[Obsidian Dragon]

I personally would get as much RAM as I can afford, but that is just for my preference. I think the use of RAM to make sample based audio readily available for use in a DAW made sense when spinner hard drives could not provision the sample data fast enough. That was 15-30 years ago. Today's SSD with increased throughput for storage is faster by several magnitudes and should be capable of provisioning sample based data adequately for DAW use. The technology of loading sample data into RAM still exist and continue to work even though it may not really be necessary with most modern systems. On most Macs, the RAM is fixed (soldered onto the logic board) or in the case of M1, M1Pro, and M1Max, the unified RAM is part of the "system on a a chip" architecture. The fact that you can not increase the RAM by adding more later means that consumers need to determine how much they need for the duration of owning the computer at the time of purchasing the computer. If 16GB is sufficient, great. If 32 is enough, go for it. If you need 64 GB, that is available with an M1Max. If you are convinced that you need more, then you'll need to stick with Intel based Macs with expandable memory for now (or use a Windows machine). If I'm not mistaken, most of the large sample based libraries can be configured to use RAM to hold the sample data or allow it to stream from the storage. I suggest if you are one of those using huge RAM in your system to make use of these sample libraries, you may want to try "not" loading them into RAM and allow them to stream from the SSD to see if performance is adequate (I'm willing to think that it is if your storage subsystem is a modern one). What I am suggesting is that we may be misguided into thinking that we must use RAM as the holding place for samples when the SSD is more than adequate for the task. I am open minded and willing to hear your results. If using the SSD in place of RAM for sample data sucks, please share that with us here so we can all make informed choices.