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.
@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.
DavidSchaub
Konrad Kołakowski