Isn't the 16 GiB a self-imposed limit by the laptops manufacturers rather than the processors?

Bit of both. Current Intel chips (including these ones) don't support LPDDR4. This is largely because Intel is at this point years behind on their roadmap; phone chips have supported LPDDR4 for a while. They support LPDDR3 and plain (non-low-power) DDR4. So if you want to go over 16GB, you have to use plain DDR4, and power usage, especially suspended power usage, suffers.

Next-gen Intel chips will support LPDDR4, making the whole thing a bit of a non-issue.

If the next gen was close, it would not be an issue. But because it's way behind and one commenter up above stated its 18 months out. So it's an issue.

My dev team is finally abandoning mac books for lenovo laptops with 32 gig.

If you mean mbell's comment, they said it's 18 months late, not 18 months out.

How many months it's out from this point is presumably something only Intel knows. Or maybe not even Intel.

ah, thanks for the correction. so when is it expected, if not in 18 months? I've been waiting for > 16 gig for literally 2+ yaers.

Hopefully soon. I've been waiting for > 16GB for almost 7 years now. :/ (I have a 2011 MBP with 16GB RAM)

It'll be this decade or next, never you worry.

You can buy an HP zbook x2 with i7-8650U and 32Gb today, if you want? And there's even a mobile Xeon laptop from HP that supports 64 Gb...