You would have to go back to 1990 and the Mac Classic and IIsi to find a machine that shipped with less than 2mb. By 1996, the PCI Powermacs and their derivatives were displacing earlier machines and none of them shipped with so little RAM. The Quadras all shipped with either 4 or 8 megs as standard and Apple sold a lot of them, so to say that Macs were still averaging only 2mb has to be an error. Even in 1996 those older machines with 2mb or less were probably no longer fighting on the front lines and had been relegated to lesser tasks where RAM sizes weren't so important. You probably still had a lot of Quadras and Nubus Powermacs chugging along awaiting their inevitable replacements to arrive, but they probably all would have at least the 8mb RAM recommended by the author of the article for running OpenDoc by then anyway. System releases for 1996 included 7.5.3 and 7.5.5, which were still usable by machines as old as the Mac Plus but those older machines would have required a memory expansion beyond the standard 1mb so a lot of those older compacts and Mac II's probably received a memory boost at some point during the System 7 years in an attempt to stay current making the 2mb figure quoted even less likely. The number of Macs still struggling along under heavy workloads with less than 2mb was probably insignificant by then and Apple could have cut them off from running the latest and greatest apps without much fear.