I’ve never felt memory limited on my 16gb macbook pro, on which I code, run rust-analyzer (major memory hog), video edit, etc. Most people definitely don’t need 32GB
That was fine when Intel was sitting on their ass, raking in the cash, and nearly everything else (storage, especially external drives, RAM, and even batteries weren't too bad) is upgradeable. This is less great when you can no longer upgrade the component most likely to be the first bottleneck.
Apple pays people to be smarter than me about this, but I still think it's a stupid long-term play to damage one of your biggest selling points
It's nice to see more RAM and Apple was being very stingy about it, but the real-world is totally overblown.
I'm also doing Rust dev, but I can't work with less than ~24GB.
On my headless rackmount dev box that I use for my remote development environment, the box sits around 17GB of memory in use + 8GB of cache. I've got an M3 with 36GB running a few Visual Studios Code (plus browser/Docker/Dropbox) with about 30GB used (8GB of that is cache).
16GB would not have been enough for me for my work at Deno. My current job involves both Rust and Python work and I'd quickly hit the limits of 16GB if I'm running my code while developing it, let alone running a browser or keeping my email client open.
(WebStorm, Rider, Android Studio, Chrome, Discord & Slack), not currently running an Android Emulator, LLM or Docker
At some point it becomes impossible for the OS to keep everything it wants in RAM at the same time, and then you get an orgy of disk thrashing and a potential lock-up.
This is not theoretical. I've had it happen on both Macs and Windows machines, sometimes with just a single main app running.
At best you'll get obvious delays if you switch apps, as pages get dumped to disk while other pages are loaded.
Some RAM is used for file caching and other optional stuff, so not all of the additional usage will translate into swap if RAM is reduced.
MacOS also makes use of RAM compression, which increases the amount of memory pressure that can be sustained before swapping is necessary.
All in all, it's pretty complicated, and the only way to know if a workload will perform acceptably on a machine with less RAM is to try it.
With usb-c/thunderbolt, it is hard to be a pro user AND be interested in the iMac form factor when you can have a mobile device that you can easily dock to a large screen and have the conveniency and comfort of both a laptop and a desktop.
Outside of companies that wants fixed, kensington locked desktops for their employees, I don't see who would choose an imac over anything else.
Whenever switching company I went from a 64 gb ram computer to a 16 gb ram. Yes, it worked, but only because I had to adapt to it. But one might not see it if one's never tried.