[Macha]

Your average consumer is not really using more than 16GiB of RAM, which was also an artificial limit for a while in laptops due to having to choose between LPDDR3 (power efficient, 16GiB limit) or DDR4 (larger capacities allowed, uses more power).

Apple and other manufacturers thus had to keep 8GiB models around so they had something to boost to entice you to the more powerful models.

So a few professional laptops went with DDR4 as LPDDR4 support floundered for years, but most stuck to LPDDR3 as most consumers would notice an extra 30 minutes of battery life on the spec sheet more than RAM they wouldn't actually use.

It's only with Ice Lake (low quantities) and Alder Lake (more available) on the Intel side, M1 on the Apple side, and Ryzen 4000 on the AMD side that it's as cheap (cost and battery life) to have a system capable of more memory.

But plenty of consumers still haven't complained about their 8GiB systems, so they still sell them.

[throwaway290]

Are you saying MBP is a machine for your average consumer? Whom is MBA for, then?

[Macha]

Are you telling me the 13", 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage base MBP is a professional machine? The Macbook Air's target market seems to me to be "I want a Mac, the cheapest Mac because I want to save money, but I'm also willing to pay double what a non-Mac laptop would be" with a secondary market of "I don't care about money, performance or longevity, I just want the lightest mac".

Personally I wouldn't recommend any Mac for the average consumer. If they just need "a computer", there's a number of perfectly servicable Windows machines for €600, while the Macbook Air starts at €1149, and if they want to play video games the Mac isn't really a candidate due to worse software support amongst games than Windows or even Linux at this point. Those are the two most common asks for advice for a computer I get.

If you need a Mac for professional creative use, or want a *nix system for development use, you already know what you want/need, and you're unlikely to be asking me.

[throwaway290]

I'm not asking you indeed. My point is that 8 GB RAM is not a professional machine and is incorrectly labeled. You seem to be restating this point.

MBP is supposed to be professional, but I can't imagine using a 8 GB machine. Even on 16 GB M1 RAM is the bottleneck and I get OOM errors.

[Macha]

Oh yeah, like my original stance was that basically the 8GB MBP exists to have a cheaper entry price, and to have something that's a no brainer upgrade to make users actually looking for a professional machine buy the next one up.

[throwaway290]

The op was "why does MBA have the same as MBP", your response was "consumer does not need more RAM than MBA has". My point is that MBP is not positioned for consumer, because if it is, then whom is MBA positioned for. What's your objection I still can't grasp.

[tragictrash]

This is literally their marketing strategy. The same thing applies to popcorn sizes at the movie theaters. I can't remember what it's called or find a reference to the strategy, hopefully someone smarter than I can provide it.

[ev1]

MBA is for people running Facebook Messenger and Instagram to use in coffeeshops, obviously :)

[throwaway290]

So average consumers.