The posted article is about a mac version of visual studio. Coincidentally, visual studio only runs in 32 bit mode and hence can only make use of 4 gigs of ram total: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2015/12/29/revisiting...
The article is worth reading. They (correctly) have kept asking "why does VS need more ram than that?" and just optimize the code when the footprint grows bigger.
And I'm genuinely confused by all these people complaining about 16 gigs of ram not being enough. If you have a laptop today with 16 gigs of ram, have a look. Do you actually run out of ram while working? (And if so, what on earth are you running?). It looks like its genuinely hard to fill 16 gigs without chrome or slack running. Look at all the stuff you can fit in that much ram: https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6355
I'm also a big fan of pushing app developers to fix their cruft. Maybe in 2016 its not ok to have apps that suck up as much ram as possible. Maybe app developers shouldn't write super inefficient software just because next year we'll have bigger computers anyway. Maybe if you're writing software (any kind of software) that really does need more than 16 gigs of ram to work effectively you should fix your shitty code instead of demanding everyone buy new computers. The atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM, and played all sorts of cool games. The original X-Box had 64MB of ram and ran Halo. Maybe its not apple's fault that your fancy 3d graphics program can't work properly in 'only' 16 gigabytes of ram. (Especially given there's 2 gigabytes/second of SSD bandwidth available on those new machines. Yummy!)
I love the fact that the new machines are small and portable. The hardware is more than capable of doing everything I need it to do. The only barrier to all day battery life now is crappy software.