It's not more expensive. They just want to force people who want to use two external monitors to buy a more expensive machine. I say this as a MacFanatic since

It's not more expensive. They just want to force people who want to use two external monitors to buy a more expensive machine. I say this as a MacFanatic since December of 1983, when I saw a closed-door/by-invitation-only demo of a prototype of the original Mac, before the official announcement during the Super Bowl in January of 1984. Five minutes of playing with the only two applications that existed at the time (MacWrite and MacPaint, because the Calculator had not been written yet), and I was convinced that this was the future of all modern computing. I became a Mac owner in the 512k "FatMac" days, and have owned many, many Macs and other Apple devices ever since. I also did a six month contract for Apple Retail Software Engineering, the group that develops and supports all the software used to train and otherwise assist all the employees in all the stores. I have literally been there and done that, for decades. Apple clearly wants to make a distinction here, because otherwise there would be no justification for the "pro" name in "MacBook Pro". If the baseline MacBook could do two external monitors, and cost hundreds of dollars less, then that would sorely hurt their profit margins. Apple makes money by selling you stuff at a significantly higher price for each step up than it actually costs them to make. They make much more profit on the more expensive items, and that's what they want to upsell you on. They've been doing that for decades. I have literally put my money where my mouth is. Thousands and thousands of dollars of it. I know what they're doing and why. And yet, I still buy those more expensive machines, because they're the ones that give me the features I want. But that doesn't mean I have to be happy about what they're doing and all the extra thousands of dollars of money I've had to shell out over the years.