I bought a mac mini with 32 GB in 2018 and I managed to OOM it a few times and oh boy was it ugly - already regret not taking the 64gb option at the time.
I do most of my data engineering in the cloud, or on a 32 GB Linux system - so I don't need a lot of memory for data sets - just something that will run the applications. I would never recommend that the average user buy more than 8GB of memory with a Mac Laptop.
Meanwhile - my 16 GB Linux Laptop (Ubuntu 20.04 Dell XPS 15 7590) routinely comes to a crashing halt if I try and do something crazy like open up 40 Browser Tabs and then start zoom. It's horrible. I've spent hours trying to see what's going on with top to no avail. If only it was a graceful degradation - but open a single browser tab on the wrong site once you are close to the edge- game over. Usually faster to just restart the system than wait for whatever swapping is happening to conclude.
I've rarely had this happen to me on the MacBook Air.
Different operating systems/hardware really seem to make a difference using pretty much the same workload, speaking from personal experience of someone who splits their time 50/50 on Linux and macOS.
(Not saying it is ergonomic or better than the mac.)
It's usually gcc that eats up all my memory, turns out with template metaprogramming a single gcc instance can eat 3GB of RAM, and I usually build with 6 parallel instances. Thankfully I've got plentiful SSD-backed swap so I don't feel the system becoming too unresponsive.
It decreases swapping to disk by using a compressed ramdisk for logs, unused stuff etc. The zram-config from universe may be broken (https://github.com/StuartIanNaylor/zram-swap-config)
Only thing it’ll probably die on is running VMs which I’m not going to do any more. They can live in DigitalOcean.
One liner review: this is the only computer I’ve ever had which can keep up with me.
People have been saying this for years and my personal 2011 17", 2016 13" and 2018 Mini have never had more than 8GB. Never noticed an issue.
Unless you know you're going to be running memory intensive workloads, I see no need.
It was a very different situation even only a few years ago.
So with wear levelling you should see the SSD last well beyond the usable lifespan of the device.
How?