I have 16 GB on my Macbook Air M1, I'd rather have more since it resorts to compressed RAM and swap but it's not the end of the world - it's still much snappier than my thinkpad of similar vintage that also has 16 GB of RAM. I don't think "the masses" that buy the 8 GB configuration are being well served. In my opinion Apple should discontinue the 8 GB option to avoid getting a deserved bad reputation for poor performance, even if that meant their starting prices rose to that of the current 16GB configuration.

People stopped using spinning rust for swap over a decade ago. Nobody is complaining about that being slow anymore, it's not even considered usable.

People whose computing needs are met by 8 GB of RAM minus however much of that is needed for VRAM in this era of everything-is-a-web-app and phones shooting 4K60fps video are in the minority. A large chunk of people are essentially getting tricked into buying underspecced machines unfit for their needs that will end up as premature e-waste and giving Apple a bad reputation for performance. Nobody would expect Apple to care about the former but for their own sake they should care about the latter.

You don't feel any slowdown because you're accustomed to it. On my 16 GB M1 I very much notice when I hit the wall.

Phone RAM is not relevant to mac computer RAM, the interface is way different and the tasks performed are way different. Windows and desktop Linux numbers are the reasonable comparisons.

They can push way more than 1GB per tab. Last I checked my Discord was using 2.7 GB.

Yeah, me. The only worthwhile change since then has been the ability to resize windows from any corner or edge, and the support for new hardware I guess.

Chrome crashes tabs all the time for me. Firefox and Safari don't. Process isolation on Chrome is a must because it's just a big piece of doodoo browser.

Enjoying your tools is important. Computers aren't that expensive and typically keep working for a decade or more. Get one you enjoy using.

8 GB isn't enough to do web browsing on macOS either.

Who needs 50 tabs when a single Discord one can take up 3 GB? Also remember that some of that 8 GB goes to the GPU.

Your mom's your mom but mine wouldn't be happy with 8 GB and she wouldn't know that the reason it's slow is that it's swapping. The problem with 8 GB models being the cheap default option is that a lot of people, probably the majority of 8 GB buyers, buy the wrong configuration for their needs.

Disagree. Only the prevalence of lower specced devices keeps hardware requirement inflation in check. If all new devices had more, you'd be making e-waste out of old ones.

They do rub me the wrong way too and I've been using Apple computers my whole life, since our family's first computer in 1991. I use a more powerful desktop PC for my more RAM/multicore heavy tasks and a NAS for mass storage now so I can get away with "just" a 16/512 GB Macbook Air to avoid the most egregious upsells. It's a great laptop but Apple's predatory business practices make me want to not rely on them TOO much.

Nerfing the least bad option isn't really a positive. The alternatives getting better would be.