Precisely. But if you don't spend even $200 more on the Macbook Pro to get 16GB, you are leaving a bit of the M3's performance on the table due to swapping. So

Precisely. But if you don't spend even $200 more on the Macbook Pro to get 16GB, you are leaving a bit of the M3's performance on the table due to swapping. So, $1799. Or step up to the M3 Pro with 18GB at $1999. And on the Air you could drop that same improvement in. So, $1,299. Which says to me that from $1000 to $2000 there are a variety of ways to get satisfactory performance out of a long-battery M3 Macbook. A corollary is that there is no way to get everything (unlimited multitasking, unthrottled renders, no swapping, no IO constraints) you could want out of a $999 Macbook Air M2/8GB/256GB.