Intel only supports LPDDR3 and DDR4, not the lower power variants of DDR4. Switching from low power uses a lot more battery (idle usage is especially low in LP).

How on earth is that an Intel issue when it was Apple that decided to put even less battery in the thing than the previous model?

Engineering is about finding a balance among opposing constraints; Apple clearly decided that a svelter profile was more important than larger memory sizes for its market.

Don't know why your comment is getting down voted. I think that's the core issue here. Everybody loves that Apple provides high quality hardware, and a neat operating system that is very dev friendly (unixy). It is the choice of sacrificing compatibility for thinner and svelte that pisses some of us off. The best would've been for them to choose DDR4 instead here and add more battery with the same size MBP as earlier versions. I'd have been perfectly happy. Again, that's just me. Looks like there are several others perfectly content with Apple's choices.

The CPUs in question support up to 16 GB of LPDDR3 or 32 GB of DDR4, but do not support LPDDR4. Apple needs the LPDDR* variant to meet their power budget.

So... because the CPU that Apple chose doesn't support >16GB RAM in a way that's convenient for Apple to meet an Apple-imposed specification, it's Intel's problem?

It was a design trade off Apple made. They could sacrifice power efficiency for additional memory (LPDDR4 on the CPU is limited to 16 GB, DDR4 can go up to 32 GB).

I'm pretty confident if Intel's CPU supported more RAM they would of made it a configurable option. Apple still has configurable graphics cards, hard disk sizes and CPU speeds. RAM could of easily been another configuration they could of offered.

Like I said previously, the MacBook Pro is a mobile device so making a trade off for power efficiency makes perfect sense to me.

A largely Apple-customer imposed specification, and one which I, for one, welcome.

Sure, so am I. My Air has 4GB RAM and it's mostly fine - I was hoping to see an upgrade in October, but 8GB would suffice.

My only point was that this really isn't something that Intel does or even should care about, it's the result of Apple's decisions; isn't even necessarily their "problem".

Well, it kinda is, because low-power/long battery life is a reasonable requirement for a laptop, and it is a limitation of the Intel chipset that doesn't allow more than 16GB of low-power memory. Or in other words, how could Apple solve the requirement of low-power/long battery life together with 32GB RAM without Intel?

Also, if low-power, long battery life and low weight are not your requirements, maybe you're not in the market for a laptop?