Has the Time for 32GB of RAM Finally Come?

I teach system admin for a living. When Covid hit and on line classes became the norm we put 500GB ssd and 16GB memory into some Dell 5420 laptops(2011 era). We ran Google Classroom and up to 4 VMs (Win1X/Fedora3X) depending on the topic. Two years later we got modern dell machines with 32GB. After configuring the new machines for the same teaching environment I cannot see a big difference. It will be needed eventually as the demands of the VM guests change over time. For our current load not need yet.

I've just received a new MacBook with 32 GB, partially because that was what was available that did what I needed, but also because the last one lasted 4+ years with 16GB, so I want to be ready.

My current report during a working day say:

    23.38 GB Used
    13.32 GB App Memory
     3.79 GB Wired Memory
     3.95 GB Compressed
     9.68 GB Cached

I say that as someone who has 96GB in their home desktop: it is a sad state of affairs if the average person needs 32GB.

I love seeing my memory actually used while "idle" in Windows 11. 64g of RAM and usually with nothing running it'll be using 12G. This is a good thing, it means less is cached to disk and more is in memory. Please, use my RAM, it's fast. Yes my nvme is fast but ram is faster.

Many of us grew up with the axiom "The fastest way to speed up a computer is to throw more RAM at it".*

Most of us still feel that way. My newish desktop (6 months old) has 32 gig of RAM.

* A corollary would be to replace that slow HDD with yet more RAM again. And what is an SSD but non-volatile RAM?

I like to have thousands of browser tabs open and use virtual machines so the time for 32GB of RAM was about six years ago when I could get fairly-cheap used RAM from ebay.

I have a 2013 MacBook Pro with 16 GB that I use daily.

If you buy a computer today and want to use it nine years from now, I would say yes.