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I understand all the criticism and have held off on pre ordering one myself (still shopping for a good Linux laptop with solid battery and resolution+light weig

by kriro 10y ago

I understand all the criticism and have held off on pre ordering one myself (still shopping for a good Linux laptop with solid battery and resolution+light weight) but some of the comments seem a bit ridiculous to me. 16 GB of ram as the bare minimum for web development...come on now. Is there anything obvious I'm missing? That's even enough to run a couple of VMs with full web stacks and some testbrowsers + git and whatever editor you use

sealthedeal 10y ago
I thought the same thing. What kind of "web development" was that user doing? 16GB of ram seems more than enough.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nextos 10y ago
I can see why people prefer more RAM, but I also agree for regular development it might not be needed. Overall, I find it sad Apple is ignoring the professional market. Even if it only brings a small portion of their sales, I think it's bad from a strategic point of view. Developers are those who made their ecosystem so nice. Alienating them is not smart. At the same time, their design decisions have been copied by Lenovo, in a bad way. So ThinkPads are a bit different from what they used to be, and we are left with few good options.
mrweasel 10y ago
I understand the complaint about the memory restriction, when it's coming from video editors, but for developers 16GB is fine. Web development on even 8GB isn't an issue, it's fine. The only issue I have with the new MacBook Pro, from a personal perspective is the touch bar, it seems pretty useless. Mostly my problem is that I can't opt to not get the touch bar on larger models, so I have no means of indicating to Apple that I don't need it, or want it. Let's say it turns out the the touch bar is just a gimmick, and not of any actual use to anyone. Would Apple ever admit to that? I doubt it, so now we're stuck with it. Also perhaps price. The MacBook Pro is somewhat overpriced.
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  Really depends on what you're developing. I'm not a web dev, I'm a back-end dev and data herder. For me, 16GB is doable, but tighter than I'd like. I prefer new computers to be roomy, because of the way data volumes tend to grow over time.
  - lucaspiller 10y ago
    I do frontend web and backend web services. I have 4GB on my Mac, it's tight but it works. As someone else below said, I want something for the future, and I don't think 16GB will last 5 years. Considering you can get a ThinkPad with 64GB ram (P50) for a couple of hundred more than Apple'a base price, they seem very overpriced. Apple's laptops were already thin and light enough for me, I don't see the point in paying more to get less anymore.
- gizmodo59 10y ago
  16GB is not fine in many cases. Just a VM (Say cloudera) and chrome with several tabs is enough to slow things.
  - toasterlovin 10y ago
    Really? I frequently have two user accounts logged in, each with their own VMs running. Along with a dozen open apps each. RAM has never been an issue for me. Like, not once.
nathancahill 10y ago
Ok, but will it be enough in 5 years? My current MBP lasted 5 years. I'm counting on my next one to be around for 5 years as well. It's something I have to think about since I can't upgrade it to 32gb down the road.
- throwawayReply 10y ago
  5 years ago 16GB was fine, 16GB is still fine now. My prediction: In 5 years 16GB will be fine. Why? Because RAM requirements passed from "We need more, it'll speed things up" to "We've got enough" a while back, and there just isn't much you can do with the extra. Once you're no longer space constrained it just ceases to move the needle. I'm not defending Apple here, but generally it's hard to think of something that would require 32GB of ram that doesn't better belong on a server. Once you get to that kind of size you'll probably want ECC or stable uptime or other features you'll get on an actual server rather than a machine you turn on and off several times a day.
  - zaroth 10y ago
    "Who would ever need more than 16KB/MB/GB...." It's not a question of whether 16GB is sufficient. It's a question of whether 16GB is an reasonable maximum for a "Pro" machine. OK, forget about expansion and maybe adding 16GB RAM and a few more TB of flash in a couple years. Clearly that ship has sailed. But 16GB RAM is the absolute minimum I would buy with a new machine today. For that to be the Pro's maximum is wrong.
  - dijit 10y ago
    5 years ago 8GB was the max you could buy for a MBP. 16G wasn't available and was considered overkill. I remember that quite clearly because it was 2011 and I bought my fully maxed out Macbook Pro from apple with 8G of ram and I was looking at 16G upgrade kits on iFixIt a year later. So, no, 16G was not "fine", 16G was considered future proof.
  - Xylakant 10y ago
    I do a lot of puppet development and parts of my development cycle require me to spin up a whole virtualization cluster with a master node and at least one worker node ot test interactions - possibly even starting vms in that cluster. I can certainly start simulating that with docker, but I'd prefer to be as close as possible. This does indeed require substantial RAM, but doesn't require any ECC or stable uptime. I can certainly do that part of my development on some bit of dedicated hardware that sits in the office, but that means I need networking there, which means I can't code on the road etc.
adamors 10y ago
Is this really so hard to comprehend? I'm not buying a 2500€ machine for 12 months. I need future proofing. I already use 10-12GB for work NOW.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
If people are using that much for web dev, it scares me, because I don't know if the websites they're building will be useable on a modest machine.
- adamors 10y ago
  Quick math for you: - Chrome alone eats 2-3GB of RAM - Windows 10 needs at least 6GB allocated in a VM - Slack, Skype, an editor, Firefox etc. take up another 2GB easily. That's just 10-11GB for boring stuff. If you have Photoshop open or sites like Zeplin that consume a lot of RAM you can reach 16GBs easily. No need to be dismissive.
- Ralfp 10y ago
  It shouldn't. This is mostly shaving time from assets pipeline, doing more at single time eg. editing design in graphics software that autoexports it to your frontend where its grabbed and served by locally running instance of an web app you are working on, shorter times needed to recreate your data to initial state, shorter times needed to populate your database with test dataset, shorter times needed for you to run your test suite, etc ect. Stuff thats manageable, but you never can't make fast enough.
- randallsquared 10y ago
  I imagine that most web devs run a version of the server on their local machines, which these days might mean one or more of mariadb, mongodb, couchbase, postgresql, rethinkdb, cassandra, together with redis, rabbitmq, ELK, all the backend services and the API gateway that manages them, consul and/or etcd/kube and/or swarm... It's easier to run the full environment in development than it is to worry about bugs introduced by differences between development and production.
stinkytaco 10y ago
I would recommend a Samsung Ativ Book (940X), which is excellent with Fedora, were it not for an infuriating issue where the trackpad stops working reliably. Closing it a reopening generally solves the issue, but if you use an external mouse, it will probably be fine.
gregmac 10y ago
> 16 GB of ram as the bare minimum for web development Pretty sure you need that much just to resolve the npm dependency tree for many projects these days.
- rufius 10y ago
  Wut? I guess my viewpoint is skewed as a developer. I spend most of my time making the product I work on use as little RAM and CPU as possible. RIP js developer's RAM.
762236 10y ago
Android Studio becomes unbearable once it starts garbage collecting, which invariably happens while typing code and code completion kicks in, yanking you out of the flow. It is the one piece of software I would give 64 GB to last a day without a GC pause. JetBrains should sell hardware that is fast enough to run their software. I've also run into similar pauses on Xcode unfortunately.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  > JetBrains should sell hardware that is fast enough to run their software. Sun tried that. Didn't go well.
sssilver 10y ago
> 16 GB of ram as the bare minimum for web development...come on now. Is there anything obvious I'm missing? You're missing the power price you have to pay for more RAM. This is not an Apple problem. This is a physics problem.

by kriro 10y ago

sealthedeal 10y ago

I thought the same thing. What kind of "web development" was that user doing? 16GB of ram seems more than enough.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nextos 10y ago

I can see why people prefer more RAM, but I also agree for regular development it might not be needed. Overall, I find it sad Apple is ignoring the professional market. Even if it only brings a small portion of their sales, I think it's bad from a strategic point of view. Developers are those who made their ecosystem so nice. Alienating them is not smart. At the same time, their design decisions have been copied by Lenovo, in a bad way. So ThinkPads are a bit different from what they used to be, and we are left with few good options.

mrweasel 10y ago

I understand the complaint about the memory restriction, when it's coming from video editors, but for developers 16GB is fine. Web development on even 8GB isn't an issue, it's fine. The only issue I have with the new MacBook Pro, from a personal perspective is the touch bar, it seems pretty useless. Mostly my problem is that I can't opt to not get the touch bar on larger models, so I have no means of indicating to Apple that I don't need it, or want it. Let's say it turns out the the touch bar is just a gimmick, and not of any actual use to anyone. Would Apple ever admit to that? I doubt it, so now we're stuck with it. Also perhaps price. The MacBook Pro is somewhat overpriced.

bunderbunder 10y ago
Really depends on what you're developing. I'm not a web dev, I'm a back-end dev and data herder. For me, 16GB is doable, but tighter than I'd like. I prefer new computers to be roomy, because of the way data volumes tend to grow over time.
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  I do frontend web and backend web services. I have 4GB on my Mac, it's tight but it works. As someone else below said, I want something for the future, and I don't think 16GB will last 5 years. Considering you can get a ThinkPad with 64GB ram (P50) for a couple of hundred more than Apple'a base price, they seem very overpriced. Apple's laptops were already thin and light enough for me, I don't see the point in paying more to get less anymore.
gizmodo59 10y ago
16GB is not fine in many cases. Just a VM (Say cloudera) and chrome with several tabs is enough to slow things.
- toasterlovin 10y ago
  Really? I frequently have two user accounts logged in, each with their own VMs running. Along with a dozen open apps each. RAM has never been an issue for me. Like, not once.

nathancahill 10y ago

Ok, but will it be enough in 5 years? My current MBP lasted 5 years. I'm counting on my next one to be around for 5 years as well. It's something I have to think about since I can't upgrade it to 32gb down the road.

throwawayReply 10y ago
5 years ago 16GB was fine, 16GB is still fine now. My prediction: In 5 years 16GB will be fine. Why? Because RAM requirements passed from "We need more, it'll speed things up" to "We've got enough" a while back, and there just isn't much you can do with the extra. Once you're no longer space constrained it just ceases to move the needle. I'm not defending Apple here, but generally it's hard to think of something that would require 32GB of ram that doesn't better belong on a server. Once you get to that kind of size you'll probably want ECC or stable uptime or other features you'll get on an actual server rather than a machine you turn on and off several times a day.
- zaroth 10y ago
  "Who would ever need more than 16KB/MB/GB...." It's not a question of whether 16GB is sufficient. It's a question of whether 16GB is an reasonable maximum for a "Pro" machine. OK, forget about expansion and maybe adding 16GB RAM and a few more TB of flash in a couple years. Clearly that ship has sailed. But 16GB RAM is the absolute minimum I would buy with a new machine today. For that to be the Pro's maximum is wrong.
- dijit 10y ago
  5 years ago 8GB was the max you could buy for a MBP. 16G wasn't available and was considered overkill. I remember that quite clearly because it was 2011 and I bought my fully maxed out Macbook Pro from apple with 8G of ram and I was looking at 16G upgrade kits on iFixIt a year later. So, no, 16G was not "fine", 16G was considered future proof.
- Xylakant 10y ago
  I do a lot of puppet development and parts of my development cycle require me to spin up a whole virtualization cluster with a master node and at least one worker node ot test interactions - possibly even starting vms in that cluster. I can certainly start simulating that with docker, but I'd prefer to be as close as possible. This does indeed require substantial RAM, but doesn't require any ECC or stable uptime. I can certainly do that part of my development on some bit of dedicated hardware that sits in the office, but that means I need networking there, which means I can't code on the road etc.

adamors 10y ago

Is this really so hard to comprehend? I'm not buying a 2500€ machine for 12 months. I need future proofing. I already use 10-12GB for work NOW.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

If people are using that much for web dev, it scares me, because I don't know if the websites they're building will be useable on a modest machine.

adamors 10y ago
Quick math for you: - Chrome alone eats 2-3GB of RAM - Windows 10 needs at least 6GB allocated in a VM - Slack, Skype, an editor, Firefox etc. take up another 2GB easily. That's just 10-11GB for boring stuff. If you have Photoshop open or sites like Zeplin that consume a lot of RAM you can reach 16GBs easily. No need to be dismissive.
Ralfp 10y ago
It shouldn't. This is mostly shaving time from assets pipeline, doing more at single time eg. editing design in graphics software that autoexports it to your frontend where its grabbed and served by locally running instance of an web app you are working on, shorter times needed to recreate your data to initial state, shorter times needed to populate your database with test dataset, shorter times needed for you to run your test suite, etc ect. Stuff thats manageable, but you never can't make fast enough.
randallsquared 10y ago
I imagine that most web devs run a version of the server on their local machines, which these days might mean one or more of mariadb, mongodb, couchbase, postgresql, rethinkdb, cassandra, together with redis, rabbitmq, ELK, all the backend services and the API gateway that manages them, consul and/or etcd/kube and/or swarm... It's easier to run the full environment in development than it is to worry about bugs introduced by differences between development and production.

stinkytaco 10y ago

I would recommend a Samsung Ativ Book (940X), which is excellent with Fedora, were it not for an infuriating issue where the trackpad stops working reliably. Closing it a reopening generally solves the issue, but if you use an external mouse, it will probably be fine.

gregmac 10y ago

> 16 GB of ram as the bare minimum for web development Pretty sure you need that much just to resolve the npm dependency tree for many projects these days.

rufius 10y ago
Wut? I guess my viewpoint is skewed as a developer. I spend most of my time making the product I work on use as little RAM and CPU as possible. RIP js developer's RAM.

762236 10y ago

Android Studio becomes unbearable once it starts garbage collecting, which invariably happens while typing code and code completion kicks in, yanking you out of the flow. It is the one piece of software I would give 64 GB to last a day without a GC pause. JetBrains should sell hardware that is fast enough to run their software. I've also run into similar pauses on Xcode unfortunately.

rbanffy 10y ago
> JetBrains should sell hardware that is fast enough to run their software. Sun tried that. Didn't go well.

sssilver 10y ago

> 16 GB of ram as the bare minimum for web development...come on now. Is there anything obvious I'm missing? You're missing the power price you have to pay for more RAM. This is not an Apple problem. This is a physics problem.