I’ve been buying Macs forever. For most of that time, the conventional wisdom was simple: Get as much memory as you can afford. Back then, everyone was doing video editing or photo work. Memory was expensive. So you bought as much as your budget allowed. More memory always makes your Mac snappier.

Then the world changed. Solid state storage got cheap. Cloud services got fast. Most people stopped doing local heavy lifting. They stored their photos in iCloud. They edited video in the cloud. RAM didn’t matter as much anymore. You could get away with less memory on a Mac and never think about it.

I told people that advice for years: “Don’t go crazy when buying memory”. When I bought my souped up M2 Mac Studio, the one place I scaled back was memory.

I’m done giving that advice.

The age of LLM-based Artificial Intelligence has made memory a premium again. That’s particularly true if you run local AI models, but even Apple Intelligence can get memory hungry. Modern Macs are amazing hardware. But it means nothing if you run out of memory.

The AI era has changed the buying calculus for Macs.

If you’re running local AI models, you need more memory than you think. Significantly more. I’m not talking about academic research. I’m talking about doing actual work on your Mac.

The M5 GPU is better at this stuff than previous chips. It’s built for it. But you need to feed it memory. Without it, you’re bottlenecked. With it, you actually get performance.

In addition, the price of memory is skyrocketing and it’s only a matter of time before that’s reflected in new Mac pricing.

For most people using traditional Mac software 16GB is still fine. If you’re using Slack and Chrome and Word, you don’t need more. But if you’re thinking about running local models or you’re thinking about a future where some of your AI processing happens on your hardware instead of in the cloud (which I expect most of us will be doing soon), you need to spec higher.

I’d say for someone interested in AI work 32GB is the new baseline. Not for today necessarily. But as a hedge for tomorrow.

This is a shift from how Mac people think traditionally. We’ve been storage-focused. How much SSD. How much disk space. We’re moving into a world where RAM is the limiting factor. Where more memory means access to capabilities that weren’t available at lower levels.

So here’s my practical advice. If you’re buying a Mac in 2026, go big on memory. You’ll thank me in three years when you don’t need a new machine because you hit the memory wall.