yeah, that's a bunch of crap. If you have something that needs lots of RAM (say audio uses where samples and such must be in RAM for latency reasons) swapping

yeah, that's a bunch of crap. If you have something that needs lots of RAM (say audio uses where samples and such must be in RAM for latency reasons) swapping to SSD is NOT a solution. And swapping to SSD is pretty stupid - SSDs have finite write lifetimes. Yeah, you can get data center capable SSDs that are over provisioned and cached to the hilt - but at that point RAM would just be cheaper; and still be faster. I get why Apple is sticking with the tightly coupled RAM on SOC - it's part of the equation that gets them their blistering performance (love my maxed out M1 Max - but kind of nuts 64GB is the most it can have). Some use cases just need more memory - period. I'm still hoping they will have a true desktop chip at some time where RAM could be externalized even if it causes a slight performance hit. The problem is the number of users who truly need that much RAM is so small I doubt they can justify diverging from their existing architecture that severely.