I'm going to offer an alternative perspective. My mom needed a new computer a few years ago. I just went and bought her a base M2 Macbook Air. It had the 8Gb o

I'm going to offer an alternative perspective. My mom needed a new computer a few years ago. I just went and bought her a base M2 Macbook Air. It had the 8Gb of RAM and 256Gb SSD that everyone complains about, and guess what happened. She loved it. It has been the best computer she ever owned. She doesn't run out of storage because she doesn't really download that much stuff. Everything she does is basically in the browser. The apple photos app is the only real storage risk for her and it manages your library really well, offloading most photos to the cloud and downloading the ones you are working with seamlessly in the background when you work on them, and offloading them when you have ignored them for a while. She streams movies from Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, etc. She doesn't download them. She uses "Canva" for various art projects and a few other little apps like that. She uses Messages heavily. But that's it. She doesn't run into any limitations with the 8Gb Ram and 256Gb storage limitations. Furthermore, I bought it for $899 with a small discount I was able to get, but even the MSRP is only $999. And if you asked her about it today, she would candidly tell you that she loves her computer. Her favorite features are: 1) It is "pretty" (i got her Starlight, which is a gold color) 2) The battery lasts a long time. With her light, only-web use and she rarely uses it for longer than an hour at a time. So the battery lasts her around 2 weeks on a single charge. 3) The screen is really nice 4) It's really lightweight 5) it doesn't make any noise. If you broke into her house and slipped a 16Gb or 32Gb MacBook under her pillow without her noticing, she would never notice any speed difference. She is not hitting any sort of limits. I use my mom as an example, because MOST people (or at least a significant percentage 33%+ I would presume) buying MacBooks are people like my Mom. They need a laptop to make a Google doc or run Office. They need to check their email. They might want to make a digital postcard or something and share a photo of their grandkids. That's what most people do. Meanwhile I buy a MacBook pro with 64Gb of Ram for myself because I need it. Most people that talk about Apple are more like myself. I can't imagine 8Gb of RAM, so we complain about it. But the truth is, we are not most people. Most people are like my mom. They want a high quality computer that looks nice, doesn't make noise, has a long battery, and a nice screen. They use the browser for everything and 8Gb is fine. 256Gb is a bit sketch in my opinion, I'd like to see 512Gb be the default, but looking at my mom's computer she is only using 94Gb right now. So maybe 256Gb is really fine afterall.