I priced out a 14" and chose the minimum options that enable 64gb, and it comes to $4974 before tax with 512gb of storage. 512 to 1TB is that aforementioned $25

I priced out a 14" and chose the minimum options that enable 64gb, and it comes to $4974 before tax with 512gb of storage. 512 to 1TB is that aforementioned $250 extra, or the $750 extra for 2TB, bringing it to nearly six grand before tax. Going from 64gb to 128gb adds an additional $1000. A lot of that price comes from the required upgrade of the base model cpu to the best cpu. I'll give them some credit and say that a very mid-tier upgrade from my 16gb ram intel mbp 13" to the now baseline 18gb 14" wouldn't be excruciatingly expensive and probably a great machine, but ram is being eaten up harder and faster than ever. At minimum, as a non-ML (unemployed) software dev, the 36gb is minimum I'd expect to be practical over the next 5 years