M4 Macs

Some brief thoughts on the new Mac hardware announced this week.

#tech

The new M4 Macs look great.

I’m not using my Apple accessories right now, but the USB-C keyboards, mice, and trackpad would finally allow me to get rid of my Lightning cables. And the new Mac Mini looks super fun. So small!

Since Apple moved to Apple Silicon-based Macs, new hardware releases have entered a funny territory. Most upgrades are pretty minor - literally from the very first M1 release, every Mac became absurdly fast, with incredible battery life. There is rarely a reason to upgrade once you’re on Apple Silicon. But I digress. I’m a dev, so I run these machines into the ground and I like to eek out whatever performance I can. I still upgrade every two years or so, even though I don’t necessarily have to. 🤷

That being said, there is one dimension of the Mac upgrades this year that is incredibly important. Standardizing on a default of 16GB of RAM is long overdue, and that alone will be a huge quality-of-life improvement for most users.

I’m running two computers day-to-day:

  1. 2023 M3 Max MacBook Pro, 128GB RAM
  2. 2023 M2 Ultra Mac Studio, 64GB RAM

They’re both lightning fast. But my wife is using an 8GB M2 MacBook Air. It chugs on everything.

I’ve been incredibly impressed by Apple Silicon, but the incredible processors can’t fix that we live in a RAM-heavy software world now. With Electron apps and JS-heavy browser tabs1, 8GB of RAM just isn’t enough.

So I’ll be moving to the new M4, and my wife will take my MacBook Pro. No more RAM constraints!

Footnotes

  1. Brave reported to me yesterday that my Gmail/Google Chat tab was taking up 1GB of RAM. Absurd! ↩