RAM is really cheap when you're not buying it from Apple.

There are a lot of laptops with soldered RAM.

That's a shame, it's a bit weird seeing someone having to limit what software they can use, and looking to offload things onto external machines, over something you can get 4 times the amount of (32 GB) for under $50 (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=sodimm+ddr4+32gb)

For the price point of entry level M1 Air or Pro, there is nothing that competes on battery life.

I'm in South Africa, with spotty electricity. I need a laptop that can sustain work for 4-6h without charge without spending an extra arm. Anything non-Apple that does this competes on the top end range, not entry level.

Cheaping out on hardware here just means I need to buy bigger backup batteries, so either way I need to spend a ton of money if I really want to avoid Apple that much.

Another solution is to use an editor that doesn't rely on the browser or electron (which is just another browser). That's the main reason I switched to vim, all my tools were electron and the fan was constantly spinning. No regrets, highly recommend.

I'm a PHPStorm lad. I've thought about Vim over the years, but Jetbrains has been pretty great for being an all-in-one tool. IDE, git UI, database viewer, and convenient CLI.

Another option I considered is Sublime, but it seems a lot of its extensions that I'd need are not very up to date.