The usual culprits are virtual machines, large images, video editing. A little less common: big data, large matrices, scientific computing in general.

I never hit 16 GB on my laptop (I even disabled swap) but I got close once with three browsers open (I segregate some web apps into different browsers), a few VMs, some other random application running. It made me think if it was time to buy the extra 16 GB I can fit into my laptop. I just checked, it's about $100.

I see. So this is also part of the cross-cutting problem everybody is mentioning here of Apple not catering to the pros.

For sure, I regularly sit between 12-16GB used (mainly doing web development + docker work, large systems, many services), but frequently will be above that when running a lot inside of VMs.

You are also up against a loosing battle of programs using more RAM to do the same job. You get a better experience now, but you can also expect normal PC usage to result in big RAM usage.

Running one instance of Android Studio, a VM and like 3 chrome tabs is enough to blow 8gb out. We need 16GB min with a 32GB option in pro laptop

On the average work day I've got 4 VMs running at any given time, eating up 6-8 GB of RAM. Put Chrome, my IDE, etc, and it's definitely relevant.

My real complaint here, though, is that besides the GPU and CPU, this is essentially the same specs as my 2013 MBP. I'm not going to drop $3.6k for an incremental upgrade.