Generative AI has done one unambiguously good thing for PCs and Macs: 16GB of RAM

Op-ed: AI has been a cure for $1,600 computers that start with 8GB of memory.

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[bugsbony]

Just wait until the AI bloat becomes a mandatory always‑on part of the OS, and we're back to square one (or rather √64).

Why would it become mandatory, and if useless bloat is mandatory why are you submitting to this OS ? OS shouldn't dictate things, fight for freedom.

 

[mludd]

I have to admit that I haven't been paying attention to the specifications of prebuilt PCs lately but this reminds me of that era when for several years even as GPUs and CPUs improved drastically the baseline RAM option was 256 MB for way too long.

I was running on 768 MB and thinking about upgrading and most standard configurations for prebuilt PCs still came with 256 MB.

IIRC there was also a period in the 90s where 16 MB, and after Windows 95 came out, 32 MB were the "standard" long after we got to the point where most users really should have had 64 MB.

 

[murty]

Well, no, it's only the norm in Apple products. You can still easily add more memory in basically any non-Apple computer even in this era.

My work computer, a Dell Latitude 5320 from early 2022, has soldered RAM. Latitude’s are generally one of the most field serviceable laptop product lines that Dell sells, so it was pretty disappointing when I found out I couldn’t upgrade the RAM (I’m basically always consuming 85-95% of my 16GB of RAM).

Even though Apple may have been one of the first companies to embrace LPDDR (soldered) RAM, they are far from unique in this realm.

And while it sucks as a consumer from an upgradability standpoint, there is a trade off with increased performance at a reduced power cost.

To wag your finger at Apple as if they unique in this regard, and that it is solely a cash grab (not that they mind the extra money upfront, but that is not the primary motivator of LPDDR), is uninformed at best.

 

[F12]

"AI has been a cure for $1,600 computers that start with 8GB of memory."

If you were paying $1600 for a computer that came with 8GB, that's on you.

 

[CelicaGT]

Thanks ;-) I had hoped that including the prompt would allow people to verify if ChatGPT is wrong and lessen the downvotes...

Broad Internet decorum dictates that as the original poster of claims it is upon you to provide links or cite the correctness of your claims, not the other posters.

The use of AI to verify your claims and then provide only the prompt for other posters so THEY can verify the correctness of something you posted (and the correctness of the AI citations…)

Bad form.

Had you read, confirmed the correctness of the AI results, cite the AI, then post links to support, that would have been the preferred method. Don’t make others do the work for you as it leaves a bad taste. Additionally, for now AI still needs a human Nanny, be a responsible user. Confirm the results.

 

[altsuperego]

Phones and tablets have gone the other direction, from mostly browser based to an app for every last little thing you can think of to do that largely should just be done in a browser, especially since half those apps were built with JS & HTML, so they are essentially a bundled up web page.

Most non gaming apps are still small. It's the photos that eat up all that space. Or maybe Netflix downloads.

 

[Secondfloor]

"Companies like Apple and Microsoft have, for years, created attractive, high-powered hardware with 8GB of memory in it, most egregiously in $1,000-and-up putative "pro" computers like last year's $1,599 M3 MacBook Pro or the Surface Pro 9. This meant that, for the kinds of power users and professionals drawn to these machines, that their starting prices were effectively mirages...." (my bold)

Well, for this power user, I can't imagine being attracted to these machines. Most power users are immediately going to the specs; they'll see 8GB RAM, and immediately disqualify the machine for any additional consideration. Power users are uninterested in these machines.

If the power user doesn't want to build their own machine, then a simple perusal of Cyberpower's offerings reveals that a $1,600 PC can be purchased that offers thrice the performance, performance that can be inexpensively expanded in the future because the machines are not built by a company that intentionally denies customers the ability to do easy expansions of RAM, SSDs, or GPUs.

In a 30lb desktop. One of the nice things about being true power user is the ability to wield that power anywhere. God I can't imagine being tethered to a solitary indoor desk to do my work.

 

[Mean Disposition]

There was a story from a few months ago where I suggested 16GB should be the baseline memory configuration for pricey Apple computers because even consumer Windows PC's in the $600 and up range started coming with 16GB a few years ago. In 2024, 8GB shared with the GPU is simply inexcusable given the price and context.

A dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan who shall not be named here said it was unnecessary and accused me of wanting a free ride. They even pointed at list pricing for 8GB corporate laptops as a gotcha counterpoint. That user is not here right now because they're probably revising their talking points as we speak.

AI or not, this is long overdue.

 

[Artimusbill]

It's not just RAM. 256gb of storage space seems pretty crap, too. A handful of AAA games and a couple of big productivity apps will fill that in no time.

It's not like storage is expensive, either, you can get 1TB SSDs for <£60 and presumably even less if you're a massive OEM buying in bulk.

At least with the base Mac Mini an external SSD boosts performance (personal experience in addition to other's findings). I use to think 256GB was fine but I am quickly being proven wrong by myself.

 

[Powderhorn]

I have to admit that I haven't been paying attention to the specifications of prebuilt PCs lately but this reminds me of that era when for several years even as GPUs and CPUs improved drastically the baseline RAM option was 256 MB for way too long.

I was running on 768 MB and thinking about upgrading and most standard configurations for prebuilt PCs still came with 256 MB.

IIRC there was also a period in the 90s where 16 MB, and after Windows 95 came out, 32 MB were the "standard" long after we got to the point where most users really should have had 64 MB.

My first build, a PII-266 in 1997 for college, had 64MB. My roommate had a K6 with 32MB that was a hell of a lot more stable (both were custom builds -- it was actually unusual to have two computers in the same dorm room). The slot 1/socket 7 era was far more interesting than what we have today.

 

[Dputiger]

I remember hearing about how unusable 8GB was at least as long ago as 2011, when I bought an 8GB Macbook Air. Worked fine for the seven years I used it. I replaced it with an 8GB Macbook Pro that also worked fine for the five years I used it. Now I have a personal 8GB M2 Macbook Air and work-provided 16GB M1 Macbook Pro and they're both fine; I can't notice any difference in their performance (I just use MS Office and the browser on both machines).
I get that many people need all the RAM they can get, but 8GB is still fine for many other people.

I'm glad you can't personally notice a difference, but for people who use various applications that can push a RAM buffer, the difference is real. This has been demonstrated in various applications as it relates specifically to Macbooks.

https://www.tomshardware.com/laptop...-pro-crushed-by-16gb-config-in-cpu-benchmarks
The M3 with 16GB was quite a bit faster than the 8GB model in applications like Lightroom and Photoshop, and up to 4x faster in Final Cut PRO.

You may say "Well, I don't use those applications," and that's fine, it really is, but the problem is this: Crippling a machine with 8GB of RAM means that if you buy your laptop now and might want to try those applications later, you're going to find out you can't run them nearly as effectively. What used to be a small upgrade -- going out to buy some RAM -- is now a machine-replacing issue.

I got into video editing around 2020. It changed my system needs. I had a desktop and was able to change my system configuration to account for my new hobby. Laptops with soldered RAM make that RAM boost impossible, which is why improving the baseline matters.

 

[Dputiger]

My first build, a PII-266 in 1997 for college, had 64MB. My roommate had a K6 with 32MB that was a hell of a lot more stable (both were custom builds -- it was actually unusual to have two computers in the same dorm room). The slot 1/socket 7 era was far more interesting than what we have today.

That was a nice system. My own college roommate had that rig. I had a K6-233 with 32MB of RAM. I eventually boosted that motherboard to a K6-2 400 with a 2x / 6x multiplier remap (enabling 6x multipliers on 66MHz busses).

Eventually I moved to a K6-2+ @ 500MHz and 96MB of RAM. 2x32MB sticks and a 16MB stick of 66MHz RAM that would actually run at 133MHz overclocked, but only in the third motherboard slot, farthest from the CPU.

Interesting times indeed.

My favorite system I ever built was an IWILL KT133A motherboard that I ran at a 190MHz FSB on a Duron with the voltage pencil-locked to 1.85v to enable booting above the 100MHz FSB limit. I used Tonicom BGA-mounted SDRAM to hit a synchronous 190MHz RAM clock. It outran the first KT266 DDR motherboards, even those equipped with DDR-266. It wasn't until the KT266A came out with an improved memory controller that it was finally beaten.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

 

[equals42]

I remember hearing about how unusable 8GB was at least as long ago as 2011, when I bought an 8GB Macbook Air. Worked fine for the seven years I used it. I replaced it with an 8GB Macbook Pro that also worked fine for the five years I used it. Now I have a personal 8GB M2 Macbook Air and work-provided 16GB M1 Macbook Pro and they're both fine; I can't notice any difference in their performance (I just use MS Office and the browser on both machines).
I get that many people need all the RAM they can get, but 8GB is still fine for many other people.

I bought an M3 MacBook Air for my wife this month with the new default 16GB RAM. It replaces an M1 MBA with 8GB of RAM which has been handed down to my middle school son. My wife never noticed an issue with the RAM or performance. She does a fair amount of office productivity stuff in parallel on it like Word, Excel, Quickbooks, CRMs, etc. She doesn’t really notice anything much better with the M3 other than the screen and she likes the form factor. As I was writing, I noticed that MagSafe just saved it from certain death when our dog ran between the recliners where it was charging and yanked on the USB cord. It disconnected as designed instead of pulling the MBA to the floor. Kudos on that working!

The irony is my middle school son will be more likely to hit up against the 8GB limit. He’s just glad to have something besides the school Chromebook though.

I have a 14” 32G M4 Pro MBP from work. It’s nice but I find it to be a fat, heavy slab and I only take my M4 iPad Pro 11 to meetings and cafes. I’ve only used the HDMI port once. I have a TB3 dock setup for all that cabling. I’ve never used the SD cards slots either and they’re probably disabled by corp IT anyway. Everyone’s needs are different but 8GB (and two Thunderbolt ports) still works for a lot of people. I gladly took the new base 16GB though.

 

[itfa]

I'm convinced 8 gig models exist purely to sell expensive upgrades. Both MS and Apple will increase a device's sale price by a couple of hundred bucks just for 8 gigs of memory added on.

 

[Thegs]

Apropos of that; It'd be nice if Steam (and others; though realistically it's not like it matters to many people what the Windows Store or Epic does) had some kind of support for automatically moving games between drives.

You can order it manually with some clicking around in the UI; not like you need to do horrible things in the registry and play freaky reparse point tricks; but it's not the most convenient process.

Even mechanical disks offer pretty endurable speeds if all you are doing is big linear reads or writes; and really cheap and nasty SSDs are really zippy on big linear reads and normally endurable on heavy writes; so for anything big enough to accommodate at least two mass storage devices(or set up with network storage) it should be pretty tractable to have the game you wish to play moved on to your actually-good SSD; with space freed up as necessary by shoving less often used stuff over to bulk storage.

Obviously if you want to go all nerdcore about it you can run the wintendo partition in a VM with GPU PCIe passthrough and have a fancy flash accelerated ZFS storage backend; or run physical but diskless with a server pull NIC and iSCSI or NVMeoF; but that's...not exactly...the general audience play compared to having the application take care of it for you.

As much as I can appreciate the desire for maximum efficiency, I think that asking Steam to perform storage tiering is a bit... aspirational

 

[lucubratory]

Just wait until the AI bloat becomes a mandatory always‑on part of the OS, and we're back to square one (or rather √64).

The year that actually happens might finally be the year of Linux on desktop. We might see the desktop Linux userbase grow two or even three times larger, as a percentage of the desktop OS market, reaching heights it's never been to before.

Joking aside, I am glad that I always have the option of Linux if something like this does happen. It's been ~a decade since I last put Linux on an old MacBook for my daily driver (we've been a Windows exclusive household ever since), and from the outside looking in it looks like Linux is doing better than ever. I'm particularly interested in the gaming improvements that we've seen with the Steam Deck; I'm impressed enough now that when the next generation of the Steam Deck launches I intend to buy one.

 

[mikeschr]

I'm convinced 8 gig models exist purely to sell expensive upgrades. Both MS and Apple will increase a device's sale price by a couple of hundred bucks just for 8 gigs of memory added on.

The upgrades were too expensive for those who need them, but 8 GB really is enough for many people. I do some video processing and I have a couple of 8 GB M-series Macs that have done a brilliant job for me. It's great that more people will have 16GB now, of course, but I'm sure we're about to hear exactly the same complaints now that it isn't 32GB.

 

[maxoakland]

Just wait until the AI bloat becomes a mandatory always‑on part of the OS, and we're back to square one (or rather √64).

Apple intelligence is already bloating my computer, taking up 4GB of my tiny low end 256GB SSD and I can’t find a way to remove it even if I turn it off

 

[SittingDuck]

Sure, Ars readers all build their systems from a BOX OF SCRAPS and are constantly fiddling with them.

What we see in this thread is a bunch of Ars reacters.

 

[maxoakland]

RAM and storage space should be regulated as mandatory to be user upgradable. This is a matter of increasing e-waste unnecessarily and IMO companies should be fined for this sort of planned obsolescence.

You’re getting downvoted but you’re right. This is an environmental issue as well as a right to repair issue

 

[btroy]

16GB RAM is no doubt better, but 8GB really was fine for a lot of people. 99% of my wife's computer usage is Safari and her 8GB MacBook Air has never shown any slowdowns with that. People here forget that they are not the typical computer user.

Most typical users I see have 8 to 20 tabs open. With 8 GB of RAM in a Windows machine (which means about 3 or 4 GB is available), the machine is using swap memory. Fortunately, browsers are getting smarter. Unfortunately, website are getting fatter.

 

[1972foreva]

You're framing this in an absurd and tech elitist POV.

In the last 3 years, our organization deployed hundreds of the lowest spec Mac minis throughout our clients.

How many of them failed at their ENTERPRISE jobs? None.

I know plenty of clients with low spec PCs. They work as intended.

Get many nosebleeds in your rarified tech atmosphere?

So you're the reason we'd have time for a coffee break while excel runs a filter on lab results! I know they're different budgets but damn the company lost a lot of money overall from those slow computers

 

[caramelpolice]

Making Macs start with 16GB of RAM is, as far as I can tell, literally the only useful thing Apple Intelligence has given anyone.

 

[issor]

We need a Congress that's brave enough to outlaw soldering of parts that can be replaced.
RAM, hard drives, whatever.

It’s an admirable thought, however there are many ways to tackle this, and regulation is a bit fraught. Mandating devices be user upgradable for all parts that could be considered replaceable makes about as much sense as RTO mandates, there is no good “one size fits all”.

For example, nobody even thinks about RAM upgrades on phones or tablets outside of some bulky niche experimental products, because the form factor makes it incredibly difficult. So where is the line drawn - are ultralights ok to be non-upgradable?

What is required to be upgradable? Are all laptops now going to need to be ten pound briefcases with socketed CPUs, extra memory slots, a spare NVMe slot and cooling capable of a variety of components?

Also, though it is probably unimaginable to Ars readers, there is evidence that the vast majority don’t upgrade components, they just use a device until it stops working well. So the net result of a such a mandate could very well be the inclusion of a bunch of extra waster material in each device (slots, solder, board, traces), as well as the associated weight and e-waste.

Personally I’d like to see more emphasis on good reuse and recycling programs. Programs that would cover an assurance that the devices aren’t just taken back and landfilled.

 

[Chuckstar]

My only problem with 8GB RAM has been on higher-end mobile games where clearly there’a some RAM I/O contention going on, that I suspect to be RAM-hunger-related. When games stop for a full second or two, the only thing I come up with is a context switch occurring in the background that is requiring some heavy I/O because the background context had been fully/mostly ejected from RAM.

 

[brewejon]

I'm reading this on my 8GB/256GB M2 Macbook Air. The only time I've ever noticed it slow down was when I had around 100 tabs open in Firefox. Using it for work, a minimum of Figma, Calendar, Mail, Firefox with a bunch of web apps open, Notes, and Slack has never made it pause for breath once. Image editing also works just fine using Affinity apps.

My point being, 8GB on a Mac is still fine for most office jobs and home web-browsing usage. I'm certainly not going to bemoan Apple moving to 16GB without a price increase, because their RAM upgrades are insanely priced, but I don't see any reason to call 8GB Macs "crappy". 8GB is still perfectly functional for a vast number of users.

 

[aleph_nought]

It's not just RAM. 256gb of storage space seems pretty crap, too. A handful of AAA games and a couple of big productivity apps will fill that in no time.

It's not like storage is expensive, either, you can get 1TB SSDs for <£60 and presumably even less if you're a massive OEM buying in bulk.

16GB/256GB is a decent baseline model for CoPilot+ Snapdragon PCs by Microsoft, Lenovo and others. The best thing about those models is the ability to swap out the SSD yourself, so you can change to a 1 TB SSD for less than $100.

We're nowhere near having CAMM as a default option so soldered RAM will be the unfortunate status quo for the next couple of years. That being said, I'm happy with the high speed RAM on new laptops because they're fast enough to run local LLM inference.

Apple's soldered SSD setup is unforgivable - these replaceable M.2 2230 SSDs are faster than Apple's drives, so there's no technical reason to not use them. Windows OEMs also manage to slot in large batteries so it's not like they take up more space either.

 

[yticolev]

16 GB? That’s nearly enough to open 16 tabs in Chrome!

My 2016 12" MacBook has 8 GB and I routinely have 30 to 50 tabs loaded (which I have done on much older MacBooks ever since Safari became a tabbed browser). No apparent slowdown, and I have never reached a limit. Mind you not all page images load until I open the tab. I use several browsers, but Chrome has a nifty feature showing memory usage per tab, generally 50-200 mB per tab. I suspect some tab content may be stashed in longer term HD memory. Not that I care about how it works, as it always does.

 

[RickVS]

I built my 2016 gaming rig with 32 Gb of RAM to future proof it given my previous Dell would always run slow due to its minimal RAM. I thought never again. Now 8 years later I am always at 50% RAM usage so good decision. Next year's rig will no doubt have 64 Gb RAM. I also have an LG Gram 2019 that I upgraded to 24 Gb RAM, its max and added a second TB SSD. Obviously I'm a big believer in avoiding the soldered-on solutions that limit future expansion.

 

[iim]

I don’t think the issue is whether 8 GB is fine. It’s how much Apple was charging for that is not.

 

[LtLoLz]

It's not just RAM. 256gb of storage space seems pretty crap, too. A handful of AAA games and a couple of big productivity apps will fill that in no time.

It's not like storage is expensive, either, you can get 1TB SSDs for <£60 and presumably even less if you're a massive OEM buying in bulk.

You're still correct about SSDs being cheap, but the 60 something 1TB NVMe and Sata SSDs are usually QLC without DRAM. Perfect for storage, but they can slow down to HDD speeds in certain scenarios if over 1/3 full. Proper TLC NVMe for the OS costs quite a bit more, but is still a lot cheaper than it used to be.

 

[JanneM]

As much as I can appreciate the desire for maximum efficiency, I think that asking Steam to perform storage tiering is a bit... aspirational

Steam already does it on the Steam Deck. You can move game installs to an SD card if you want, and run them from there too.

With that said, I have the 256GB version and I've yet to run into storage issues. I only play a few games at any one time, and Steam lets you uninstall a game without losing your save files, so it's easy to remove games when you're not playing them.

 

[gnasher729]

16GB RAM is no doubt better, but 8GB really was fine for a lot of people. 99% of my wife's computer usage is Safari and her 8GB MacBook Air has never shown any slowdowns with that. People here forget that they are not the typical computer user.

There are two effects: One, MacOS will use all available RAM for disk caches. Which isn’t very helpful, but better than unused RAM, so if you look at your 16GB machine it looks like all RAM is used and you think 8GB must have trouble. Often it is just fine.

Two, swapping is very, very fast. Swapped memory gets compressed while being written, so you can effectively write to swap at 3-4 GB/sec. So if you have 8GB and would need 12, that is one second for swap instead of 40 on a spinning hard drive.

 

[gnasher729]

You're still correct about SSDs being cheap, but the 60 something 1TB NVMe and Sata SSDs are usually QLC without DRAM. Perfect for storage, but they can slow down to HDD speeds in certain scenarios if over 1/3 full. Proper TLC NVMe for the OS costs quite a bit more, but is still a lot cheaper than it used to be.

My crucial SSD is pseudo-slc which means the same SSD can be 500GB at almost SLC speed and endurance, or 2,000 GB at QLC speed and endurance. In practice I can write 200 GB at full SLC speed and then the drive copies it to QLC in the background. Which is slooow but in practice you don’t notice it. Outside of benchmarks no slowdown is noticeable. Except when I copied a complete 1TB drive onto the new, larger drive.

I don’t think they have much or any DRAM because they can write 100s of GB fast.

 

[theSeb]

That's on purpose. It pre-caches things to make the system more responsive. They started doing that with SuperFetch in Windows Vista. It evicts that stuff from RAM first if there's any memory pressure.

Otherwise, you have RAM just sitting there using electricity for no reason.

MacOS does the same thing and then people who don't understand what is going on complain about "running out of memory"

 

[torp]

The problem is all those JavaScript “experts” will now assume the base 16 Gb ram and will take it as permission to add more bloat.

sssshh… let’s not tell them that my x86 desktop has 64 Gb…

MacOS does the same thing and then people who don't understand what is going on complain about "running out of memory"

No sorry. I complain when the swap file grows over 4 Gb. Or over 10. You should hear the whines then. Remember that the storage said swap file is trashing is also soldered and hard to impossible to repair when all the trashing breaks it.