I’d cut Apple some slack on the RAM front because Intel was supposed to ship DDR4LP a couple years ago, after years of being fairly good about hitting targets.
The larger point about recognizing that we’ve plateaued on size & weight benefits is important, though. As long as we need keyboards there’s not much point in taking on all of the other compromises.
Ironically, it was Steve Jobs' pep talk to new executives that went something like: "The difference between a janitor and executive is that VPs are not allowed to have excuses". So trying to share the blame with Intel is just silly.
Every single Apple's competitor delivers laptops with 32+ GB of RAM, and MacBooks are stuck at 16GB and there's no one to blame for it but Apple.
> Every single Apple's competitor delivers laptops with 32+ GB of RAM, and MacBooks are stuck at 16GB and there's no one to blame for it but Apple.
This is only partially correct: those are separate models which are bigger and have worse power and heat characteristics. Every laptop which is similar to Apple's shares the 16GB limit for the same reason; the difference is that Apple has decided not to offer that second tier.
Dell's XPS is comparable in size and performance to the MBP and has 32Gb of RAM available. Does the standard DDR4 they use effect battery life? Possibly, but that's a trade off I and others would take for our $4000 laptops not to grind to a halt when we spin up a few docker containers.
The larger point about recognizing that we’ve plateaued on size & weight benefits is important, though. As long as we need keyboards there’s not much point in taking on all of the other compromises.