Even if they are right, no one cares and it will always be a bad look.

I’m fine with this.

I mean, I have no interest in an 8GB machine, but it’s also fair to say that there definitely are people who are fine with it, and who would like to save the money. Say you’ve got four kids and you’re buying them all laptops – I dunno if that’s the thing parents do these days, or whether kids typically just get by on smartphones or what. And sometimes they get broken or whatnot, and you’re paying for the other expenses associated with those kids. That money adds up.

Apple runs a walled garden, unless things have changed in recent years while I wasn’t watching. They tried opening up to third-party hardware vendors back around 2000 with some third-party PowerPC vendors, found that too many users were buying that hardware instead of theirs, and killed off the clone vendors. That means that if you want to use MacOS, you have to buy Apple hardware. And so there’s good reason to have a broad range of offerings from Apple, even some that are higher-end or lower-end than the typical user might want, because Apple is the only option that MacOS users have. If I want to run Linux on a machine with 2GB of memory, I can do it, and if I want to run Linux on a machine with 256GB GB of memory, I can do it. MacOS users need to have an offering from Apple to do that.

Plus, I assume that these are running some form of solid-state storage, which makes hitting virtual memory a lot less painful than was the case in the past.