Key Takeaways
- 8GB on Apple Silicon Macs is sufficient for many users now, but future software demands may require more memory.
- The increasing importance of local AI technology may necessitate a 16GB minimum memory configuration for future Macbooks.
- Macbooks, like other Apple devices, can provide several years of use, making future memory upgrades essential for longevity.
There’s a lot of hullabaloo about Apple selling base model laptops with “only” 8GB of unified memory, and there have been some ridiculous claims from both sides of the table, such as 8GB on Apple Silicon being exactly like 16GB on Windows, or that Apple Silicon systems have poor performance with 8GB. Either way, I’m doubling up on my next Mac.
I’m Still Perfectly Happy With My 8GB Mac
I’m in absolutely no hurry to replace my base model M1 MacBook Air, and this is quite frankly the best $1000 I have ever spent on a computer. I fully expect to get at least another four years out of this computer, or until the battery fails. Whichever comes first. I haven’t had a single day when I thought the performance of my little Mac was inadequate, and I’ve even got some decent gaming results when in a pinch.
If you just need a general-purpose computer that you can do a bit of everything on, then I have no issue recommending an 8GB Mac today, but you can be sure that my next Mac will have at least 16GB of RAM, and hopefully, by the time I need a new laptop, Apple will have made 16GB the base configuration across the board.
I’m Gaming on Mac More Now and Memory Matters
Overall, my M1 MacBook Air offers PlayStation 4-ish performance for games that have Mac versions, and newer games that take advantage of Apple’s upscaling technology can do even better than Sony’s old console.
So more and more I’ve found myself loading up an older or more modest game when all I have with me is my MacBook. If all you own is a MacBook, you can have quite a bit of fun with it in between the serious stuff, but this is one area where 8GB of memory really hampers things. Since this is unified memory, it has to work as both VRAM and system RAM, and that means dialing down texture detail. Often to lower levels than the GPU in my M1 could otherwise handle.
Apple’s really making a push for better gaming on Mac, and more memory will be crucial to do this. Even gaming PC handhelds generally have no less than 16GB of RAM for this very reason.
I Want Access to Local AI Technology
I probably don’t need to tell you that AI technologies are taking off, but it seems the real value of this tech will be in running locally instead of in large data centers. At least for many common tasks you might need help with. The latest Snapdragon-powered CoPilot+ laptops have a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for this job, and they need at least 16GB of RAM to run local AI apps.
This, more than anything, is likely to force Apple to make their baseline laptop models come with 16GB of memory at least, and since I, like many other people, have plenty of reasons to use local AI image generation or chatbot software, there’s no way I could do with less.
I’ll Be Using It for Years
By the time I’m done with my M1 MacBook Air, it will likely be somewhere between six and eight years old. Like my various iPads over the years, my MacBooks remain usable for a long time and I could probably really push things if I wanted to and wait until the computer simply doesn’t support the latest version of macOS anymore. So, by the time I actually buy my new Mac, 8GB of memory will be truly obsolete, and if I want the new system to give me just as many years of service, then at least twice the memory will be the least of my requirements.
