You can love or hate AI, but it’s killed crappy 8GB versions of pricey PCs and Macs

I’d describe myself as a skeptic of the generative AI revolution—I think the technology as it currently exists is situationally impressive and useful for specific kinds of tasks, but broadly oversold. I’m not sure it will vanish from relevance to quite the extent that other tech fads like the metaverse or NFTs did, but my suspicion is that companies like Nvidia and OpenAI are riding a bubble that will pop or deflate over time as more companies and individuals run up against the technology’s limitations, and as it fails to advance as quickly or as impressively as its most ardent boosters are predicting.

Maybe you agree with me and maybe you don’t! I’m not necessarily trying to convince you one way or the other. But I am here to say that even if you agree with me, we can all celebrate the one unambiguously positive thing that the generative AI hype cycle has done for computers this year: the RAM floor for many PCs and all Macs is now finally 16GB instead of 8GB.

Companies like Apple and Microsoft have, for years, created attractive, high-powered hardware with 8GB of memory in it, most egregiously in $1,000-and-up putative “pro” computers like last year’s $1,599 M3 MacBook Pro or the Surface Pro 9.

This meant that, for the kinds of power users and professionals drawn to these machines, that their starting prices were effectively mirages; “pay for 16GB if you can” has been my blanket advice to MacBook buyers for years now, since there’s basically no workload (including Just Browsing The Web) that won’t benefit at least a little. It also leaves more headroom for future software bloat and future hobby discovery. Did you buy an 8GB Mac, and then decide you wanted to try software development, photo or video editing, CAD design, or Logic Pro? Good luck!