I bought my 2020 M1 mini with 16GB of memory. I've been keeping an eye on memory pressure all long (iStat Menus), turns out 16GB was a waste of money.
That's like "I wasted my money on the more expensive boots because they're not leaking yet!"
...or if you did indeed waste your money, that's Apple's pricing policy
working as intended. Which is really what people are complaining about.
If memory pressure stays green that just means that you have
enough RAM. Once it goes into yellow or orange, that suggests that the RAM is starting to get full, the system is using swap more frequently and you might benefit from
more. You could try messing around and creating an 8GB RAM disk or something to see what the memory pressure would be on an 8GB machine. Otherwise, maybe you'd have been fine with 8GB, maybe not.
That's the problem, it's almost impossible for most people to predict whether they're going to need more RAM or not. If the RAM were upgradeable after purchase you could start off low and expand if necessary. If the BTO upgrade cost a more realistic $50-per-8GB rather than $200-per-8GB then you wouldn't have to agonize about over-speccing a bit. There's no justification for such a modest amount of extra ram RAM to account for 25% of the price of the machine.
Going to 16GB as the base spec is a great help, but they stuck on 8GB for so long that its already behind the curve. I suspect that the effect on Apple's costs is insignificant once you take into account economies of scale (no need to buy in 4GB chips) and logistics (with the M4s added capacity they'd have needed to make
4 different flavours of M4 packages - 8 as well as 16, 24 and 32GB - rather than the previous 3 - 8, 16, 24)
If I were to buy the base M4 Mini, I would still have a problem with the 256GB SSD. This means (to me) that I would have to move the Home Folder and most apps to an external SSD, which is a lot cheaper to buy the optional Apple RAM and SSD.
Sure, that's the solution for the moment - but it shouldn't be necessary. Some people will always need external storage for their documents/projects/media library/backup, and can choose between USB, Thunderbolt, NAS or cloud storage as appropriate - but the
internal SSD with the fastest access should be big enough for the OS, temporary storage, applications & their libraries
and plenty of free space to keep the SSD running smoothly, even under frequent writing from swap and temporary storage. 256GB is too small for that once you install a couple of pro apps or games... and using external storage to install apps pretty much rules out wireless NAS or cloud storage which would avoid needing a second box tethered by a cable.
As with 16GB RAM, 512GB or 1TB
is simply not something that should cost hundreds of bucks extra in 2024.