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It's a fairly realistic lower-bound for professional macOS work, if you don't want to thrash the SSD with zram writes.

Aside from running local LLMs (which is tight on 32GB anyway), what on Earth are people doing that requires 32GB as a bare minimum? I have 24GB on my current MacBook Pro and never find myself limited by it. My work MacBook Pro has 16GB, and that is occasionally a bit tight. However, that's largely because the stingy 512GB SSD quickly fills up, leaving no room for swap, not because I really need more RAM as such.

That said, I don't believe that SSDs can feel pain, so I am quite happy for the OS to thrash them as much as necessary. The fear of SSD failure is massively overblown IMO.

As I happily whir away on my 8Gb Neo.

Everything I use, almost literally everything, is either cloud or a box I’m ssh’d into.

I can see how I’m the exception, though.

If you find yourself loading that much stuff in memory you probably need to offshore your compute

As the saying goes, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

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