As other's are saying, it depends what you need. However, I'll give you a financial argument: a laptop with more memory will last you longer (unless it breaks

As other's are saying, it depends what you need. However, I'll give you a financial argument: a laptop with more memory will last you longer (unless it breaks down). It's more expensive upfront but if you then are able to use if for 5-10 years, it was a good investment. So, buy what you can afford now rather than the cheapest one. It might hurt a little but you'll save some cash longer term. CPU speeds have stopped massively improving years ago. So, any CPU from the last ten years with 16 or 32 GB will run most workloads reasonably well. And a lot of things of course aren't really that CPU intensive to begin with. But if you run out of memory, things will start swapping and get tedious. That will happen a lot with 8GB and a lot less with 64GB. 8GB was already on the small side ten years ago. 4GB was definitely claustrophobic at the time. I upgraded my then mac with to 16GB (from 8GB) and I used it for another five years until it finally broke down. I have a new M1 currently with 16GB and a samsung galaxy book running Linux also with 16GB (cost me about 700euros a bit over a year ago, good value IMHO).