I agree. Especially for programmers, I understand needing beefy specs if you have super heavy compiler workloads and/or do heavy GPU work, but how many people is that really? And wouldn't most such people prefer a desktop anyway?

I am a software engineer and my personal machine is the supposedly ultra-wimpy 12" Macbook, and I love it. It legitimately handles every workload I throw at it (including running multiple VMs) and it's so tiny and portable that it's basically a zero-cost proposition to take it everywhere I go, which is amazing. To me, sacrificing convenience for spec-sheet wankery is just silly, but I've met a lot of people who I think would probably disagree with that, like it's some badge of nerd honor to be walking around with a 5 lb brick of RAM that's rarely if ever going to be more than 1/4 utilized.

I am not super stoked about the touch bar business, though. It seems like a solution in search of a problem; the main draw of Apple laptops for me has been their refined execution and lack of gimmickry. I am glad that my machine dodged that bullet.

Well yes in terms of specs and performance, but you can't take that with you. If you do GPU work you'll really want a discrete GPU with a complete featureset. Some people were complaining about the new MacBooks having AMD cards, I presume because most DL frameworks perform best with (or in some sad cases only support) CUDA libraries.

The teeth-gnashing and stream of navel gazing blog posts that you see on many tech forums on the topic is 98% nonsense.

If you are in fact the mythical creature who needs a 32/64GB workstation on your laptop, you have a problem unless you make some very significant sacrifices. You need a "mobile workstation" from Dell/Lenovo/HP, and you're essentially giving up major aspects of portability to do so.

Because that's how long these machines have to last, realistically. And I'll bet that 16GB in three years will feel pretty cramped for a lot of higher end users.