I do heavy dev work on my M1 Air with 8GB, meaning multiple IDEs, dozens of Chrome tabs, iPhone simulators, and plenty of electron apps all open at once. Never had an issue with it. MacOS is very good at paging to it's super-fast SSD.

The iPhone 15 Pro that launched some months ago has 8G

8G is paltry on a desktop computer that should last years.

Not when you compare against other devices and consider that bloat is a thing and programs and websites use more RAM now than they did to accomplish essentially the same thing.

If Apple was asking $600 that might be OK, but at $1600? How many laptops at that price point have 8GB RAM? Heck a $400 Steam Deck has 16GB.

Add on to that the observation that memory for your average consumer computer is something of an arms race between the manufacturer of the consumer's computer and the developers of the software they'll use.

Manufacturers want to have a computer with enough memory that it never feels like a constraint to the user (and blog posts like this one enjoin them to do that).

At the same time, developers of software want to consume as much memory as possible-- up to the point where they've used it all and any extra becomes noticeable as perf problems to the user.

So Apple keeping their default memory offering low could be seen in a certain noble light...like honoring a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

It is not a ton if you're using the laptop for professional software development or for professional whatever software work that would call for professional hardware - I am specifically excluding professional work that can be done on a MacBook Air from 2017.

Honestly Apple holding the line on memory probably helps pressure developers to optimise.

When people say they need 16gb of ram to have a browser with 200 tabs, a chat messaging program, and an audio player I really wonder what they're smoking. That could be done on maybe 4gb, 8gb would make it easier to handle things like tabs with high resolution video.

You only NEED ram for what is actively being used. If you aren't actively using 199 tabs, you don't need them in memory.