Open Task Manager or Activity Monitor, push your worst workload, and add 30 percent headroom. That is your real RAM number, and it explains why 8GB is enough on a Mac but not on a 2026 Windows laptop.
Before you click "buy" on a new laptop, take 30 seconds to find out what you actually need. Open Task Manager on Windows, or Activity Monitor on a Mac, sort the list by memory, and run your heaviest real workload for a few minutes: the browser tabs, the spreadsheet, the video call, the photo edit. Look at the peak number, not the idle number. Add roughly 30 percent headroom for the apps you have not opened yet and the background work the operating system will quietly do. That sum is your real RAM requirement. Everything else on the spec sheet is context, and most of it is noise.
That single test also explains why the standard advice for 2026 has gotten weirder, not simpler. A practical buying column on the question, ZDNET's 2026 RAM guide, lays out a tiered answer: 16GB as the floor for new Windows machines, 32GB for gamers and creative pros, 48 to 64GB for 8K video work and heavy parallel apps. The tier chart only matters once the floor is real for you, and that depends on the operating system, the apps you actually run, and the lifespan of the machine.
Start with the floor, then decide whether you live on it or step up. The 16GB baseline for new Windows consumer laptops in 2026 is real, but it is a floor, not a target. Microsoft's own Windows 11 minimum sits at 4GB, a number almost no serious user can live on for a full day of work. Sixteen gigabytes is where the system stops swapping to storage under normal multi-app use. It is also where on-device AI features such as Copilot+ on Windows, Apple Intelligence on macOS, and locally run language models have enough room to operate without choking the browser. The same ZDNET column notes that Microsoft pointed buyers toward 32GB in its November 2025 gaming PC guidance, the cleanest signal that the industry has quietly moved past 16GB as a comfortable ceiling for demanding play.
The Mac story looks different, and the cost curve looks different too. Apple silicon stretches 8GB further than Windows can, because unified memory and tight OS-level tuning let the system get away with configurations that would feel starved on a Windows laptop. That is why Chromebooks, which lean on a similarly streamlined OS, can still ship with 8GB or less and feel usable, at the cost of a thinner native app catalog. Apple raised the MacBook Air M4's starting point to 16GB in 2025, and the MacBook Air M5 launched at the same 16GB floor, a quiet acknowledgment that the 8GB era is ending even on Apple's most efficient laptops. The catch is that stepping up to 32GB or 64GB on an Apple Silicon machine is a meaningful price jump, because the memory lives on the same package as the processor. The same dollars buy more RAM on a Windows machine, and that asymmetry is worth naming before you compare spec sheets across platforms.
So the real decision is not "how much RAM is enough" in the abstract. It is whether 16GB is your floor or your ceiling. If your heaviest day is a browser, a chat app, a spreadsheet, and the occasional photo edit, 16GB is the right place to park. If you are running mod-heavy games, Premiere or DaVinci Resolve timelines, Logic sessions with large sample libraries, or a local LLM alongside everything else, you are not at the floor. You are on it, and the system will tell you so by stuttering, swapping, or quietly throttling background work. Watch for browser tab counts where the system starts to drag: 30 tabs on a 16GB Windows laptop feels different from 30 tabs on a 16GB MacBook, and different again on a Chromebook. When the drag appears, the upgrade is real, not optional.
Two more signals are worth tracking in 2026. The first is the shift in memory standard. DDR5 is the current baseline for new RAM, with LPDDR5X as the lower-power variant that lives in thin laptops and tablets. JEDEC, the standards body that defines these memory types, has published the LPDDR6 standard, which points to where laptops and phones are heading in the next product cycle, though consumer DDR6 desktops and laptops are not expected in the near term. The second signal is on-device AI, which is the new memory pressure that did not exist a few product cycles ago. Copilot+ on Windows, Apple Intelligence on macOS, and locally run language models all want resident memory that the old "8GB is fine" advice never had to budget for.
The 30-second test, then, is the part worth remembering when the next spec sheet lands in your inbox. Run your real workload, read the peak, add 30 percent, and that is your number. If the floor model you are about to buy meets it, buy it. If it does not, the next step up is not a luxury. It is the same machine with the headroom your actual day requires.