alt Hacker NewsSmall models are gaining useful reasoning ability and that's a genuinely helpful development, but they'll be heavily limited in world knowledge for the foreseeable future. BTW, the base of the Mac lineup is now once again a 8GB device with a small and low-performance SSD. Many people will tell you that it's broadly comparable (though of course not identical!) to the original base model M1.
For many tasks, including lots of agentic applications, world knowledge is not a "must-have."
To me the Neo is an exception, and doesn't represent the core Mac lineup, which is all at 16GB+ of RAM. If you're developing pro software that would rely on an on-device LLM, you probably wouldn't be targeting the Neo anyway.