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High RAM prices: Have we gone full circle with 8 GB RAM?

LEM Staff - 2025.12.11

Recently posted in our community, a meme was shared which sparked a discussion about having 8 GB RAM in different years – now to be featured as a part of the “Low End Mac Mailbag“. As a part of the Low End Mac mailbag, we aim to:

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  • Answer commonly asked questions, helping you problem-solve your Mac.

With RAM prices exploding due to AI, this will force manufacturers to either raise the cost of devices, lower the RAM capacity shipped with said device, or to find alternative solutions altogether. This is most financially and experientially impactful to the consumer, which raises some questions:

What some people think

Response 1: “A much-needed industry wide shift toward optimization. From hardware to software, games to operating systems…everyone’s taken advantage of low cost high end hardware. The same 64GB of ram that costed $110 at Best Buy is now over $900. You could have bought a whole entry-level gaming pc for that when I used to work there.

I am very aware of the current state of the tech industry and I am speaking on a best case, perfect world. I think the industry’s leapfrog to actually putting in that level of work is just to move everyone to cloud based processing. Developers will only optimize software when they are given bounds, development is sloppy optimization is a nightmare.

They basically have “unlimited” power to work with now. Back when games could only fit on floppy disks and cartridges a developers core mission was optimization. You already see it with Microsoft, they’ve been taking the Xbox hardware less than less seriously. Moving to on demand cloud streaming, which is acceptable for most people especially with more residential fiber installations than ever right now.”

Andrew Proz: “Just to give my perspective, I’m approaching this from being involved in devops for the last 15 or so years and am overseeing a migration from on prem hosted apps to cloud hosted apps.

The only thing being optimized is the profit margin for memory manufacturers. You honestly think ANY development effort is going to optimize for memory usage based on end user cost? If development effort wasn’t already being put towards memory usage optimization for a given product, this isn’t going to magically open budgets and resources to do so.

Development houses care about a baseline spec where the app will function reasonably well enough to sell or not cause support burden from customer complaints. The cost of high end hardware over several years did not change how apps were developed. This RAM price increase? Not gonna do a thing for app requirements or optimization.

Even prior to that formal devops stuff, I was on a team working on a game using the quake 3 engine.

In neither world were we optimizing for file size or memory footprint. The closest we got was creating assets and trying to minimize polygon count (aka triangles aka tris) to keep a player’s onscreen tri count lower than like 25k.
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Oh, how the world has changed since the mid 2000’s. Once we got a renderer that could offload more onto the GPU hardware, it became less of a concern and I was one of the few folk who wanted the game to run on original Q3 supported hardware, if even in a limited state. But it’s an uphill battle at times. Devs like new features and the artists like to show off their creations in the best possible light. Like literally, some of our dev effort went to q3map2 for texture blending on map compilation, if memory serves.
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Look at crappy console ports that assume they have 12 GB of video memory to load their assets because that’s what they have on PS5 and XBoneX. Most folk were constrained to 8 GB or less but until there was enough customer pushback, no effort was made. It’s gonna be like that but new computer sales with “small” amounts of RAM is gonna be like 5% of potential customers over the next 2 years. Who’s gonna put the effort in when 95% of your customers already bought computers with enough RAM and won’t be upgrading for another 3 to 5 years?”

Response 3: “Screw that. 64GB in my MacBook Pro and 96GB in my OCLP’d 5,1.”

Response 4: “The IIgs opposite my aging trash can Mac only has 8 MB. That’s so much more than I could have ever dreamed of back in those days.”

Response 5: “The OS bloat creep has been getting worse. Hopefully they take a hatchet to a lot of things once they drop Intel code. It would be nice for a modern day “Snow Leopard.””

Response 6: “Still on top of the world with my M2 MBA with 8GB / 256GB, lol. The stuff I’ve built on this little laptop – little bits of software, digital archaeology, few videos here and there… 16GB is nice but 8GB is adequate. I’m finally “at home” in the market again lmao.”

Response 7: “Hopefully the ram prices make devs optimize their stuff better, but sadly I have doubts.”

Response 8: “Late 2005 , when I rebuilt my PC and upgraded to 64 bit XP… The second thing I did was upgrade to 8 GB ram. 2009 brought 8GB minimums, 16 average, and 32 for the workhorse installs. Even today, 16 is about the minimum I run without having to consider pairing down the OS to utalize “low ram”. Running Tahoe is , imho 16GB minimum… with all the AI stuff turned on, I find 32 is needed to prevent slowdowns. BUT, the $24 of ddr3 or ddr4 ram is now $200+ ddr5. And Crucial (i THINK it was crucial) saying they’re not selling to gamers anymore because AI companies will take everything they can pump out..”

Response 9: “64gb on my gaming rig… 18gb on my MBP… I’m good lol.”

Response 10: “You mean 8TB of ram in 2026”

Carl Draper: “Might be fine on ARM Macs but not on anything else….8GB isn;t enough…16GB isn’t enough….”

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