this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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Remember this is “unified”, it’s not like you can upgrade, nor is it available in the “cheap” packaging we’re used to.
You’ll get whatever Apple puts on the SoC, and you’ll be happy with it
The upside is that unified memory is genuinely different from traditional RAM. The CPU, GPU and Neural Engine all share the same memory pool, so data doesn’t need to be copied back and forth. That reduces latency, improves efficiency and lets AI models, graphics and other workloads access much larger datasets. It also uses less power and saves board space. The downside is obvious: because it’s integrated into the chip, you have to choose the right amount upfront, since it can’t be upgraded later.
Ya, these high memory amounts and ever increasing memory bandwidth are heavily (but not only) targeting people wanting to run local large AI models like a full deepseek on their machines.
You might not be able to train as well on them as NVIDIA + CUDA, but for local inference, they're an alternative to NVIDIA and more reasonably priced for the model sizes you can run, and each iteration they get better as the bandwidth increases.
Apples memory has never been cheap, it's always been a very expensive upgrade.
I slowly turn to dust as I recall cracking open 2013 MacBook Pros and just putting more memory in.
The memories of loading up the G3 with SDRAM so I can fiddle with Photoshop 5, lost like tears in the rain.
How dare you steal hundreds of dollars by installing contraband ram!