These seems quite illogical to me.

If there was no 8GB option, the price of the base model would be higher -- going by the comments, apparently $200 higher.

That would kind of screw over the people who don't open 20 Lightroom tabs or similar workloads, who might want that $200 for something else.

I guess people are imagining that if the 8GB option didn't exist then 16GB could be had for the same price, but that isn't rational. I think all Apple customers would quite like their prices to be lower, of course, but it's not like they are suddenly about to change from a publicly traded for-profit company to a charity organization.