This week’s new Macs all had one thing in common: a minimum of 16GB of RAM. That was true of the new Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, and iMac, which were all refreshed with M4 processors this week. The MacBook Air was refreshed to start at 16GB of RAM, too, even though it didn’t get a bump up to the M4 chip. The change brings an end to the long-running era of 8GB of RAM as the default on consumer-grade Macs.
Apple had transitioned most of its Macs to 8GB of RAM by 2016. But now, after eight years, that quantity feels increasingly insufficient. Reviewers have criticized the entry-level RAM as limited since at least 2022. Local AI features like Apple Intelligence, which need constant RAM to work, have only accentuated the need to change things.
That said, Apple isn’t getting generous with RAM everywhere. If you want more, it’ll still cost you a pretty penny. Apple charges $200 for extra memory — for example, bumping the iMac from 16GB to 24GB is $200, while it costs $400 to go all the way to 32GB.
The RAM upgrade likely has to do with the launch of Apple Intelligence. As I wrote in September, the general approach to running on-device AI models is to keep them persistently loaded in RAM. 8GB already felt like a pittance (even if Apple itself thought it was just as good as 16GB), and that would’ve been felt much harder if users had to give some of that up to run AI.