2mo ago

Entire Mac Lineup Now Finally Starts With at Least 16GB RAM, Ending 8GB Era

www.macrumors.com Entire Mac Lineup Now Starts With at Least 16GB RAM, Ending 8GB Era

Apple this week announced new iMac, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro models, and they are all available with a minimum of 16GB of RAM. Apple also announced...

About time. This also applies to their older models such as M2 and M3 laptops.

In the U.S., the MacBook Air lineup continues to start at $999, so there is no price increase associated with the boost in RAM.

The M2 macbook air now starts at $1000 for 16GB RAM and 256GB storage. Limited storage aside, that's surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops.

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79 comments

With no programs running my mac mini is using 16gb so I'm not surprised
- That’s normal for these computers. Idea being it doesn’t really benefit you to have a ton of empty ram sitting around waiting to be used. So the OS makes no effort to clear it out until the space is needed.
  If you believe their marketing it’s actually doing the opposite, and preemptively loading stuff into ram in order to make your common tasks feel as snappy as possible. But yeah either way you’ll notice the memory is always “full”, but you never seem run out
  
  Well that would be good, but it goes completely against how i've learned to manage my machine these past three decades.
  
  Yeah it was a trip for me as well to adapt to the new ways. For example it took me a long long time to adjust to allowing the computer to manage the multitasking for me. I would habitually always close out programs I wasn’t using, because I felt deeply from my decades of experience that running tons of things at once would cause many issues.
  I was very uncomfortable letting all these “active” programs pile up, but it really turned out to be all good. The computers are designed to be used this way. And really, I’m better off for it, not having to go in and micromanage everything constantly.
  What I’m trying to say is that learning is not something that is ever finished, you know? There came a day when we stopped defragmenting our hard drives, and now the day has arrived where the computer utilizes all the ram all the time
  
  Interesting, I didn't know that. Is that controlled by the operating system or something else? I'm curious about whether my Debian laptop does the same.

79 comments