8 is way too low for desktop going into 2025. Your machine might scream a lot more with 16- you probably have a lot of memory pressure which means your Mac is compressing ram a lot and maybe paging in and out of disk a lot. Does newer Apple hardware do this well? Sure, but not having to do it at all is way faster and more efficient. Since an extra 8 gigs is cheap (probably like $10-$20) to apples bottom line, it’s kinda lame for it not to be a default, especially since shitty low end machines from other vendors do it.

I have 32 gigs on an m3 and kinda wish I went with 64 :/

Because RAM is cheap and really helpful. If you have a Desktop, you can buy 16GB DDR4 RAM for ~30€ and 32GB for ~60€. That's retail with VAT - Apple itself will get much better prices and so there is no reason why their expensive devices are shipped with 8GB RAM.

8GB is just too low and was too low in 2020. It gets shared with GPU and once you swap you decrease lifespan of a soldered SSD. It’s okay for light use but let’s not kid ourselves that even if it was passable in 2020 it would be enough for much longer.

It got bashed for low RAM by everyone except mainstream tech „reviewers”. Tech media are glorified advertisements these days so the only thing that happened between then and now is that they switched from selling you that new shiny M1 MacBook to selling you that new shiny OpenAI model.

I’m not going to bash M1 MacBook Air. It’s awesome, the CPU was ahead of time and I knew it would last me years. That’s why I got 16GB one.

When buying a computer, most people want it to last several years, with most PCs you can upgrade the RAM during the lifetime of the device. If you buy a modern Mac, you can't.

As time goes on new software will need more and more ram, but on a Mac you are stuck with what you got.

Sure, Apple uses a different way of managing RAM than windows, but that can only do so much. Sooner or later you will get to a point where it just isn't enough anymore. With eight gigs you will get there sooner than with 16.

Regarding your usecase, one thing you need to consider is that CPU intensive tasks does not equal RAM intensive tasks.

Copying a file is neither CPU nor RAM intesive, so it is a rather pointless test.

Docker instances depend highly on what they actually do for work weather or not they will use a lot of RAM, so it is a very inacurate test.

Web development is not as resoruce intensive as say video editing or running simulations.

For you 8GB RAM is fine, for an engineer, video editor, or even a finance analyst, 8GB is putiful.

Then we need to talk about value, I can get an Asus ExpertBook B1 B1402CVA for less than an M2 MacBook Air.

The ExpertBook is slightly heavier with slightly larger screen (but with lower resolution), it has 16GB RAM and 512GB storage space, both of which can be upgraded as the user's needs change.

The ExpertBook costs slightly less than the MacBook, so tell me, why should I pay more to get less?

Now, I realize it isn't that simple, both computers are suitable for different tasks, they run completely different OSes, and have different types of CPUs.

I think it has to do with Apple Intelligence that requires 16GB.

8GB was already too low for what is positioned as a premium machine. RAM is a pretty cheap part of the whole computer, so it's completely unnecessarily small. I'm also a software engineer and the 16GB in my work MBP M1 is not even enough at times.

The big thing that's caused Apple to stop completely fleecing the people buying the low end option: AI. If you or Apple want to run local models on a machine with only 8GB of RAM, you probably won't have much left over for anything else.

I guess we got used to massive ram increase/requirements in the past few years due to x86/64 architecture and such, that 8GB now seems completely obsolete. ARM works differently and more efficiently which would explain the lower specs for same or better results.

That's how I see it at least.