That was my discovery. I was about to suck it up and deal with a cement keyboard to upgrade my 2012 Air that i still use as a daily dev machine. Instead i am presented with:

  - no 32GB on 13" models
  - no touchbar-less 15" models

At what point did developers at apple cave to this quality of life hit. I am seriously curious about this. How do people code without literal Esc and F-Keys?

You and parent are right - the performance isn't like miles apart or anything. Best comparison I can find is here[1] (it's not testing low-power specifically though) showing basically that there's a small but measurable performance benefit from DDR4.

I'd suspect the biggest difference is the base clock boost that DDR4 provides (2400 vs 2133).

My point was simply that the number of differences between the two seem to be widening. It feels more like the 15" is the real Macbook Pro, the 13" is the standard-Macbook, and the 12" is the Macbook Air.

Apple's naming choices in the laptop lineup have been strange for years - but the widening gap between the Pro linup is interesting.

[1] - https://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-670...