Hidden among Apple's Announcements this week...

October 30, 2024 by
Hidden among Apple's Announcements this week...
David Farrow

Starting this past Monday October 28, Apple started a "week of announcements" centered around issuing new iterations of its various Mac products based on the new M4 line of chips.  Instead of a big shiny dog and pony show, this time Apple has taken the slower-and-subtle, reporter friendly approach of pushing out glossy press releases describing (and positioning) their new products, and pointing to the new AI features that are also debuting this month.

With a brand-new MacOS Sequoia and the impressive new M4 "Apple Silicon" chips, it's easy enough to overlook a significant paragraph buried in this mornings' press release:

  • Now, models with M2 and M3 double the starting memory to 16GB, while keeping the starting price at just $999 — a terrific value for the world’s best-selling laptop.

Across its' product line, Apple has raised the minimum RAM configuration to 16 GB -- double the default starting RAM that has been the same 8 GB for quite a few years now.  That is a significant development, one that some have been calling for for a while now.

Creative Goose started advising customers last year to upgrade their purchases of new Macs to 16 GB for all but the most cost-conscious buyers, and this is why: starting now, to get full functionality on a Mac, app developers and Apple itself are going to be using more and more RAM.

We've been on that trajectory for some time, really; Apples' memory management (on a modern Mac with adequate space on the solid state drive) is excellent, so much so that even if your Mac is using scads of virtual memory, you'd never notice a hit in performance doing the things most users do with their Macs: you can have 2 web browsers, multiple spreadsheets and word processing documents, an email program with possibly scores of open windows, photos and games open on your Mac, all at the same time, and switch between them fluidly and without any noticeable pause, on a modern "Apple Silicon" Mac with just 8 GB today. 

So this new minimum threshold of 16 GB heralds more high resolution, compute-intensive stuff coming our way, starting with Apple Intelligence.   It should be an interesting year ahead!

If you would like to discuss upgrading your Mac hardware -- now or in the year ahead -- Creative Goose can consult with you to optimize your purchase; hit our link or give us a call to discuss.

Hidden among Apple's Announcements this week...
David Farrow October 30, 2024
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