Try running a couple of test VMs, an IDE with code completion on top of a decent sized code base and you’ll be swapping like crazy even with 16GBs.

While I agree with you that node.js is bad, that's not even my issue. I use Vagrant extensively and I might want to spin up 2 or 3 VMs with 2-3GB of ram to test $thing.

Now, I can do that (3*3 == 9 < 16) but, really, it makes the rest of my system just run terribly.

I would personally pay a $1000 premium over the current MacBook Pro for a version with 64GB of RAM.