And it uses that much more bandwidth. 4K webcams are just dumb. Totally unnecessary and counterproductive since most broadband is slower for uploading than downloading.

So order 16GB. Problem solved.

I was working for a company a few years ago doing full stack development (React UI, Java based micro services, SQL database). I typically had 4 Docker containers running (3 servlet containers and a PostgreSQL server) and 3 instances of IntelliJ in debug mode for the micro services and WebPack development server to run/debug the UI. I was running Windows 10 on a HP business-class machine: one generation from latest i7 processor, 16GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, and was often memory constrained where I had to close something down. The Product Manager wanted more day-to-day testing done on Safari, and so they asked for a volunteer to switch to a Mac for development. I would much rather use Mac OS than Windows, so I jumped at the chance. I was heartbroken when the new machine arrived: base MacBook Pro 13": 2 generation old i5 processor, 8GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, and told my team lead it was going to be ugly, and it probably was going to really slow me down but I would give it a try. I was using exactly the same development tools as the Windows team, except substituting Safari for Chrome as my development browser. To my amazement, I was able to work exactly as I had been on the HP box with all the open processes, and performance was at least as good as it was under Windows. So Reddit has been snickering about Apple’s claim that 8GB is as good as 16GB for the past couple of days, but in my experience Mac OS is much better at memory management than Windows. I wouldn’t go as far as saying 8 GB = 16GB in all use cases, but it seemed to be in mine.

I got my M3 Pro yesterday. Gotta hand it to Apple with their Migration Assistant: I sat the new machine next to my M1 MBP, started the migration, and after 3-4 hours it coped everything (about 880GB) except for the authorization of the credit cards in my Apple Wallet. Logging into the new machine this morning, it was just like I left the old one: browser tabs still open, all the Terminal windows in their correct directories, etc. They really could not make it any easier to switch to a new machine.