Comment by mschuster91

The thing is, the storage on Apple devices is so unbelievably fast, you can get by on 8GB just fine. Even with clogging up hundreds of Chrome tabs. Swap is barely noticeable.

Memory management on Windows devices in contrast is utterly painful. The RAM itself is already slower simply due to physics (can't beat the SoC proximity with anything socketed), storage I/O usually has to cross through a lot of chips (same thing, Apple attaches storage directly to the SoC), and then the storage itself that you find on cheap devices is actually SATA under the hood or bottom of the barrel NVMe, no competition at all to Apple. Oh and the storage and RAM are both adequately cooled on Apple devices, so Apple can drive them much much harder unlike the Windows world where often enough the only thing that gets cooled is the CPU and GPU.

Yes, I do think Apple wants far too much money for RAM and SSD storage upgrades, but it's undeniable that even the more expensive ends pack a lot of punch.