I recently purchased a used MacBook Pro with 16 GB of memory. On firing it up for the first time, I realized how memory starved my current and soon to be sold MacBook Air was with only 4GB of memory. It is basically impossible to be at all productive with a machine that is so memory contristricted. Running a few tabs in two browsers can basically eat it all up. And then just firing up a development environment like PHPStorm puts it over the top where it spending most of its time swapping memory.

And its not just on my laptop that it has a problem. If you run servers on AWS or any of the other platforms, the updating of software that uses JavaScript requires that you get a bigger machine than you need to run your application. So I require 1 GB of memory to build out the environment but could easily run in 1/2 of that footprint. The lack of any focus on performance is a bit troubling.