> your "ultrafast" Mac grinds to a halt when you have a couple of Electron apps and a browser open at the same time?

The 8GB models could easily handle this kind of load.

can confirm

But they could barely do it without swapping in my experience.

The OS alone takes 2GB or more (200MB just for spotlight iirc), a bit is used for graphics, and once you add a bunch of browser tabs and windows you're easily in a situation where RAM usage is permanently above 80%. You don't feel it as quickly on the M1 but by the time you notice lags it's already swapping 15GB, sometimes for no apparent reason.

I still don't quite get it, on the 16GB Macbook I feel like I can do much more without exceeding 8GB usage.

Swapping is fine as long as performance remains acceptable. Obviously at some point it won't – the 8GB models do have limits. But these limits are often wildly exaggerated in this sort of discussion.

The 13-inch iPad Pro is a ~$1300 PC that Apple will gladly sell with 8 GB of RAM.

No, it's not. It's a $1300 high end tablet, which (among other things) will not run arbitrary programs of the user's choosing, and which has aggressive memory management and background process restrictions. All of these factors contribute to 8 GiB being a reasonable amount of memory for such a device.

As far as I know even the newest iPad Pro is limited to 5GB per app, so if you use it for things like drawing in Procreate the 16GB upgrade does literally nothing.

Procreate's own layer limit calculator makes a distinction between the 8 GB and 16 GB chips.

https://help.procreate.com/articles/YB7CjQ-maximum-layer-lim...

Thanks, last time I checked that supposedly wasn't the case. Though an increase of layers between ~10-25% seems a bit underwhelming for the RAM upgrade.

You can definitely request more than that with the right entitlements.