I’m not aware of anyone (except those using VMs) who are complaining about the memory. I personally went from 16gb to 8 and don’t miss it. Do you actually own/use an m1 Mac?
However in 2021 I am not interested in a computer with less than 32GB ram. Sure, I could work around the limitations and close not in use programs/tabs to avoid going OOM, or using swap, but life is short and memory is cheap. I'd rather not have to worry about it.
I was similarly skeptical, but my old laptop died on me so I had to replace it. My M1 MacBook Pro is a better laptop for me as developer: my 16” 2019 MBP with 32GB of RAM I got from work has performance and memory issues (mostly too many open browser tabs) more frequently than my personal M1 laptop.
What specific workloads? If you bought a 16GB machine to keep 32GB of data in RAM then clearly you bought the wrong machine. But I am able to run WAY more applications in 8GB than the 16GB intel Mac I had previously.
Which is why I asked for specific workloads in the comment you decided to reply to. I also say in the same comment this very thing you are reiterating...
I am not using VMs (unless you count the JVM or something) and I regularly exceed 16GiB of ram. I offloaded my docker VM to another machine because it was so bad.
For context I regularly have open (what I consider to be standard apps):
Same here, i am running intellij IDEA, 3 vscode instances concurrently - all autobuilding on change. I also have 2 ios simulators and an android simulator running, as well as chrome, safari (with MANY tabs) and Firefox. Mail, slack, QBServe, Datagrip and affinity designer also all running. The machine is fully responsive, flicking between apps, running both the internal display and an external 43" 4k monitor.
The ONLY time I run out of memory (or leave the "green" memory pressure) is when i use Figma - but that is a known memory hog. And it does crash, it just warns me that im running out of memory and asks to close something.
This is all on an 8GB machine. Previously I had 16GB intel macbook pro (2015) and it simply wasn't possible to run this quantity of applications.
Obviously (as i have said, and keep getting downvoted for), if you are using VMs or you have a specific memory requirement, then you need to account for that.
However in 2021 I am not interested in a computer with less than 32GB ram. Sure, I could work around the limitations and close not in use programs/tabs to avoid going OOM, or using swap, but life is short and memory is cheap. I'd rather not have to worry about it.