Mag World is an effort to develop an intuitive sense of scale-–not just “bigger” or “smaller”, but how much bigger, and how much smaller. And what are each of the levels of scale like?
I have 11 and a 15 year old Thinkpads, both have 16G memory. Both works great and have plenty of years left in them. But I do not have Microsoft Windows on them.
I believe the 11 year old device works as fast if not faster than any Windows 11 system on modern equipment.
(Some are still being sold with only 8 GiB, too, but I think those may be becoming outliers, or purposefully intended for only light use such as the MacBook Neo.)
Of course it also depends on what you use the computer for. For browsing and streaming 16 GiB is absolutely fine. For other uses 16 GiB can easily become constrained, though, even for tasks that a laptop can otherwise handle fine. And if the RAM in a recent laptop is non-upgradable, will it still be good 5 or 10 years from now?
My 13 year old laptop, that I still use from time to time (mostly because it is the only windows machine I have) has 8 GB of ram (which truly is barely usable today), it is on the slimmer side and my requirement to have at least 8 GB of ram at that time really limited my options (and there was no option to get more than that in a slim form factor). The norm (not even entry level) was 4 GB and there were tons of options with even less than that.