We're already in a sad state of software development and bloat, once upon a time you needed around 1/32nd the RAM to do all the same things you can do today (1/128th if you count the 90s state of the web as "the same").

A web browser adds a significant amount of memory usage to any task, even with basic static webpages, and then almost every other app you use is secretly also a web browser but none of the RAM usage from it can be shared with the web browser you're already running.

We are in a sad state of bloat. 99% of what people do on their computers now goes through a web browser, and opening lots of tabs chews through RAM like nothing else.

I use my M1/8GB Air pretty much exclusively for web browsing and run into 'out of application memory' errors on a regular basis. Relaunching Safari generally solves the problem. It's just such a bad look for Apple to be selling premium priced products that can't do the most basic task people want them for without throwing errors.

If we're going by anecdotes, none of the people in my circle with base machines have ever complained about their computer running out of memory for their basic tasks. I'm sure Apple is looking at their telemetry data and they aren't seeing it either.

Again, I'm personally not happy about shelling out $400 for 24GB of memory on my next Macbook, but I gave away one of my base machines with 8GB to a family member, and they simply did not notice.

God forbid a novice user learns things and becomes a power user. Memory is so cheap, there's literally no reason these machines should not have 16gb.