One thing that is very often overlooked is that in many places in the world you don't have an Apple Store and you can't go to Apple's website and place an order. Instead, you deal with stores who may or may not stock your prefered configuration, and if not, then you depend on whether that particular reseller offers custom configurations for that particular model at the time you want to buy the machine. In my country in the EU, we don't have an Apple Store, but we have Premium Resellers and I can do a custom spec for most Macs, but not for all and not always.
When I was buying my 2020 M1 MBP, I wanted 16GB but couldn't buy it as it wasn't offered at the time. That was during COVID with all the supply chain issues and everything. I would have paid for a 16GB MBP if I could get one, instead I bought the 8GB model.
I suspect that if somebody, for example, the European Union, were to force Apple to drop a model with 8 GB the result would not be a cut in the price of the 16 GB model. It would just be the elimination of the lower price model.
I'm not so sure. I'm not arguing against the economic principles of it, but they have this price point to attract buyers. The reason prices are for example 999 instead of just saying 1.000 is because three digits look better / seem less expensive than four. Apple wants a lower price to stick in the ads and you lose that by simply deleting the base configuration. I don't think it would be so straightforward, instead they'd have to replace that with something, like for instance a 12GB model with the same price tag or just slightly higher. You don't just eliminate the lowest price point like that.
What I don't understand is, if Apple's strategy is to have low RAM configurations just to keep the advertised base price low, with the idea that they will upgrade when purchasing, why don't they stock more high end configurations? Like I always upgrade my Mac and the upgrades I want are NEVER in stock. If Apple was trying to upsell, wouldn't they keep the upsell models on the shelf?
I guess both things are true. Apple is upselling with the base spec, but that only works for people who know what they want to buy and who will consider their RAM needs versus the price (and also, as per the beginning of my post, who know where to go to actually spec the thing up). The base spec is stocked to sell it to people who don't know about these things. People walk into the store not knowing what is on offer, there is some "What kind of car do you drive? A white one." level of understanding going on there and I was surprised how many times I saw people walk into a thousand-euro purchase not knowing anything about the various options on offer so they ask the staff to explain the most basic things. For those customers, you need to have these laptops stocked because it wouldn't be good if you plaster the base price all over the store entrance and then not have that model available.