Credit where it's due, Apple's doing RAM right

For several years I gave Apple consistent criticism over shipping their Macs with too little RAM in the entry level specs. Especially the 8GB machines were completely unacceptable for what were some of the most expensive laptops on the market. If you live entirely in Apple World, you think of the MacBook Air as their more affordable computer, but it must be said that that's more expensive than the vast majority of laptops on the market, so 8GB was a budget spec in a premium device.

That said, I have to give credit where it's due. I think Apple has their lineup in a pretty damn good place in 2026.

They do still have one 8GB model on the market, which is the MacBook Neo, which is their budget laptop. I think this computer is pretty good for the price point, although I do think it will be absolutely perfect when it presumably gets the 12GB upgrade next year wit it's iPhone chip bump. The base M-series chips start at 16GB now, the Pros start at 24GB, the Max starts at 36GB, and the Ultra starts at 96GB.

In my opinion, all of those chipsets ship with a reasonable amount of RAM for the price points. There's a reason I haven't complained about Apple RAM for a while, and it's because I think they've done a really great job making sure that no matter what Mac you buy, you won't be starved for RAM.

If anything, my controversial opinion is that a lot of Mac buyers actually burn money on upgrading the RAM in their machines when they absolutely don't need to.

Signed, a MacBook Pro user with 24GB RAM who edits and exports 4K 60fps video, edits multi-gigabyte Photoshop files, runs multiple Chromium browsers at the same time with dozens of tabs open, and develops iOS and web apps simultaneously with coding agents with no issues. Some people genuinely need more, but I think a lot of people are upgrading without actually needing it.