There is a place for anything. My wife uses for work an older 4GB Surface Pro; my father is also using a laptop with 4 GB of RAM. I am using the company provide

There is a place for anything. My wife uses for work an older 4GB Surface Pro; my father is also using a laptop with 4 GB of RAM. I am using the company provided laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a desktop with 128GB of RAM (>75% used most of the time); my daughter is using a laptop with 16 GB of RAM and my son a desktop with 32 GB of RAM. All run Windows 10. All of us have different needs and usage patterns, me being the extreme where the laptop is a portable email and light work tool and the desktop is the workhorse, my daughter using the laptop at school and my son only at home, so that's why he has a desktop. I am not making a case for 4GB of RAM, but 8GB is a enough for many people that don't use crappy apps or don't have special needs. Oh, and my main development VM has 8GB of RAM; I can give it more, but I never used more than 5 or 6. Expensive laptops is a very relative term and judging the value of an expensive laptop on the amount of RAM is dodgy; I expect build quality, great lifetime (my wife's Surface Pro 3 has 6-7 years of flawless operation), low weight, good screen - I don't have RAM in that list. Yes, if you need more RAM you buy a model with more RAM, but if you don't need it then you don't buy it, it is that simple for me - I agree others may see it differently.