At least on the mobile dev side, the only two platforms with enough users to matter are Apple and Google. I'm typing on a 64GB machine and Xcode takes 30 minute

At least on the mobile dev side, the only two platforms with enough users to matter are Apple and Google. I'm typing on a 64GB machine and Xcode takes 30 minutes to do a clean compile, and the CPU is pegged at 100% all day as it "indexes" - something it does afresh every build and never manages to finish. You can disable indexing, but then lose a lot of code assist and have to constantly lookup class names and method names instead of having them auto-complete. Android Studio is worse. Sometimes when AS is locked up for one of its ten minute fits I'll kill it and fire it up in power saving mode which is usable, but then there's no code assist, or I'll just open up Sublime and bet on writing my code perfectly enough to compile without mistakes, which is a big time penalty. Popular theory here is that Apple and Google have even more fancy work stations, so they don't write their IDEs to run reasonably on ours. So I'd consider 8GB to completely unusable as a mobile dev or a popular 100-200MB size app. You may be right about editors and compilers, but these are IDEs.