[Reason077]

> "From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong"

Yes and no. I had a M1 MacBook Air for several years, with 8 GB. It's fine if your needs are relatively simple (ie: just a browser, with not too many tabs, and a few other simple apps). But try to run too many apps and it would tend to hit a wall and get very slow.

One thing that did seem to help a lot was to keep the SSD relatively empty: the SSD seems to get slower once it has < 30% or so free space remaining, which would slow the whole system down because memory swapping takes longer)

Last year I upgraded to an M4 Air and got 24GB, which makes a world of difference. But I gave the M1 to my niece and she seems very happy with it!