Hi Friend,

​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 made 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. Memory 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 memory 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.

Your pal,

David

P.S. Do you want to help me out? Why not recommend this newsletter to a friend?​

​Read this post on macsparky.com​
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​MailMaven: A Serious Mac Email App for Power Users (Sponsor)

SmallCubed sponsored this post. Check out MailMaven for yourself.

For years, power users relied on SmallCubed’s MailSuite plugins to make Apple Mail actually work the way it should. MailTags, Mail Act-On, SigPro. Real tools for people who live in their inbox. Then Apple killed third-party Mail plugins, and all of that went away.

SmallCubed could have walked away. Instead, they spent two years building MailMaven, a full email client for macOS that brings back everything MailSuite offered and then some.

MailMaven is built for the kind of person who thinks about email as a system, not just a stream of messages. The tagging engine lets you attach keywords, projects, priority flags, colors, and notes to any message. If you’ve ever wanted to mark an email as “waiting for response” or “needs follow-up next week” without creating a folder for it, this is your app.

The rules system goes deeper than anything Apple Mail offers. Keyboard-driven filing. Proper Gmail label support (which Apple Mail still handles awkwardly). And an interface that feels native to macOS because it is.

Switching email apps is terrifying. SmallCubed knows this. MailMaven imports your Apple Mail setup; accounts, mailboxes, messages and even tags if you previously used MailSuite. You don’t start from zero. That alone removes the biggest barrier for most people.

MailMaven runs on Ventura and later. PGP encryption is built in. It’s available in seven languages. Joe Kissell, who literally wrote the book on email management, also wrote MailMaven’s support pages and Take Control of MailMaven, which is available for free at takecontrolbooks.com. The app is a one-time purchase with an optional $75/year maintenance plan for updates. No subscription required to keep using what you bought.

I like seeing independent Mac developers build serious productivity tools instead of abandoning ship when Apple changes the rules. SmallCubed has been in the email business for over a decade, and MailMaven feels like the product they always wanted to make. If Apple Mail frustrates you but you’re not ready to give up on a native Mac email experience, MailMaven is what you’re looking for.

​Check out MailMaven at mailmaven.app.