I'm having a hard time seeing photo editing requiring 16GB of ram. For video editing it seems to me most use cases aren't going to have more than a few GB worth

I'm having a hard time seeing photo editing requiring 16GB of ram. For video editing it seems to me most use cases aren't going to have more than a few GB worth of frames at a time required in memory, but I can see the potential for 16GB being a bottleneck in certain applications. For "actual [computational] work", use a different computer suited for the purpose, not toys marketed to graphics professionals and hipsters.