huge own-goal on Apple's part. It would be literally impossible for me to use this machine to do my job. I guess I'll have to wait until M2.

Edit: If it wasn't clear, this was not a joke. I develop a relatively heavyweight service on the JVM, and between my IDE, the code I run, and all the gradle build daemon stuff, I regularly use up more than 32GB. Often over 50GB. (Although some swap is tolerable, having the majority of my resident set being swapped at any given time means things get very slow.)

How many Slack instances does your job require?!

16GB hasn't been enough for bigger development stacks for a while.

Especially if you need to spin up some VMs and do compilation there.

You're aware that these are Apple's low-end machines right? They haven't released a high-powered M-series Mac yet.

Is there even a JVM available for darwin-armv8 ?

There is in development, but it recently stopped working due to increased codesigning requirements :(

If there isn’t yet, I’d be shocked if there won’t be one soon.

I don't understand this. Does the chip make up for it? Do I have to wait until the next generation for 32gb?

The RAM is in the chip, so presumably they just want to iterate a bit first before just throwing RAM at it.