I have a mac, absolutely love it, hate windows and yet my next laptop will be windows because of that.
You don't realize how much it matters until it does, and then it changes everything. Always having to carry an external drive just because my email takes 150gb of the 256gb MacBook storage is even more annoying than windows puting candy crush saga on the start menu.
The total size isn't so surprising to me, many have large archives, but why would it all be local to your main or external drive instead of just loaded on-demand over IMAP or whatever?
Unfortunately with DDR5L speeds, they need to be embedded to keep signal stability, so you need to find at least a 16GB laptop which is STILL pretty gatekept with a higher chip like i7 so you have to pay $300 more for that extra 8GB, pulling a page from Apple. Luckily m.2 is still a thing and 99% of Windows still use it.
If you hate Windows, you should really consider Linux instead. Gnome is quite enjoyable and can be relatively easily made to behave similarly to the macos DE. Fedora works pretty well OOTB on most hardware. If you buy as Frame.work[1] laptop, Fedora will install and run very well.
[1] Dislaimer: I'm a community investor in Framework but have three of them because I like them a lot.
Why do you need 150G of mail locally? and why did you think it sufficient to bug the absolute minimum spec available?
I’m afraid though that the core premise of your comment is flawed. Storage and especially memory are increasingly soldered to thin and lights. Even professional grade laptops such as the Thinkpad X1 Carbon have soldered memory.
You don't realize how much it matters until it does, and then it changes everything. Always having to carry an external drive just because my email takes 150gb of the 256gb MacBook storage is even more annoying than windows puting candy crush saga on the start menu.