It was Intel's fault that there was no low power memory controller that would work with 32gb for a laptop. There were definitely PC laptops available with 32gb

It was Intel's fault that there was no low power memory controller that would work with 32gb for a laptop. There were definitely PC laptops available with 32gb of ram, but the wired powered consumption doubles from ~6 to ~11/12 watts [1] [2] Reviews of pc laptops at the time (eg: Skylake) with 32/64gb of ram showed some detrimental battery life and it appears in Apple's case it wasn't a tradeoff they were willing to make. To me it seems as though Apple gave up and just put DDR4 into their laptop anyway and also increased the battery W-h from 76Wh in the 2016 model [3] to 83.6Wh in the 2018 [4] thus offsetting some of the battery life issues but there may have been other hardware improvements that reclaimed some battery life. As for the 13 inch MBP, the 2020 model was the first to include LPDDR4X and could allow the bump to go to 32gb but is much more battery constrained at 58Wh. [5] [1] https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/ https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/ [2] https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-memory/how-much-power-does-memory-use https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-memory/how-much... [3] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP749?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP749?locale=en_US [4] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP776?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP776?locale=en_US [5] https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/