It all depends where the market is going. I’d suspect if windows pc manufacturers were switching to 16gb then Apple would too based on getting biggest discounts amortised over the next 4 years.
The market has already
gone. There's no "if" about it unless you make false comparisons with $300 PC bricks or deliberately hunt out the
worst deals on PC makers' labyrinthine websites. Mini PCs in the Mac Mini $700 price bracket - form the likes of Minisforum tend to come with 32GB (as does the £1600 Snapdragon ThinkPad). Entry-level MacBook Airs aside, going to 16GB base barely brings Apple up to par.
It’s not a case of photocopying Redmond but maybe someone like Tim has done some supply chain negotiation and 16gb RAM will be the best deal over time - not just right now this year.
As I've posted before - Apple's prices are so far detached from the actual hardware cost that I doubt the actual bill-of-materials for a particular product really comes into it. It's been $200/£200-per-8GB since
at least the 2014 Mini (which may have been justified by the cost of LPDDR at the time) it was $200/£200-per-8GB when I bought an iMac in 2017 - which used bog standard DDR4 SODIMMs and was able to get an
extra 16GB
one-off, retail (and keep the supplied 8GB) of the same Micro RAM from Crucial for £140 - and its still $200-per-8GB today when
32GB of LPDDR5x retails for $175 (that's $44 per 8GB).
These are high-margin products and are probably
not priced on a bill-of-materials + % markup basis. It's probably closer to "Here is the range of price points we want to sell our computers at - what are the minimum specs we can get away with to justify each price point?"
if Apple put up prices it will be because they think the market will bear higher prices, and any increase in specs will simply be a rationalisation for that.
The $200 increments for RAM capacities - and likewise for SSD - are baked into Apple's current price range: not just the BTO options, but in the best/better/best variants of each model and even between models. I suspect that those $200 upgrades will stay. However, if Apple really are, as rumoured, going to update the entire Mac range to M4 series between now and next spring (something of a first) that's a good time to re-structure their price range.
I wouldn't rule out the 12GB base - I don't see a compelling case for or against it - which could lead to a neat 12/24/36 progression with $200-per-12GB becoming the new rule. Or they could just bump the base specs to 16GB and ripple that up across the range, and still charge $200-per-8GB increment. Or maybe after 10 years at that rate it's time to accept that 16GB is the new 8GB and charge a still way-over-the-odds $200 per 16GB.
Or - quite frankly - they probably have the brass neck to just stick to 8GB base and rely on the loyal fan-base hating Windows and Linux enough to keep paying up.
I’d just like the next macOS to come with an AppleTV mode so people can potentially purchase a mini as an ‘AppleTV Pro’ with m4 processor and play tvOS games or stream their 8k stuff off a dual bootable or virtualised partition.
You mean like this :
en.wikipedia.org
Which has already come and gone - not a good sign! I guess Apple would rather sell you two devices, and make sure the TV box - even if it needed a M-series processor for 8k support - wasn't a viable Mac.
I guess you can always run Plex or Kodi on the Mac.
