I don’t get why Android phones have so much ram.
They often have more ram than my wife’s MacBook and the same or my as my desktop.
How much ram is needed if you’re not gaming or video editing?
In my case, it’s a very occasional picture or video recorded and then just social media apps and web. Do I need to get a phone with 12gb? Or is that just thrown in there for marketing?
You don’t want to max out your ram with running applications, modern operating systems are designed to have several gigabytes of cached stuff in the memory next to your applications. You will be experiencing less than Ideal performance (and in some cases, quite abysmal performance) if your application usage is brushing up against your capacity.
A good rule of thumb is when you’re running your heaviest task, you probably still want at least a quarter of your RAM “free” (free memory is not unused).
If you’re specced at 16GB and the most you’re doing is zoom plus a couple of web pages, then you might be cool for the next couple of years, but I’d not recommend someone buy a new computer with that amount today as software inevitably gets heavier and a new computer shouldn’t only last a few years