Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb. Well, I use my M1 (16 GB) for heavy video editing and music sessions, plus professional programming, with IDEA, VMs, and so on. And I don't seem to ever need even close to 16GB, much less "way north", or even saw it be slow. > As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Ci…
> Maybe it's time to come over to M1 and 12.4? This is the very type of bamboozlement I was alluding to - instruction set and/or silicon architecture doesn't actually change the amount of data you use. Citrix will still need to buffer the same (compressed?) 4K worth of pixels and Edge will still to load up the full DOM, cache all the sources, stand up a sandbox with javascript virtual machine etc. There's nothing mag…
I'm now playing a 4K movie on Plex. It's using a little over 1Gb RAM for that. After I started it, my computer swapped ~250Mb to the SSD. Firefox is still snappy. Safari is still running normally. VS Code is still doing its thing. I even started a `brew update` on iTerm, and I have the App Store installing a couple apps. Mail still runs fine, sends and receives, and I can switch between mail accounts and messages.
So, you may be technically right about the memory usage and the need for swapping. What you're missing is the fact that it doesn't hurt the user experience.
This is not marketing or bamboozlement. This is me on the same laptop I'm typing this answer.
You should probably do a deep inspection of your beliefs and stop denying the actual, practical experience of many people who are responding to you with real world experience.