The problem is that your use case (retina + 16GB) is easily satisfied by the 13" rMBP, and the vast majority of Apple's consumer customers will not need more th

The problem is that your use case (retina + 16GB) is easily satisfied by the 13" rMBP, and the vast majority of Apple's consumer customers will not need more than 8GB of RAM for the next few years. Apple made the design decision to focus on consumer for the Macbook, making 8GB RAM standard across the board. This probably works well as they can optimize the size to fit the exact memory modules required, but leaves a few high-end people like yourself out in the cold. I guess Apple assumes (probably correctly) that if you really need 16GB of RAM, you can afford an rMBP.