Hmm..
So I would say - ok, we have been at 8 for a long long time. But for most people (not all of us here, obviously) - the OS uses most of that for ... peripheral stuff ... and the rest of it is mostly used up by Chrome. Most things that get run by normal people on a daily basis - they just don't use a lot of RAM.
Office doesn't use a ton. Games require more these days, but it's rare to see one require more than 8G (they do exist, just not common outside of the big AAA releases). Just looking over the "Top Sellers" over at Steam right now - none of them require more than 8G (although a couple are recommending 16).
So. We are probably long past due for an upgrade there.
But.
But.
I'm all for upgrades, so long as they are useful. WTF is Microsoft going to use that RAM for on my PC? My understanding was that most of AI compute was done back in the cloud somewhere - my front end just did basic request processing and passed it on. It doesn't take 16G+ of RAM to do Voice Analysis or biometrics, or other basic AI tasks.
Sure, if you want to run a LLM offline, you need some RAM. But I wouldn't want my average office PC running LLMs - that adds a ton of cost to otherwise commodity PCs that get bought by the hundreds/thousands. Just like I don't need my basic office PC hosting a web server, or SQL database, or any number of other things that are best served being centralized and accessed by slimmer clients.