OR
Its set so low that people then have to choose the more expensive option and thus Apple rakes in more profits.
I'm betting that Apple is fully aware of the whole "future proofing" idea and people more often then not spec up their configurations because, you know, you can't add more memory afterwards.
To be clear, Apple will optimize for profit obviously, the ram pricing is designed for that, however I don't think they would set the base line at 8/16 for the Air/Pro unless it was good enough for the vast majority of their users over the expected life of the machine (which they view to be 4-5 years, and backed up by MacOs update periods).
Generally, the Mac revenue base is so small relative to their other product offering, I doubt they will sell you a deliberately ram starved machine for the masses and risk the reputation/customer hit for having a slow machine before the expected eol.
Now if you use extensive memory apps, electron everything, chrome only etc, then sure pay the premium because that's the use case, but its not for the vast majority of people.
I think the reason RAM upgrades are so contentious here, is folks keep parroting by more ram, without actually considering use cases, and it really is an individual use case. If you expect to keep your laptop beyond software support range, or plan to use heavy ram intensive apps then go for it, but honestly, Computer usage in terms of RAM/CPU usage for day to day tasks have been pretty stable for the last 8-10 years. I just don't see, safari/spotify/Apple News/excel/powerpoint/mail etc needing 32gb in 4-5 years to warrant it.
Note: If you do think that 4-5 years of a laptop is too short of a lifespan for a Mac, I wholeheartedly agree, but let's be honest, once the Mac. is no longer on the OS update list, it's officially eol at that point. I really think, folks should be talking more about this and less about the ram, because this software based deprecation will happen before any RAM bottlenecks occur for most folks.
Note 2: 4 years is too short though! Apple in the sustainability report for 2022 believes the first owner will use the laptop for 4 years and how they measure the product lifecycle for the average Mac User. While the aknowledge is uses for far longer, they care about folks buying their products, not handing it down. (Paragraph 2, Page 85 of the 2022 Sustainability Report)
- To model customer use, we measure the power consumed by a product while it is running in a simulated scenario. Daily usage patterns are specific to each product and are a mixture of actual and modeled customer use data. For the purposes of our assessment, years of use, which are based on first owners, are modeled to be four years for macOS and tvOS devices and three years for iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS devices. Most Apple products last longer and are often passed along, resold, or returned to Apple by the first owner for others to use. More information
on our product energy use is provided in our Product Environmental Reports.
