I was worried about this too, but have been pleasantly surprised by this laptop. I'm sure my use case is far different to yours though. I was looking at my RAM consumption on my 16GB MacBook Pro prior to purchasing the M1 MacBook Air, and I was usually hitting 14-15GB with multiple GB of swap used in my regular use case (couple of chrome tabs, some electron apps, Xcode, 1st party apps all open).

I consciously pare down my usage on this MacBook Air, but I am typically at around 7GB/8GB of ram, with 3-4GB of swap space used. It feels noticeably snappier and overall better (minus some odd Big Sur UI bugs every now and then) than my 2017 15in MBP.

I wouldn't be worried about 16GB now (my current MacBook is 16GB and I don't have any problems). But I want my laptop to least a decent amount of time (at least 5 years), and I do worry about whether 16GB will be sufficient then.

This is one of the biggest reasons for me, personally. It is such an inexpensive difference in overall cost versus the benefits of having that headroom.

Plus I am sitting at ~26gb used memory right now. I tend to give my VM's a nice big 8-12GB chunk of ram depending on what I am doing too, so it is almost like I have two machines in one.

The disks and data pipelines on these new machines are so fast though that I do wonder if the RAM's responsibility has shifted towards being a giant CPU cache and the disk has likewise shifted into a point where it performs more like RAM.

Maybe that’s the eventuality. I don’t run VMs much if at all for my work/day to day, but I have a desktop in the event I need to.

It depends on what you do, and always will. 16GB will be enough for web browsing, gaming, and coding websites in python 5 years down the line. 16GB is not enough now for.. say, compiling Firefox with LTO, at least while browsing.

I figure I will eventually pass this laptop on to a family member by the time I will be in the market for a new laptop, so I am not necessarily worried about that. I suspect my 2017 mbp would have worked fine for a few more years but I wanted to transition to a more portable device.

One nice aspect of Big Sur and the M1 is that you can run the iPad version of many apps, rather than the Electron desktop version. The iPad versions often use way less memory.

I wonder if the Mac Pro version of this will do a two-tiered thing, with 16GB on the chip, and then a bunch of slots for your slower, "external" memory modules— basically the Mac Fusion Drive of RAM, with an internal controller to manage moving stuff in and out of the low-latency area.

I could certainly also see them going all-in on the integrated architecture, but the possibilities are intriguing if they want a reasonable story for a workstation that goes up to 100s of GB (the current Mac Pro's top configuration is an eye-watering 1.5TB of RAM).

There's not really any reason it would be slower. Being on-package doesn't offer any real performance advantage (the lengths of the traces to memory have a negligible impact on performance or latency), and is more of a benefit to manufacturing.

The memory on the M1 actually has fairly poor latency compared to most x86 systems:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

The on-package RAM is probably more aimed at reducing power consumption; it's not particularly low-latency. This obviously wouldn't be an issue for an MBP.

Has to be a new chip, this one is limited to 36bit address space. We won’t see a 32GB M1

Same!