The most gentle response to all of this discussion is to get a new computer store. You mentioned Adobe but I couldn’t find any other software vendor that recommends less than 16+GB of RAM for photo editing.

In the infinite scheme of things the performance of Operating Systems differ very little. Likewise, processor architecture is not currently a large factor. Perhaps the Apple M-1 architecture may prove superior but needs software that takes advantage of it. And by the way doesn’t and won’t utilize RAM differently that is an application issue.

More RAM is the least expense performance improver. Laptops are not the route to performance with photo software. Size is a problem that you have encountered but performance eventually costs higher power consumption. Faster CPU processors, faster RAM and powerful GPUs have a large effect on performance.

One of the quotes I saw was 8GB is fine for browsers and office software but not photo editing. Perhaps the new observation may be “It’s the RAM, stupid!”

Then they should take it in trade for the 16GB model and give you the full selling price as credit on the new machine. May be hard for them to swallow, but in my business if our SE had recommended a particular configuration that turned out to be inadequate, that’s what we (and any reputable computer manufacturer) would have done. Real computer companies are regularly asked to recommend # of cores, memory and I/O for a customer and are expected to stand behind those recommendations.

Also, you’ve just encountered first hand the limitation of Apple’s non-upgradable philosophy on its new machines and their marketing campaigns touting that you would be fine with half the amount of memory that would have been required in PCs.

Despite the fact that Apple advertises that DRAM is used differently, the size of an application is the size of the application and it takes as much DRAM as it takes, regardless how the OS may be optimized , unless it was specifically written differently to be more compact for a particular OS. Having said that and also being unfamiliar with this application, 7GB sounds like a huge amount of memory usage for a single Ap. I would look to see what other aps are running simultaneously and their memory usage. Apple products are so easy to restore, that scrubbing the machine and reloading everything might be a good idea. It’s not unusual for “free” aps to be bundled with others that are already running in the background. One day I noticed my CPU utilization was over 50% for one Ap (which I hadn’t loaded and didn’t recognize) running in the background). Turns out Oracle, in a SW update, had embedded a very difficult Ap to remove that was using my machine to distribute updates to other customers.