Question for you all: What does having 32gs open the door to, outside of my current workflow, that having 16gs limits? Stated differently, What could I do with 32gs of memory that I can't do with 16gs?
I mean the simple an slightly annoying answer is "Have more things in RAM".
Up to a point the argument is that you can use more RAM to keep more programs open at a time. I say up to a point because if you have 128GB of RAM and your main usage for that is to keep apps open, I struggle to think how you manage that many open programs, not to mention why.
After that point we need to look at how much RAM an individual app might consume. - There are videos on YouTube like "How many Chrome tabs before we fill 1TB of RAM", and that's a bit of fun but it's not realistic work.
To really get to a point where you're putting 32GB or more to use, you probably need to look at people running virtual machine; For example if you're developing cross platform software you could have a VM ready to run tests on another platform to make sure the code behaves well. Thus, you'd effectively need the memory for two computers.
We could also look to professional photography work with huge images. A camera might take a photo at 30 million pixels. A photographer might compose 7 pictures like that together into a single working file, and add individual layers of effects and such. And in addition to keeping it all in memory there's also the back buffer for undoing and all sorts.
In general, multimedia work can be quite hefty on all system resources, and photographers especially consume RAM more than any other system resource, though they'd probably also generally not go beyond 32 yet, but for some professionals, 16 might give some additional delays 32 wouldn't.
Could also have a workflow where having a RAMDisk could benefit, i.e. using some memory as a disk in Finder (all data would be gone on shutdowns or power drops) to have really fast data read/write for a scratch disk.
Using the iOS Simulator or the Android QEMU emulator with Xcode or Android Studio can also eat up memory, effectively the virtual machine argument again; I mostly do fine with 16GB for programming, but I can certainly see larger codebases where 32 could be beneficial.
And then of course there's processing of large amounts of data for scientific work where you can easily go to TB.
Some heavy users of Excel can even push Gigabytes of RAM on spreadsheets
Music production is also a big one; But again we're more in the professional or heavy prosumer space than the hobbyist. You can plug a guitar or keyboard into GarageBand perfectly fine with 16GB, but if you're running many plugins and effects through thousands of tracks, more memory gives a massive benefit.
With some exceptions RAM is one of those things where if you don't have enough, things slow down tremendously, but once you have enough, adding more doesn't really make a difference. - Now there are features in macOS like RAM caching that means you can still get small benefits from having a bit more than you need, but yeah.
It's often one of those "You know if you need it" things.
(Not actually suggesting you switch - use what ever You prefer - just being cheeky)
