For the 40th Anniversary of the Mac... here are 40 years of All-In-One Macs' base SKU memory capacities.
It's sometimes tricky to tell which SKUs were still on sale at what time, so this is just based on "entry level" product introductions.
Memory increased quickly until the Mac Plus. 1986 to 1990 were all about decreasing the entry Mac price. Then we get a pretty straight logarithmic line until Tim Cook became CEO and there has only been a single increase since.
Interestingly, that increase in RAM capacity curve is actually a bit steeper than Moore's Law:
... but that doesn't really explain the cut off.
I would like to know "how much of the BOM" was 8GB RAM in 2008 vs today's M2 MBA.
Around the max RAM capacity of John's Mac: about 1TB of RAM.
In no way am I saying that Apple should have maintained that curve... but if Apple had bumped the base RAM up to 16 GB by now, I wouldn't have bothered posting anything. :)
@sdjmchattie @dschaub @atpfm @siracusa Shame it’s not at least gone past 8GB. Some Android phones come with 12GB or 24GB. No Mac should start with less than an Android phone!
“All of our Macs now start with 32GB of RAM. Only Apple can do this.” -Tim, in some parallel universe or something
@JoshHrach perhaps my previously reply came across a bit condescending. You are right to make comparisons. If an Android can make use of that much RAM, surely a Mac could as well!
There is an overhead in terms of power draw with more RAM, so perhaps the availability of very fast SSDs for swapping plus the desire to make the battery last a very long time means that, for most “normal” users, 8GB is adequate. Their Pro machines should never come with 8GB in my opinion.
@sdjmchattie Adequate is a good word. My day job gives us iOS devs 8GB M1 machines and it’s adequate. We all wish it was more.
Pro machines definitely should base at 16 minimum.
The rest of the PC industry is similar, but for less money.
A Raspberry Pi 5 now comes with 8GB of RAM for about $100.
Continuing the curve would be ridiculous, but clearly manufactures (including Apple) make more money on RAM than they used to.
If Apple just had bumped up to 16 GB a couple years ago, and only charged $200 for ~32 GB, nobody would really care.
@dschaub They stopped at 8 too? I guess I assumed they’d be at 16 for Apple priced machines.
I know the RAM/disk prices have absolutely influenced whether or not me and other people in my family have upgraded to new Macs or stuck it out.
An extra $400 to get 16/512 on an $1100 machine is crazy.
To this day, I wonder if Saudi investment by murderous despots accelerated an already existing trend or initiated the #enshittification of tech.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/1/23702451/silicon-valley-saudi-money-khashoggi
https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/07/saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman-meeting-tim-cook/
https://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-arabia-crown-prince-visits-apple-google-2018-4
@dschaub @atpfm @siracusa I was actually disappointed that they “fixed” the slow SSD speed in the lowest end MacBook Air. I’d rather they had slightly slower SSDs with larger storage. 256GB should not be sold any more.
Apple’s SSDs are ridiculously fast so being half the speed is actually still fast. And it’s way faster than a horrible fusion drive. Bigger cheaper slightly slower SSDs please.
No doubt.
Heck, I would love cheap 8TB SSDs at SATA-3 600 Mps... but maybe not to boot off of :)
@dschaub As much as this is ridiculous of course: we simply don't need as much of an increase anymore. We reached "peak resolution" some time ago with Retina/4K resolutions - there's not much of an incentive to increase the RAM really, mostly for higher abstraction layers for the apps (Electron?) … for now!
AI might change it, as local LLMs requires quite a bit of memory.
And not that PCs have any different - 8GB is still standard on entry-level PC laptops as well, like Surface Laptop 5
You are absolutely right that graph was going to level off, but it leveling off at 16 by now would have been more comforting.
Retina on the iMac happened 2 years after 8GB became the standard.
That was before 100MP cameras and 4K/HDR videos.
Web pages aren't getting smaller.
What's wild: Not only was 8G the new minimum, but 16G was maximum.
@dschaub @atpfm @siracusa I could be wrong, but my memory was that for years, there were always compelling new reasons for base level consumers to have more memory, like advances in graphics and video. I feel like once everybody got 24 bit high res displays, that trend ended.
If all someone does is web surf and edit documents, what do they need more memory every few years for? It’s not like we’re getting 3D volumetric displays.
But I do agree that 8 GB in 2024 feels a bit rude.
@dschaub @atpfm @siracusa - I look at the Tim Cook years of Apple a bit like the Merkel years of being Chancellor in Germany. A general feeling of being on the good side, doing the right things. Avoiding some major chances of turning evil(TM). A warm, fuzzy feeling.
But at the cost of neglecting a lot of the foundation and crucial maintenance. For Germany, it is infrastructure, digitalization, decarbonization, and social injustices (yes, many countries are doing far worse, but Germany is certainly not doing good enough).
For Apple, it is long-lasting neglect of the Mac platform. Media integration has withered. My Photos.app has so many glaring bugs that have persisted for 10 years now, and are not being acknowledged or fixed. Music.app is crumbling and losing features and usability at every step. I've lost more data to iCloud and the "automatic save" paradigm than in decades before. Apple Mail has cost me data more than once.
I'm switching platforms now, after 20 years. I've had it with Tim Cook's Mac.
I expect that AI/ML will finally push Apple to increase the base SKUs above 8GB.
The non-pro iPhone is expected to hit 8GB this year too. All those existing phones not getting AI is likely a consequence of Apple's stinginess with RAM. Unfortunately, it might just means Apple sells even more iPhone 16.
That being said, Apple absolutely will say that 8GB is "sufficient" to run AI models... Just expect more VM swapping.
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