Videos, music, photos, all of these add up fast. I have encountered plenty of family and friends needing help when their storage is exhausted.
Then there is the ever increasong bloat of software, web apps, etc. that chew through RAM.
If this isn't a daily driver, sure. It is fine. But for those where this is their only computer, this is a lot of money for an 'entry level' model that can't do as much.
And I bet I use my computer more strenuously than 90% of the population.
Those times are over when you swim in the mainstream.
$200 Chromebooks are the kind my various teacher friends complain about because they're so shit that they even drive elementary school kids crazy.
I have zero recent experience with MacOS or the M1,2,3 ARM hardware but I doubt even the very fast RAM is going to make that much difference to the above.
I can certainly get it to start swapping easily enough, so I don't necessarily agree with all of the people I've seen claiming that these machines are revolutionary and 8GB is the new 16GB, but it does seem to manage better than I would have expected.
Apple's pricing on memory and disk upgrades really aggravates me, though, and was a significant factor in deciding to switch to Linux for my primary computer.
For my kids and parents, the M1 Air has been flawless (even for me - it's my travel Mac). But if you know you're a heavy user definitely get more RAM.
Honestly, even 16GB isn't enough if you keep a modest (say, O(100)) number of tabs open. I regularly find my MBP slowed down due to "memory pressure" (swapping) at that point, with closing/restarting the browser to be an instantaneous fix.
