Ehhh Macbook Pros can be configured with up to 128 now, iirc 16 was the max back then. But I guess the baseline hasn't moved as much.

Yes, there has been some movement. But even an 8 fold increase (128/16) over a decade is nothing compared to what we used to see in the past.

Oh, and the new machine has unified RAM. The old machine had a bit of extra RAM in the GPU that I'm not counting here.

As far as I can tell, the new RAM is a lot faster. That counts for something. And presumably also uses less power.