8GB of RAM. Shocker /s
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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Like leaving the iPhone in a bar that time
“Accidentally leaked”
right after they announced it with an entire website.
BRAKING NUWS
The story is gone
Suspicious
I suspect it'll come with 8GB RAM to ensure the price can't justify it's usefulness...
E: looking up the leaks confirms it's supposed to be 8GB RAM. Imagine selling a PC with 8GB RAM for $700+ in 2026. So insane. I can get a better PC than that for $400.
Apple heard you and released it for $599-699!
I'm not planning on touching them, but in this economy + the Apple tax, I'm almost impressed
The 17e or whatever new phone is supposedly available for 599 with 256GB of internal storage.
Honestly: If the phone i know little android competition in that price range witg comparable specs and polish.
But I'd still get one at a higher price because I don't like Mr.WalledGarden
I only see a $600 option. What's the $700 option?
If you go to the official Apple store, the one with 512GB storage is $100 more
Okay so there's not even an option for increased RAM, huh? 🤣
There's more color options than all the other options combined! Internally you only get the two choices.
This would eat MacBook Air's lunch with 16GB (market-wise). They're just intentionally kneecapping it again.
Apparently, the last (2020) MacBook Air, which is much more capable, is only $700 to $750 if you can find it on the market. But it's getting phased out right now. Heaven forbid consumers have anything better for less than $1100. Not from Apple.
People keep saying to buy this thing all the time, seemingly unaware of the fact that every Apple product has an expiration date, when Apple arbitrarily decides that it's "obsolete". That 2020 MacBook has like 1 year of life left in it.
Unified memory, so more efficient with that. Also MacOS has RAM compression.
I suppose more is better, and 8GB seems like bare minimum for something useful. But one should always mind that now (unlike before 2020) Apple's hardware has caught up with their advertising in the fact that it's really specifically optimized for the job.
It's fine for an "Apple Chromebook" I think, especially if bulk orders for institutions will get different deals.
LMAO you actually bought into that 8GB = 16GB marketing nonsense
RAMDoubler!
No, that's you happily laughing at the nonsense you yourself said attributing that to me.
I said that RAM compression in MacOS is an OS feature, well-tested and always on. You can play with something similar under Linux and find out it really makes things better. Which means you can fit more there. Like 10%-20% more is notable enough.
And I said that unified memory is a feature of their hardware, which is correct. Which is the reason Intel and AMD were playing with that X86-S idea (a new architecture with much of legacy removed, and also, yes, unified memory), until they dropped it because Intel is going to shit.
I don't see any marketing nonsense in technical facts. Your GPU can use all the same RAM with less expense for doing that. And RAM allocated to applications does get compressed, which is more CPU-intensive obviously, but happens.
These are obviously correct.
Not who replied to you originally but,
You aren't wrong (you even stated that more is probably better) , just not necessarily presenting the whole picture.
Ram compression isn't a benefit only scenario, there is a cost in processing power to make that happen.
So it's a trade off of memory utilisation vs processing requirements.
Whether or not it's worth it is down to circumstance, though i agree that generally i think it's worth the tradeoff.
Unified memory is useful in specific circumstances, most notably LLM/ML scenarios where high vram utilisation is part of the process.
It's not an apples to apples comparison by any means.
Of course. I'm also generally a low-end user, so to say. 18GB is the biggest I've used on one machine, and the program I run that realistically often takes much of it isn't even the web browser, it's POV-Ray. Sometimes some work VMs, but that's rare.
I can get a better PC than that for $400.
Are you sure? Because at this moment with $400 you only get the RAM.
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I have an M1 mini with 8Gb of RAM that I use as my Home Assistant server. I've given 4Gb to HAOS running in UTM, and let Ollama use the rest to run a modest LLM for speech to text. It's flawless.
I'm not suggesting that 8Gb is the gold standard or anything, but for some applications it's still perfectly usable.
I have an M2 Air with 16Gb, and for what I need it to do, I couldn't have any less, but the target market for a bargain basement entry level MacBook almost certainly won't ever notice. It'll literally just be a portal to access iCloud and whatever browser they use to get on their socials. And if they do find they need more, then Apple will happily sell them a new laptop.
Don't get me wrong, I think Apple's approach to RAM pricing has been criminal for years, and as a company they're really figuring out how to plumb the depths of scumminess, but on this I don't really see the issue.
With that said, the cost of an extra 8Gb to them is literally pennies, so withholding it is shitty. But it won't really make that much difference to the average performance of the computer.
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