Equipping the machines with a relatively small and non upgradable amount of RAM is probably the easiest way to achieve a sufficient probabiliy that these device

Equipping the machines with a relatively small and non upgradable amount of RAM is probably the easiest way to achieve a sufficient probabiliy that these devices are thrown away by their users after some relatively short period of time that best suits the manufacturer's business model. All enabled by the ever more RAM hungry bloatware that gets pushed to users' computers unless they're painfully selective about the software they install. It's probably also just marketing ... having some ridiculous 4 GB equipped laptop in the store that's only few hundred bucks cheaper than the 8 GB model, makes it way easier for many people to buy the latter. Even if both are stupidly over priced.