by Tim Hardwick
Apple regularly increased the base memory of its Mac computers until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was named CEO, charts published on Mastodon by David Schaub show.
Earlier this year, Schaub created two charts: one showing the base memory capacity of Apple Mac all-in-one PCs going back to 1984, and the second depicting the base Apple RAM for consumer laptops since 1999. Both charts were recently published on the Accidental Tech podcast.
The charts show that Apple had a tendency to increase base memory every two years or so, but that trend ended when Cook took over the company from Steve Jobs. Memory expanded rapidly until the Mac Plus was released in 1986, Schaub notes. “Between 1986 and 1990, we aimed to lower the starting price of the Mac,” he says. “Then we'll get a pretty straight logarithmic line until Tim Cook becomes CEO, and there's only been one increase since then.”
The correlation is interesting, but other variables, such as market trends and changes in technology, may help explain the Cook-era stagnation. For example, Stuart McHattie notes that sales of the first all-in-one Mac computers increased tenfold every six years. If this trend had continued since 2006, when the base capacity was 500 MB, today's base Mac models would reach 500 GB. However, today's consumer PC RAM requirements remain between 8GB and 64GB, and very rarely exceed double digits.
Computers have also changed a lot over the past few years. RAM has become faster. Hard drives have been replaced by solid state drives. Chips and components are more tightly integrated. Apple no longer relies on Intel processors to power its computers and instead uses a high-performance system-on-chip (SOC) architecture that combines CPUs, GPUs, and unified memory into a single package. That's why the company confidently claims that 8GB on a Mac is comparable to 16GB on competing systems.
But that doesn't change the fact that Apple offers iMac and MacBook Pro models with 8GB of RAM since 2012. Likewise, the MacBook Air has the same basic memory configuration since 2017. Additionally, Apple's implementation of unified memory means that Macs cannot upgrade their RAM after purchase, while Apple continues its strategy of massively inflating prices. clients for higher memory configurations. Users often pay $200 or more at checkout just to ensure the future of their machines.
- Is 8GB of RAM enough for a Mac in 2024?
Apple's Mac memory tuning strategy will likely become even more controversial if all future models The iPhone 16 turns out to include 8GB of RAM. (In the iPhone 15 series, only the Pro models have 8GB, while the standard models have 6GB.) Why Apple is willing to increase RAM in a smartphone but not in a multitasking Mac without users paying exorbitantly for the privilege will be the main question of the mouth many consumers.
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