Can't answer for the quoted poster, but I'm on a 16GB M1 MacBook Air, and haven't felt a strong need for more RAM yet… I'm doing a heavy amount of SwiftUI, and even messing around with some local LLMs.

I could imagine upgrading to the M3 or even M4 MBA, but at that point it will have been 4–5 years on the M1.

16GB. I really don't see it being a problem.

This isn't to defend Apple's stingy memory and storage specs, I just don't end up needing more than that really for the kind of work I do.

The base SSD was 500GB too. Which I'm using like... half of? It's the same thing with iPhones. The base storage amount for Pro models is 128GB and I never run up against that limit. Maybe if I took way more pictures and videos.

I store all my important data in different versions of the cloud (code I write in remote Github repos, files in Google Drive) so on device stuff is more ephemeral.

If I was a professional photographer or video editor, I'd care a lot more. Again, I think they should offer more a base but I don't ever run into actually needing it so it's not a pain point for me.