I think the problem isn't the AI, it's the ridiculously small SSDs you can get on Apple products that make one quibble about 12GB in 2026.
I realized that in 2005(ish) my work station was a fully decked out Dual 2Ghz G5 Powermac that had 8GB of RAM. Yes, that was OBSCENE at the time but it was being used for generating light maps on 3D scenes and we were going to use all the memory we could get and 64bit processors with their memory addressing was a nice to have. But it was 8GB, a size that is still common today.
New laptops and even desktop still come with 8GB some 21 years later, who could have seen that coming? It would be like selling a PC in 2005 with 2MB of RAM.
They are taking the piss.