> 1) You can still buy a new 2015 MBP with a processer nearly as fast as the 2017 models and 16gb ram
Speed is not everything. The 2015's Skylake can't do HEVC (and VP9 but I have no idea who outside YT might use VP9).
> 2) Laptops with more memory don’t have the same transfer speed or power efficiency.
Everything is faster and more power efficient than using swap - in fact, my MBP with nothing more than Chrome, Outlook, Slack and Excel open has 13.12GB of RAM occupied and 16.5GB swap usage. Not to mention all that swapping drastically reduces the life of the flash memory - which is, to make stuff worse, soldered on the motherboard on the 2017 model. Yet another thing that Apple forces down the throats of its users, no way to get data recovery on these when your mobo gets fried.
Both YouTube and Netflix use VP9. As videos from these two services constitute the vast majority of my video watching, Apple devices are an exceedingly bad choice for battery life and performance if I want a VP9 encode or for video quality and bandwidth usage if I stick to an Apple-approved codec.
Speed is not everything. The 2015's Skylake can't do HEVC (and VP9 but I have no idea who outside YT might use VP9).
> 2) Laptops with more memory don’t have the same transfer speed or power efficiency.
Everything is faster and more power efficient than using swap - in fact, my MBP with nothing more than Chrome, Outlook, Slack and Excel open has 13.12GB of RAM occupied and 16.5GB swap usage. Not to mention all that swapping drastically reduces the life of the flash memory - which is, to make stuff worse, soldered on the motherboard on the 2017 model. Yet another thing that Apple forces down the throats of its users, no way to get data recovery on these when your mobo gets fried.