Well, I certainly wouldn’t like to offer much advice, when I’ve yet to actually use the system myself. But I have read dozens, upon dozens of articles on the M1 and watched more in-depth videos than I can remember, since it was released.
From what I’ve seen though, it’s incredible just how much performance they are squeezing out of an 8GB system, with little to no performance impact.
Other than personal use, I’ll be using mine for iOS and macOS development and everything related to my journalism - so, writing (well, a BBC micro can handle that
), editing images, including some very large PSDs, PNG, JPEG, Vector and so on, along with video capture and editing in up to 4K.
I’m used to doing these things on an iMac with either 32, or 64GB of RAM. Yet, I’m not in the least bit concerned that my Air will have just 8GB...... Ok, I was definitely a bit concerned. But having seen live demos of video editing 3 4K h.265 along with an additional h.264 stream I’m utterly blown away with its capabilities.
I’ve also watched live demos of large image editing, and again, I’ve come away astounded.
There will be circumstances for which 16GB would undoubtedly be better - otherwise it wouldn’t exist as an option. But I’m 97% certain that I won’t be hitting that limitation.
Obviously, I won’t know for sure until I use it in my everyday workflow. We’re all going to have different experiences in the real world, after all. But if you don’t have particularly demanding needs, I don’t think 8GB will disappoint.