Is M2 16/512 enough for web dev who does photo editing at the same time

[MattRaven88]

My wife is a web dev and her current Windows laptop has 32gb ram and at max usage, lightroom, millions of tabs, and visual code studio, it says she's using 20gb ram. I know Apple silicon is supposed to be more efficient with ram but would 16/512 M2 just run really slowly for her? We're looking at getting a second hand M2 in Japan next month as I have a 8/512 M2 Air which i use for copywriting and its great. Plus we need to save space as we're digital nomads so Air's are ideal. All advice appreciated.

 

[smirking]

UPDATE: I neglected to mention that I work on a 16GB M1 Pro MBP.

I don't use Lightroom, but I'm a WebDev and Photographer myself and my 16GB M1 Pro MBP works perfectly. I typically have a large PHPStorm project, a few virtual servers, and Capture One Pro open all the time running side by side. There are some occasions when I might hit a resource constraint, but no obvious issues.

Lightroom might fare differently though. Go up to a 32GB if you want some security, but a 16GB Silicon Mac will probably be good enough... unless she's doing work on huge large format panos.