The chart posted by David Schaub on Mastodon shows that Apple had been regularly increasing the memory of its Mac until Tim Cook was appointed CEO in 2011. Earlier this year, Schaub made two charts: one showing the basic memory capacity of Apple all-in-one PCs from 1984 onwards, and the other showing the basic memory capacity of Apple's consumer laptops from 1999 onwards. These two charts were recently resurfaced by the Accidental Tech Podcast.
The chart shows that Apple tends to add memory every two years or so, but that trend ended when Cook took over the company from Steve Jobs. Before the introduction of the Mac Plus in 1986, memory had been growing rapidly. "From 1986 to 1990, the entry price of the Mac was going down," he says. We then got a fairly straight logarithmic line until Tim Cook became CEO and there was only one uptick after that. "
This correlation is interesting, but other variables such as market trends and technological changes also help explain the plateau phenomenon of the Cook era. For example, Stuart McHattie points out that early all-in-one Macs grew 10x every six years. If this trend had continued since 2006, when the capacity was 500MB, the modern base model Mac would have a capacity of 500GB. However, the need for memory in today's consumer PCs remains around 8GB to 64GB, rarely exceeding double digits.
Computers have also changed a lot in the last few years. Memory just got faster. Hard drives are replaced by solid-state storage. Chips and components are more integrated. Instead of relying on Intel processors to power its machines, Apple is adopting a high-performance system-on-chip (SoC) architecture that combines the CPU, GPU, and unified memory into a single package. Because of this, Apple is confident that the 8GB of RAM on the Mac is comparable to the 16GB of RAM on rival systems.
But that doesn't change the fact that Apple has been offering iMac and MacBook Pro models with 8GB of RAM since 2012. Similarly, since 2017, the MacBook Air has been using the same basic memory configuration. In addition, Apple's adoption of unified memory means that Macs can't upgrade their memory after purchase, and Apple continues to pursue a strategy of buying higher memory configurations at a premium price from users. Users tend to shell out $200 or more at checkout, just to keep their machines well prepared for the future.
If all of the upcoming iPhone 16 models come with 8GB of RAM, Apple's Mac memory configuration strategy could become more controversial. (In the iPhone 15 series, only the Pro model comes with 8GB, while the standard model only has 6GB). Why Apple is ready to increase the memory of smartphones but not multitasking Macs, and users are not overpaying for it, will be the top concern of many consumers.