You can think what you want, but it should be obvious that the vast majority of people using Photoshop/Lightroom have 16GB of RAM, and in many cases 8GB (32GB is certainly not the norm). You may be working with 1TB images, but that is also not the norm; nor is the 2TB internal solid state drive that one should have to process an image that size. Or are you editing directly on 2TB high speed external solid state drives, which most people also don't have? Your assertion that 16GB of RAM is "barely adequate for most photographers" will certainly come as news to the legions of people who are using 16GB RAM laptops to edit photographs and video.
In a current thread on this forum -
Apple's New Mac Studio Computer - a full-time working professional with a blue chip client list says that he's using a 16GB M1 Mac mini. On an M1 Apple computer, that 16GB of memory is
shared between central processing and graphics; that's why it's called unified memory rather than RAM. The professional photographer posting in that thread is considering a 32GB Mac Studio, not for the memory, but for the ports. Earlier in this thread, Allan Klein says that he's never seen his computer use more than 12GB of RAM while processing still images in Lightroom and video in Premier Pro
at the same time.
When I purchased a computer three years ago, nobody seriously suggested that 32GB of RAM was needed for Photoshop/Lightroom. In 2022, in the course of purchasing a Mac Studio, which isn't available with less than 32GB of memory, I noticed that there are suddenly people claiming that 32GB is needed. In your own case, you actually recommended 64GB of RAM. Now you're recommending 64GB for "future proofing". I've yet to see one of these people identify a concrete problem that the've had with 16GB of RAM. As far as I can tell, it's amateur photographers flush with cash engaging in RAM inflation, and, in the case of the Mac Studio, trying to justify buying the shiny new computer on the block.
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