My mac is 5 years old. I don't think I can comfortably buy a new one right now. It has a 16GB unified RAM. Honestly that would be enough for so many local models that I want to use but can't use. Because RAM usage (even with literally every single user installed app quit/stopped) the RAM usage is very high that I can barely safely get 6-7 GB (I am supposed to get ~10 GB, but it goes up and down real fast!). That's a shame. If only I could install an alternative OS that uses very little amount of RAM :-)
How are you measuring memory usage? top tells me that 45/48GB is "used", but Activity Monitor shows me that 24GB is cached files.
I'd be quite surprised if Mac OS alone needs more than 8GB, given that they sell the Neo with 8GB of RAM today.