It's just ironic that some people here are really pushing a $599 Mac mini as a valid option, while ignoring tablets. The argument that a Mac mini is a great alternative to a PC in that malware isn't an issue is totally valid, but iPads benefit from that too (and are often less than $599).
As I'm sure you know, there are many articles, threads, et. al. out there about whether 8GB is enough for a Mac. We can link articles back and forth all day, but here's what it comes down to: with only 8GB of RAM, even light use will see the Mac offload to swap much more often than if it had 16GB to work with, and one of the first "scandals" that arose from the M1 Macs was that bytes written to the internal SSD was much, much higher than it should have been, because of that swap usage.
