There’s no doubt MacBooks are some of the best laptops available in the market, and what money can buy, but some strings are attached to this statement.
Apple first began shipping MacBooks with 8GB RAM as standard in 2016, a significant leap from the previous 4GB standard. Surprisingly, almost a decade later, Apple hasn’t deviated from this norm. The recent releases, including M3-powered MacBook Air and Pro, have stayed true to tradition, kicking off with 8GB RAM as par for the course. And the sad part is, it doesn’t seem to end, but I wish it does, at least in the M4 line.
During an interview with ITHome last week, two senior Apple executives talked about various things, and the 8GB RAM standard in MacBook was one of them. Apple’s senior product marketing manager Evan Buyze stated that 8GB RAM in basic Macs is sufficient for everyday tasks like web browsing, media playback, and light editing. Apple’s VP of hardware engineering also joined the conversation, saying that Apple’s chips make 8GB of RAM more powerful than it seems.
Not to be forgotten, this isn’t the first someone that Apple’s senior executives have come in support of the 8GB RAM standard in MacBooks. In a previous interview with Lin YiLYi on the Chinese video-sharing platform Bilbili, Apple’s VP of worldwide product marketing, Bob Borchers, had compared MacBook’s 8GB RAM to 16GB on other systems, like Windows PCs. He reasoned that it’s “because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture.”
That said, from my experience, I can say that the MacBook Air does a fair job with 8GB of RAM. However, the same cannot be said for MacBook Pro devices. While the Air is a lightweight, travel-friendly, compact notebook, the Pro is explicitly for professionals using the device for video editing, coding, and running heavy programs. In such instances, 8GB of RAM becomes insufficient, and Apple should standardize 16GB of RAM in all MacBooks because it’s high time.
Apple’s basic RAM compliment is sufficient for most users. We have placed many of these with no issue whatsoever.
If your tasks are more than average, then you need to buy an above-average compliment. If you fail to do this, it’s your fault. You need to do a better job of assesing your needs.
This is a tiresome argument that goes back decades.