Ultra portable is a definition of form, not function. I want to run the same Qubes on my laptop as I run on my desktop.

This applies to normies too. I mean, it's nice to have (web/g/hot)mail, slack, skype, messenger, element, discord open in the background while surfing the web and I doubt that 16GB will be enough for long.

What if I want to run photoshop and illustrator at the same time? Heaven forbid, they rewrite those power tools to run on electron.

I can run all of those workloads in 16gb of ram without issue without a swap partition or pagefile enabled on my windows partition, the only thing that might struggle is multiple vms, but that isn’t a typical workload, which is why more than 16gb is so rarely seen.

Normies use their phones for that.

Ultra-portable is a feature, not an end goal. Netbooks’ end goal were to be portable and they failed miserably. Most people work on thinkpads, I don’t know about you, but I actually cannot think of a time where my browser, IDE plus a few cached programs don’t exceed 16GB.

There exist other, larger ThinkPads that accommodate user upgradable RAM slots for those that need it. No product can be all things for all people. For example you can get the P1 with 64GB of memory.

As someone who splits his work between a 64GB workstation and a 16GB ultraportable, there are a ton of use cases where 16GB is a perfectly acceptable amount of memory. That said, 32GB of soldered memory is feasible in a ultra-portable these days so it would be nice for Lenovo to get with the times.

Netbooks' endgoal was to be ubercheap, the portability was an afterthought. Even aside from this ThinkPad model, there are plenty of high-end ultrabooks on the market that are not much less portable than the old netbooks.