> you'll end up with a measly 8GB/256GB model which will only be useful for basic browsing.

I must be doing something wrong then. I've got one of those measly models and I do quite a bit more than just basic browsing without any problem. Video calls are the least of that, and they work fine.

Anyone who says the 8/256 Airs are throwaway machines has literally never used one. Full stop. You have an opinion about what 8gb of memory is capable of, which is influenced entirely by Intel CPUs and Windows. It hits different on the M1 platform and MacOS.

I have the base level M2 Air and it’s anything but a basic browsing machine.

Runs everything I throw at it development wise, while a good few other things are open and it has never felt slow. Compare that to any Windows laptops with the same spec and it would be chugging along with just Chrome open.

I do all of my development on a measly 8GB/500GB model. The only application that has performance problems for me VCVRack, and that’s only after I surpassed 900 modules

While they do swap more often than one with more RAM (obviously), at least with the M1s, the SSDs are stupidly fast, to the point that you barely notice it for day-to-day work. They nerfed the SSD on M2 base models; not sure about M3.

For the record, on my base M1 Air, I generally have Safari, Spotify, and Alacritty open at any given time. I can also run Docker Desktop if necessary, although I prefer colima since I don’t need any of the bloat.

Video transcoding is done on the GPU and has nothing to do with memory/storage.

And there isn't a trend towards more Electron apps. Increasingly developers are using Tauri which is Rust based and extremely lightweight.

"will only be useful for basic browsing" nah.