Apple may ship every single M4 Mac with at least 16GB of RAM as standard instead of 8GB. It’s a massive upgrade, without a doubt.
16GB of RAM will be Standard on M4 Mac Computers Set for Release in October
We came across a report from Bloomberg a while back that said Apple is testing several M4 Macs for release this October. However, if you look a little closer at that report, you’ll notice every single Mac being tested has at least 16GB of RAM. That is a massive upgrade over the current 8GB which Apple ships its Macs with.
If you want to upgrade the RAM on something like a MacBook Air to 16GB, you have to shell out $200 extra. That’s a lot of money for a small upgrade that doesn’t cost too much on other platforms, but it seems as though Apple may just ditch the 8GB RAM practice altogether.
It’s obvious Apple is doing this for Apple Intelligence. Given Apple wants to run its AI on-device rather than offload it completely to a server, that extra RAM will definitely come in handy. However, assuming this 16GB jump really is for Apple’s AI, does that mean 8GB Macs will struggle with Apple Intelligence as new features roll out?
Apple can pull a pro-gamer move by simply limiting the OS to use 8GB of RAM and allocate a major chunk of it for just AI tasks. if that happens, I’m pretty sure users aren’t going to be happy about this. Why? Because not everyone is so keen on using AI all the time. Sure, the hype is real, but if you ask people around how much they use AI to get things done, that number may actually surprise you.
I’m not saying Apple Intelligence is not going to work out for people. It definitely will, especially those who keep on jumping back and forth between apps just to make a sentence sound professional. AI on a system level on something like an iPhone, iPad and Mac will make things simpler for a ton of users out there, including myself.
Anyway, let’s see if Apple actually does deliver the extra RAM and end its long-standing tradition of shipping devices with 8GB of memory. Just a couple of months to go and we’ll find out first-hand.
