Web browsing and a bit of office is offered as an example of the lightest imaginable load for someone actually using a computer. My daily needs are much heavier than that.

To offer a line of laptops with 8GB of RAM as the max in 2017 is ridiculous.

Ridiculous to sell them or ridiculous to buy them?

Well. I'm not buying, even though I like the form factor and would accept the other limitations of a 12" MB. And I do think it's ridiculous of Apple to not sell reasonable things I want, because right now it means I'm just sticking with an older laptop and waiting to see if maybe I will find something more to my liking from another brand after 15 years of buying Apple.

I have local "spin-up everything but pint-sized" dev environments for our developers to use and they far surpass 8gb even at the most minimal. I had my card out and was ready to buy the 2017 MBPr if it had 32gb to upgrade from my 2015 MBPr.

Some people do actually need a lot of ram. Specifically, I work on kubernetes and docker and it's a hard requirement. I'm severely limited in my work now and have to continue using aws+gke for full blown dev environments when if I had the proper amount of ram (what I've had on my desktop for years) I could have full blown testing on my laptop which is always plugged into monitors and a keyboard.

Sure, I'm %1 of the market but I will pay the money if it's available. Next year if I can't get an OSX laptop with 32gb of ram I'm going to wind up traveling down other roads.

Sure, which is why I mentioned VMs. But we're talking about the MacBook here, not even the MacBook Pro. Simply put the MB just isn't build for VM workloads. If the RAM weren't the bottleneck, the CPU or available storage space would be.

Besides, I don't buy it. I also use VMs. And the underlying host doesn't really matter, i.e. it doesn't really matter where the VM is run. So I don't quite understand why you'd spend $$$ on a beefy laptop instead of a nice laptop and a server. Maybe if your internet connection is really bad?

The host OS doesn't matter, the ram does greatly matter. The delay in development between having to spin up and down servers for testing on aws/gcp is MASSIVE vs. launching tests via minikube.

Evidently I missed that this was about the Macbook and not pro, I couldn't care less about the Macbook.

I'm on a fully loaded i7 2015 MBPr and need a new one stat, new as in more ram (limited to 16gb).

No I mean you can use the capex savings from "just" an average laptop to buy/build really beefy servers. In a professional setting this scales quite well. At home, you could also use that server as a NAS or gaming rig. That way, you can also upgrade the server separately from the laptop.

It's maybe not for everybody (e.g. photo/video editing), but pretty underrated IMO. Further advantages: RAID, easy to replace the laptop if you lose it or it gets damaged, server are easier to set up with fast, reliable connections (intra or internet) for pulling VM images. Disadvantages: More maintenance/admin?