alt Hacker NewsBack in 2000 I got the M1 Air with 8G of RAM (needed the cheapest Mac to test some arm64 stuff) and that laptop served me very well. I never felt RAM-limited. I was always expecting to run out of memory during a big Bazel build or something, but never did.
It isn't the most powerful computer in the world but I never ran into any problems... so it's probably an OK compromise for most people, especially in the world where RAM is scarce because of AI datacenter buildouts.
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I have a 2008 iMac with (I think) 16Gb of RAM which is used for just Firefox. I've been meaning to upgrade it to Linux but that generation didn't boot from USB, need to burn a CD.
All our intel MacBooks now run Linux just fine. The oldest is 2012, with 4Gb but most are 8 or 16Gb.
I would always recommend more RAM first over a faster processor; back when I would build desktop machines for Windows, I would use the second best CPU and put the savings into RAM.
You mean 2020, not 2000
The M1 Air would have blown people’s minds in 2000. 128MB of RAM was luxurious at the time for a laptop. In 2003 I borrowed and bought several sticks for a presentation (senior thesis on 3D presentation software), and got to 1GB in my desktop and felt like I’d broken some law of physics.
Shortly after I had a TiBook (PowerBook G4) that was _only_ 1-inch thick! Compared to 1.75” Dells my coworkers had, it seemed like the future. DVD drive, modem, Ethernet, full sized DVI port, FireWire, WiFi, Bluetooth, optical audio in and out, gigantic display with a bezel that was unrivaled for years, even among Macs. What a beast!
(I know you meant 2020, but it’s fun to think about the air in 2000).