that's not a lot to show for over a decade when you compare that to the relative progress made over previous decades.

I never complained about the speed or battery life of the machine, so your mocking tone is unjustified. Apple's system-on-a-chip M1 architecture has essentially got a lot of its speed/efficiency gains at the expense of limiting RAM options. Today even web browsers running typical web pages consume gigabytes of RAM. So yes, 8GB of RAM for such expensive machines is disappointing for me personally. My work issued laptop has 32GB of RAM.