If the phrase "Java app" is in your vocabulary this laptop probably isn't for you. This is for the first-time laptop buyer or the basic needs non-enthusiast user or for a child. And honestly, I think Apple might make a killing here. Basic laptop users want to do no research and they want it to just work, and accessible marketing is Apple's core competency.
Depends on the course I think.
But 8Gb is more than enough to run a Java 'Hello World' GUI app or even something heavier. Students don't - as a rule - get to deal with millions of lines codebases.
Just tried out a simple Java Swing popup and it uses 6Mb of heap so that's allright then ;). (on my machine it will reserve 160Mb of memory for thread stacks, code caches, buffers and GC but that won't be a problem unless you use it)
In the 90s I also thought that was wasteful (my first PC had 32Mb). Nowadays with Electron apps taking up gigabytes it doesn't seem that bad anymore.
