@der_jeff Have to blame the previous owner for that. You may have heard of them, a company that's fairly big in tech these days. Apple.
A reseller has had a deal with them for about ten years: they buy 2-yr-old laptops that Apple execs have finished using & sell them on to the public. They're all max spec, this 11.6 inch 2014 MBA has 512 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM & a 1.7 GHz Haswell Core i7.