At least 16G, them having a 8G offering is customer hostile.

They pay like $40 for the difference, while making it a $200 upgrade, same with the SSD. - Especially since the SSD is apparently really slow with the 256G model.

Eh. I bought a base model M1 Air on a whim because they were in stock, and I can count on one hand the times I wished for more RAM. I have a Kubernetes cluster at home I can run things in, which also hosts a Jupyter instance.

My next one I'll get 16G simply because those few times (namely, creating Kubernetes labs intended to be ran on Apple Silicon) were annoying to deal with. But for I would wager 90+% of their customer base, 8G is absolutely fine. I've never once had it stutter with heavy Chrome usage, video streaming, or even gaming (not AAA titles, granted) out to an external monitor.

I have the 8GB M1 mini, which I bought as soon as it went on sale, so it's a year and a half old. In general the 8GB thing has been fine, and the notion that it can swap pretty quickly has been fine, but it's definitely noticeable now that the swapping is no longer fine, whether because the flash is wearing out or because there was a software update. These days I regularly reboot the thing just to clear the decks after the machine comes to a crawl. And I don't do anything stressful with it. VS Code, Chrome, and Terminal at the same time is about as extreme as it gets. All the real work is happening on adjacent Linux box.

I can't imagine the SSD having worn out yet; that's very odd. Mine hasn't quite hit a year yet, so I'll definitely keep an eye on it, but I haven't noticed any slowdowns.

Excessive swapping due to ram pressure can wear out an SSD pretty fast.

A change in the software is more likely, but Apple doesn’t ship the tools to read out SSD health indicators so I can’t rule that out.

Please don’t get less than 16.

I have now had two (work and personal) - my work m1 air was specced with 8GB, and had major memory pressure and issues with an external monitor. My personal 14” MBP has 16GB - same workload, same monitor, never skipped a beat.

Ended up sending the air back and swapping for one of the old dev ex MBP (intel based).

I have 8GB on my M1 air and will definitely be paying extra for 16 or 24 GB next time. Memory pressure is real especially because I have a second user on the laptop for my spouse - if both our accounts are logged in with apps open it can slow down and freeze for 30 seconds or more.

Absolutely skip the 8 GB. I tried my luck with M1 Air, but returned it after two days for 16 GB version. Some Xcode, Sketch and web development.

Once you start swapping, you easily get multi-second delays where a system is totally unresponsive.

A 24 GB M2 Air would be great, but I expect my current M1 to last gracefully for years.

Never get less than 16, since you cannot upgrade it later. Yes, it's obviously a sales technique to get you to pay a lot more than the main price they like to put in ads.

I'm definitely going to be an outlier but 8 for me.

more than 16 gigs is my recommendation. As the electron apps are proliferating RAM will always be bottleneck.