I believe we are now in the 9th year of 8GB being the baseline Mac laptop RAM config.

It’s incredibly stingy. For a while you could make the argument that a lot of Air purchasers wouldn’t need it, but I don’t think that’s the case any more. My wife has an M1 Air with 8GB and between Office, Chrome, Teams, and Slack she quite regularly gets beachballs and weird performance hitches.

Obviously a planned obsolescence tactic. If the base models were 16GB there's a fine chance Apple wouldn't see another dollar from those customers for another 10+ years at minimum. The average customer doesn't understand their memory requirements and cannot be expected to predict how they may change in the future. It's the only thing they got left they can use to trick customers into buying a machine that will need to be replaced sooner.

That's so extremely backwards in relation to everything else it's mind boggling. 16 gb being considered and priced at premium, where I had a single chrome tab eating 3gb easily few time's recently.

No, what’s worse is Apple, or is it random self-styled influencers, spreading the false narrative that Apple Silicon magically requires less RAM and people actually believing that.

This comes up often, but it's honestly totally fine for a non-technical user who only occasionally uses anything other than Safari and Photos.

The vast majority of their market would not fit into the developer, content creator, or just plain power-user category. There's people who just log on to do internet banking and email when they're not on Reddit or Facebook.

For some anecdata, 16/512+ would be a waste on my parents, in-laws and my whole extended family for that matter. They would benefit from it, but they're not screaming at spinning wheels, and are probably a bit more patient and accustomed to 'slowness', which is pretty subjective.

This is why for my Mac needs I have a cheaper Mini. If I'm going to have to be stuck with 8GB or pay insane markups for 16gb, I'll get the 8GB Mini, and only do the purely Mac-centric stuff on it to minimize pain.

I disagree, and I always upgrade the RAM even though I don’t like paying more. Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control.

Think of an alternate universe where Apple does the opposite: every new model they push the envelope and double the baseline RAM compared to the previous year. In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound. Consumers would be forced into a treadmill of computer upgrades like we haven’t seen since the 90’s when CPUs were skyrocketing in performance every year.

For anyone who forgets what the 90’s was like, here’s an example with Mac models:

1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020

1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz

That’s a 31-fold increase in clock rate (and several times that in overall performance) in the same timespan we’re discussing. Software that was written for the G4 had no chance of running on the LC (ignoring CPU architecture differences).

MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).

I'm pretty sure that's their gatekeeping.

I looked at the price for m3 and if it would have 16gig it would literally be perfect for just 1k but nope 8 more gigs cost you an arm and a leg

Agree it is crazy, I am writing this from my M1 Air with 8GB of RAM and I am yet to ever have a real issue with a RAM limitation... the OS does an amazing job juggling RAM.

The RAM being so low is confusing. Given RAM is one of the cheaper components. I guess they do some smart swap memory using SSD - but my Air laptop struggles to run PowerPoint, few browser tabs and video calling at the same time.

The way Apple has always had e-waste laptops at the bottom of the line is pretty disgusting with their environmental posturing. MacOS barely works on 128GB space and 8GB ram yet for many years that was the baseline, it was particularly bad because the ram gets full just browsing then your baseline OS and a few files is enough that the swap disk would get full soon after.

Have a crate with about 40+ of those machines at work, essentially useless from the era where the person in charge of buying laptops just bought the bottom end for every employee and considered it a job done.

Seems like a borderline conspiracy to fry the internal SSD over time, adding a wear-point to the product family, and making sure consumers keep consuming. I'm talking about system paging: virtual memory on the disk.

Even worse, if one plots the (price, unified memory amount, chip type), and looks at it from right-to-left, then the dollars per system capability is disgusting when you order a lesser system. You get the most value for your money when you buy the maximum unified memory configuration (on those three points).

Better yet, with a maxed out unified memory configuration, one can further save on SSD writes by using (and loading/storing) RAM disks for their projects!

Most people buying a MacBook for work are likely getting a higher unified memory, so their workstations live longer. Meanwhile consumers will have to keep consuming as they fry their internal SSD's on their airs...

I was also wondering if a 1TB apple fabric device is simply an 8TB fabric device with 8x the write life...