I've told my friend that with an external drive for their excess media plus iCloud, the entry-level MacBook Air has all the speed they need for work, play and school, including importing iPhone pictures, playing music and the SIMS 4 (with Expansion Packs), watching YouTube and Vimeo and finally using Apple programs like iChat, Safari, Mail, Pages, etc.
Their current Mac, an early 2015 MacBook 1.1GHz Dual-Core M, also with 8GB RAM and 250GB SSD, has slowed down over time, so they're afraid that an entry-level MacBook Air M1 won't suit their needs because it will too slow, get too hot and suffer from low-battery life like their current Mac basically, it won't be able to handle all of their day-to-day tasks without more RAM memory.
The Mac my friend gets will be an essential part their life: they go to college full-time and also work as an instructor online, so they need to record Zoom presentations, then use teaching software that requires Intel i5 processing speed or better to do various tasks like securely upload course recordings and download course materials.
I'm asking this question here because I have a wonderful, very dear and amazing friend who simply does not believe me that 8GB RAM will be enough memory for their needs and was actually also considering paying more for a MacBook Pro than the Air because at $1000, this Mac must be too slow for everything that they need to do.
Apple's engineers have leveraged the lessons they learned in designing the miniaturized iPad and applied them to the design of this 2.96-pound computer. The 13.3" MacBook Air Laptop Computer (Early 2015) from Apple is an ultraportable notebook computer with a thin and lightweight design.