Sweet 16 (Premium)

This week, Apple took the long-awaited step of acknowledging reality and making 16 GB of RAM the minimum for all new Macs. The PC market will follow begrudgingly, and perhaps slowly, given the companies involved in their inability to pull themselves out of the bargain-basement and the mentality that's been undercutting them for years. But it will happen. It's inevitable.

Perhaps the past will provide us with a rough guide to the timeline.

I've been writing about Windows for 30 years, but more specifically, I've been writing books about Windows for 30 years. And one bit that's appeared in most of my mainstream--i.e. non-educational market--books is a discussion of the then-current official Microsoft hardware requirements and my recommendations for having the best possible experience. RAM has always been key to these requirements and my recommendations because RAM has always been key to the experience one has with Windows.

In Windows Vista Secrets, for example, I noted that this OS required at least 512 MB of RAM--yes, this was a simpler time--but I recommended at least 2 GB, a four-fold increase. This was, I observed at the time, a "very reasonable" $50 upgrade. But 4 GB was even better: "Pack the host PC with as much RAM as is physically possible," I wrote. "For typical PCs today, that means loading up with 4 GB of RAM."

For Windows 7 Secrets, the 64-bit x64 variant of the aging x86 architecture was becoming mainstream. And with it came the ability to add even more RAM to a PC. "In our view, x64 is the way to go," I wrote. "So if you have a choice, open yourself up to the massive RAM improvements that accompany the x64 versions of Windows 7." The higher-end 64-bit versions of Windows 7 supported up to 192 GB of RAM--on paper, at least. But "systems with massive amounts of memory just aren’t as constrained and can operate to their full potential," I wrote. And 4 GB was my new minimum recommendation.

Windows 8 Secrets presented all kinds of challenges, thanks to the weird Metro user interfaces and the Arm variant, Windows RT. By this point, I was writing about "6 or even 8 GB of RAM" (on x64-based PCs). "x64 is x86 on steroids," I noted. "It is 100 percent compatible with x86 software, including Windows and its applications, but provides support for an astonishing amount of RAM: Up to 256 TB (yes, terabytes)." Again, on paper. But I also added that while Netbooks with a 1 GHz Atom-class processor and 2 GB of RAM were technically "capable" of running Windows 8, given Microsoft's minimums, "this version of Windows is not suited to netbooks at all."

Windows 8 was when I walked away from traditional book publishers. By this time, Microsoft was moving to its "rapid release" model, and it was impossible to keep paper-based books up-to-date at the speed at which the company improved the product. So I started self-publishing. For my first Windows Field Guide, the Windows 8.1 Field Guide, I noted that Microsoft's minimum RAM...