17 ms·

Why the MacBook Pro Is Limited to 16GB of RAM

257 points by feelix 10y ago

pedalpete 10y ago
I think this article misses the point that it seems many customers are disappointed they can't get more than 16gb and many would be willing to have the trade-off of 50% less battery life. How many people work away from power for more than 5 hours at a single stretch?
- krapht 10y ago
  When I travel with my laptop, I often don't have access to power. Most trips in a car are less than 100 miles. Yet nobody wants to purchase a low range EV. Extended battery life is useful on the occasions you need it.
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    FWIW, a lot of vehicles nowadays have inverters. Both my car and my truck have one, with a standard "plug-in" that you can plug any normal AC device into. I've run my laptop off of my truck's power many times.
- deleted 10y ago
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- arvinsim 10y ago
  I agree. There is a point where thinness and long battery life have diminishing returns.
  - chrischen 10y ago
    Not there yet. Smaller battery capacities also charge faster.
    - thinkmassive 10y ago
      Do they charge faster, or just reach capacity sooner?
      - chrischen 10y ago
        Smaller batteries charge faster by reaching full capacity sooner. So if you jam a large battery into a computer, you'll get more battery life, and most components will not be optimized to be as power efficient. This means charging to X % of battery life will take longer than on a smaller battery but more power efficient machine.
        mthoms 10y ago
        So smaller batteries don't charge quicker(?) You seem to be talking about something completely different (efficiency of components).
        thinkmassive 10y ago
        Capacity, rate of charge, and efficiency are not mutually exclusive. They aren't even really related, based on what you're talking about, which appears to be limited solely to operating efficiency.
- debinguy 10y ago
  This exactly. As a developer applications like docker and vagrant are part of my normal activities. The 16GB limit just does not work in this model. FWIW I was waiting on a laptop upgrade, and after seeing the new lineup from Apple I ordered a Linux laptop with 32GB of memory.
  - bardworx 10y ago
    I have the new MbP w/ 8GB RAM and ram 3 VMs (2 MS build for IE testing and 1 hetoku build-pack) + IDE consuming close to 1GB of ram and compared it to a mid-2014 MbP with 16GB ram with similar performance. Yes the 8GB was a touch slower but I assume with 16GB, it will outperform similar or upgraded systems.
  - corv 10y ago
    A major point of containerization is more efficient resource utilization, memory in particular. How has it come to this?
    - pritambaral 10y ago
      > A major point of containerization is more efficient resource utilization It's actually "more efficient resource utilization per instance". Perhaps, with increased capability comes increased utilization. While before one would run only one or two VMs and try to run all their apps within that, now one can run many containers. ---- That, and shareable memory across host and guests. But I guess that works only if the host and guest run the same kernel. Docker and vagrant on OS X still have to dedicate some RAM to the Linux VM running as docker host, and I don't know how efficient other facets of docker on OS X are; but on Linux, I find containerization's memory usage almost at par with running the apps directly on the host.
      - debinguy 10y ago
        For my situation I work for a large CDN and we have over 15k servers deployed globally and software I write has to run on all of them. This means various OS and kernel versions. This means in a given day I can work on 20+ different containers. The more time I spend spinning up or down containers to save system resources the more angry I get. I also travel a lot for work, so connecting to a cloud based instance from a plane is not possible, plugging into a power outlet in a plane seat is. For me the issue comes down to lack of choice. Previously lack of choice from Apple was not a concern because the choices I would make were inline with what they are offering. This is no longer the case. For those that asked, I am replacing 10 years of using MBP's with a System76 laptop. I don't have it yet so I can't comment but I am excited for the change as have been growing more and more frustrated with Apple.
- userbinator 10y ago
  And furthermore, Intel CPUs can already power down caches to lower power consumption; there are ways to power down unused RAM too: https://lwn.net/Articles/446493/ https://lwn.net/Articles/446493/
- deleted 10y ago
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- bardworx 10y ago
  I think it's a catch-22, if the laptop had 32GB ram but 5hr battery life, folks would complain about it because, for example, it wouldn't last on a flight from East/West coast flight or across the pond. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. This whole MbP experience feels rushed; Like a new tech release. You see the possibilities but it just falls short...
  - bdcravens 10y ago
    I suspect the iPhone approach of new release then a higher performance "S" release of the same device a year later has taken hold in the MacBook division.
    - bardworx 10y ago
      If what you say materializes, the outrage would be real..i mean the "Pro" monicker should already denote higher performance...
      - bdcravens 10y ago
        It's believed there will be 32gb options next year: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/31/macbooks-2017-price-cuts-32gb-ram/ http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/31/macbooks-2017-price-cuts... As for the "Pro" moniker, the new machines are pretty high performance (especially on the video front). That doesn't preclude Apple making some tradeoff and/or leaving some performance on the table.
  - tw04 10y ago
    > it wouldn't last on a flight from East/West coast flight or across the pond. Anyone making that flight on a regular basis is going to have access to a power outlet. Any run-of-the-mill consumer isn't going to be working and will be just fine with a tablet or a book.
    - monksy 10y ago
      At least you're going to figure out which plane+airline tends to have the outlets.
- tinodotim 10y ago
  First I don't think that the people who want (need) more than 16 gb ram would be okay with 50% less battery, at least not the majority, but, if apple would do that, how should they put that device on the market? As a MacBook Pro+-, the one with 32 gb ram but only 50% battery life? Or just a note on the site that this device only gets up to 5 hrs of battery life? In my eyes, the number of people confused and/or pissed of by that would be far higher, than of those who need 32 gb and would be okay with 50% less battery life.
  - Retric 10y ago
    For many people 16GB of ram is just to low to be useful. Forcing them to buy a different machine. 5hour battery life is quite a bit for someone that mostly leaves it plugged in. Worst case just use an external battery if you really cant't find an outlet. Really, it feels like a MacBook not a MacBook Pro. Non power users are going to be happy with 16GB of RAM and get a lot more from extra battery life. PS: And yea, I was one of those people ready to upgrade who kind of scratched their head and decided to skip this release. I was thinking of getting a new Mac Pro, but they did not upgrade that at all even though the current model is over 2 and a half years old.
    - tinodotim 10y ago
      I'm not saying you guys who would go for a 32 gb / 5 hrs battery life version aren't out there and there are probably comparatively quite many on hn. You are, as much as it sucks, probably just not worth the hassle. I just don't see a way to market / communicate it without all that hassle. And something you should never forget. Those 5 hrs are 5 hrs when you buy the device. 1,5 - 2 years later you may end up with 3-3,5 hrs. If those 5 hrs were what you need, you'll already need your first battery replacement. > Non power users are going to be happy with 16GB of RAM That hurts btw. :( Let's agree on "non ram power users", because I would probably consider myself a power user but i'm quite fine with the 16 gb of my MBPr 13 from last year.
      - jpalomaki 10y ago
        It is also 5 hours of video playback or web surfing - not 5 hours of "professional" use.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  Personally, I would've went for the model with 32 GB of RAM. I've got a MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM sitting here on my desk right now, the same spot it's in 95% of the time. Sitting right next to it is a 3.5 year old ThinkPad with 32 GB of RAM.
- fnj 10y ago
  Why promulgate the absurd premise that doubling the RAM would cut the battery life in half? As the article is at pains to say, 16 GB of RAM only consumes 1.49 A, while the CPU is 4.61A, and the display is a very big power hog. I am not in a position to prove it, but I suspect that increasing the RAM from 16 to 32 GB would only cut the battery life by 10%; maybe 15% at the outside.
- lowbloodsugar 10y ago
  Yes. Bottom line I switched to Apple in 2009, but my next laptop wont be an apple. My 2011 MBP has 16GB of RAM FFS. Back to linux for me.
userbinator 10y ago
The Intel chipset being used supports the following kinds of RAM: DDR3 RAM, Low Power DDR3 RAM (LPDDR), and DDR4 RAM. However, LPDDR3 only goes up to 1600 megahertz in speed, but Apple uses 1866Mhz RAM. How is this possible? That is because there yet another RAM standard, known as LPDDR3E (E for enhanced) RAM, that does go up to 1866Mhz. LPDDR4 is not supported by Intel’s CPU, and the DDR4L (another low voltage RAM type) standard is not finished yet. So desktop class memory (plainly spoken DDR4) would be the only option if they wanted to go past 16GB. I don't follow the argument here. Why not just put another 16GB of LPDDR3E on the board?
- rincebrain 10y ago
  AIUI Intel's non-Xeon chipsets won't go over 16GB for DDR3 in most cases.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Does Apple not have enough pull to get that already-existing feature on the chips they're buying? My ivy bridge laptop supports 32GB of DDR3, for what it's worth.
    - rincebrain 10y ago
      I would guess that it would require more than one vendor, even one as large as Apple, to request it aggressively earlier in the dev process for something like that to get done, because of the amounts of QA required. I would further guess that 4 DIMMs, more than just memory controller support, might have required too much precious board space - which, when combined with the power requirements and additional feature enhancement requirements for Intel, might have made it a nonstarter.
    - chx 10y ago
      That's the big question, right there, indeed. This is an artificial limit by Intel, after all. 16GB DIMM DDR3 modules do exist, it's just that Intel put an assert into the firmware to not allow for those.
  - 10y ago
nodesocket 10y ago
Great writeup and detail. However: > Even if it weighed 10 kilos and cost $10k I would still buy it. > (To show you exactly what I mean in terms of personal needs, I recently rendered a music video in HD using a neural net called Style app. Due to the 16GB RAM limitation it took several days and wrote 20.44 Terabytes to my drive in swap space (yes, over 20,000 gigabytes). This would have been an order of magnitude faster on a system with 32GB of RAM). If your rendering video and can afford a $10k computer, then you should be using a Mac Pro. You can get a 2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache and 64GB of memory for around 8.5k.
- lolive 10y ago
  Why not rent a supercomputer on the cloud just for the time of such an experiment? I rent a 16 core/128GB machine at a cloud provider. I use it for heavy database treatments. And my laptop merely became a tmux terminal ever since.
  - nodesocket 10y ago
    I don't know of a cloud provider that rents OS X machines do you? OS X is needed for Final Cut Pro, etc. If you're using Adobe Premier then you could use Microsoft Azure or another cloud provider that supports Windows.
    - hairyhenderson 10y ago
      I doubt video editing would go very smoothly over an RDP connection to a Windows VM in the cloud ;)
      - brazzledazzle 10y ago
        You might be surprised. It wouldn't be ideal but you can do some amazing stuff these days with low enough latency to the data center.
    - disordinary 10y ago
      I'd imagine the latency of running a video editor in the cloud would be a pain, also transferring hundreds of gigabytes of raw video information into the cloud isn't insignificant.
jrcii 10y ago
tldr: https://youtu.be/VEfIYZox1GM?t=8s https://youtu.be/VEfIYZox1GM?t=8s
einarvollset 10y ago
I wish Apple would do a portable computer without a battery. I work on power 99% of the time, and would love e.g. A portable iMac.
- disordinary 10y ago
  Isn't that the mac mini?
  - dabockster 10y ago
    I think he means one with a screen.
  - jacquesc 10y ago
    Apple should actually make a mac mini (again)
    - colejohnson66 10y ago
      You call always get a NUC or whatever they're called and Hackintosh it
    - disordinary 10y ago
      The apple store still has them for sale, they just haven't been upgraded for a couple of years.
  - neohaven 10y ago
    No screen on that.
    - disordinary 10y ago
      Yeah I was being somewhat facetious :) In the pro video camera space the mid range cameras and up are modular, so you have an imaging device which is just a cage with a sensor in it to which you attach storage, lenses, monitors, handles, etc. There must be similar things in the pro laptop space, but it would have to be a hackentosh.
mark-r 10y ago
So the blame is on Intel, not Apple. What does it matter? Apple is a big enough customer of Intel's that their needs should have been accommodated in the chip requirements before they were designed. Either way it makes no difference to the pro customers who need >16GB.
- chrischen 10y ago
  Of course the computer can always be improved. But the point is Apple is improved it the best they can, and certainly better than any competing manufacturer.
  - peonicles 10y ago
    Competing laptop manufacturers have options for more ram.
    - slantyyz 10y ago
      >> Competing laptop manufacturers have options for more ram. And not just for 32GB, many mobile workstation makers offer up to 64GB. You can also get ECC and mobile Xeons too.
mantis369 10y ago
I don't understand the imperatives to make the machine thinner and increase battery life. I would have paid for a 32 or even 64 GB model, but instead I'm going to delay my upgrade for 6-8 months so that I can see if something better than the new MBP comes along. I am of the opinion that a Pro machine does not need to be the thinnest available model.
- chrischen 10y ago
  I have a laptop purely because it's portable. It has to strike the right balance between performance and portability of course. To counter your vocal opposition, I think the new macbook strikes that balance perfectly. Longer battery life, and smaller battery also have benefits. Particularly, a smaller battery can be charged faster. Lower power consumption allows this, and their design decisions such as limiting RAM to 16 was made to achieve this. I run a linux VM and do dev work and even on 8GB is fine. I'm a programmer, and technical guy, but I understand that Apple can still make better computer building decisions than me, or any other nerds who just like to ramp up spec numbers in their custom build PC.
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    8GB is most definitely not fine for anyone who works with media. Considering the number of people who make YouTube videos, memes, SoundCloud tracks, web pages, blog posts, photo uploads and shares, and so on - that's a lot of users. 16GB means they're going to be waiting around the disk to thrash its way through a swap whenever they switch between applications. My iMac has 32GB, and it's a bare minimum for comfortable thrash-free media creation. Remember when media and creation was an Apple thing? That.
    - moyta 10y ago
      Not defending the MBP, but at least they have SSDs that can push 3.1GB/s [1] which is much better than most devices, esp. spinning rust. What Apple has done on the iPhones with their SSD's bus (moving off eMMC to a much faster bus) is also a big performance boosting move, really helps to keep RAM costs down now with the ongoing RAM shortage. [1] - https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/01/2016-macbook-pro-ssd/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/01/2016-macbook-pro-ssd/
jacquesc 10y ago
Come on, are we really blaming the RAM for battery life? Apple chose to put a much smaller battery in this model (75 watt) compared to last year (100 watt) for the purpose of thinness. Find me a single review that laments the thickness and bulkiness of the 2015 model. This is plain and simple industrial design gone amuck. Apple has beautiful hardware, but day to day use is important too (performance, ram, battery). Shaving millimeters and ounces hits the point of diminishing returns, especially when you focus on it to the exclusion of all else.
- ant6n 10y ago
  It's also important to have a bit of travel for the keyboard - I for one don't like tapping on a hard surface to type.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    With the size/weight you saved, you can now carry a much nicer external keyboard if you really care. Personally I think the new keyboard is marginally nicer than the old one: more snap, but less travel. In that case, I’d rather have the thinner one. But then again, in my opinion laptop keyboards have been crap ever since they decided laptops needed to be usable on a lap and couldn’t be 3 inches thick or weigh 10 pounds, sometime in the early 1990s. ;-) (The IBM P70 and 5140, the Macintosh Portable, and the NEC Powermate Portable all had amazing keyboards. Toshiba and Zenith luggables of the same era also had nice enough keyboards. Of course, those machines aren’t exactly “laptops” by any reasonable standard.)
    - Aldo_MX 10y ago
      I like most laptop keyboards, just not the one from the recent macbooks, it feels... exaggeratedly flat
      - jacobolus 10y ago
        Have you tried the new MBP keyboard? It’s substantially different than the one from the 12" Macbook. (You still might not like it; it’s not my favorite either, but it’s definitely an improvement. Hopefully they’ll put the new keyboards on the next iteration of the 12" Macbook.)
meshko 10y ago
I wonder if it would be possible to design a system which would power down some of the memory when not plugged to a power source. I do all my dev on an MBP and would be more or less fine if the memory-intensive things were only available when plugged in. That said, I don't really feel like 16gb limits me in any way except for doing data processing, but that should be happening on the cluster anyways.
- qb45 10y ago
  Possible but hard because: 1. OSs are generally unaware of the details of memory controller configuration, everything is preconfigured by firmware. Apple's vertical integration could help here, but they would probably need help from Intel and it would work only in OSX. 2. It's not the case that if you install four 8GB sticks they will be mapped at 0-8G, 8-16G, etc. and the OS can simply move data from one area to another. For performance, data are striped RAID0-style across all modules. They would have to disable this. 3. I don't know if OSX supports non-identity VM-mapping of kernel memory pages. Linux for example doesn't afaik. Without this it's impossible to move arbitrary kernel objects because you can't find and update all pointers pointing to them.
rileymat2 10y ago
>"However, LPDDR3 only goes up to 1600 megahertz in speed, but Apple uses 1866Mhz RAM. How is this possible? That is because there yet another RAM standard, known as LPDDR3E (E for enhanced) RAM, that does go up to 1866Mhz." Why does apple claim 2133Mhz?
- qb45 10y ago
  Nothing unusual for vendors to certify their RAM for nonstandard speed.
- Chyzwar 10y ago
  Probably because its single channel. They bump voltage and freq to catch up in performance. If they would choose 2x16 and lower freq, voltage resulting performance would be even better with similar power usage. Apple prefer to make more money. They use power of brand to sell overpriced products to clueless crowd. Just go apple store to see audience, most people there do not even know what is RAM. [1] http://nucblog.net/2015/09/dual-channel-vs-single-channel-does-it-matter/ http://nucblog.net/2015/09/dual-channel-vs-single-channel-do...
Spooky23 10y ago
I'm sure they've focus grouped this to death. Everyone wants battery life. It differentiates the product and sells computers. Many people claim to need >16GB, but many of those folks really don't. The folks who need to run VMs (the biggest group, IMO) have workarounds. The folks left are a small number and have alternatives, mostly in the cloud. And they make the Mac Pro to address those folks, although obviously that's a flawed product as well.
- dvtv75 10y ago
  I know quite a few people who require >16GB, and not one of them is a power user nor do they use a VM. What they do is edit large amounts of 4K video in FCP, and they're rather screwed without an actual MacBook Pro. No, there are no cloud options for them, they need the RAM for the video. No, the Mac Pro isn't a viable option for them at that price, nor is it portable. I'm pretty sure they don't give a damn about battery life, either. They do their editing at a desk, and then take the MBP with them. So, for now, they're stuck with old models until there's a better one, or they spend a fair amount of money building a new pipeline and purchasing new software.
  - cSoze 10y ago
    So their old MBPs have 32 GB? Have they just been unable to get anything done these past 40 years? The tech just isn't quite there yet. Next year.
  - comex 10y ago
    What old models? As far as I know there aren't any older MacBooks that support more than 16GB of RAM either. If you're going to compare to desktops, start with the iMac, which is "only" a year old at this point, unlike the Mac Pro which is several :(. The iMac with 5K display starts at $1,800 and is configurable to 32GB RAM, while the MacBook Pro 15" starts at $2,400, and then you probably want an external display too. (That doesn't include the rather high price of actually configuring the iMac for 32GB, but its RAM is [still] user-upgradeable, so better to buy it somewhere else.) Actually, considering that the Mac Pro starts at $3,000, which is not that much more than $2,400, I'm not sure why you think the price puts it out of range... But I definitely understand why you'd want it in a laptop.
rasz_pl 10y ago
The real why is: Because we say so, you will buy it anyway. Its cheaper(no slot) and easier(same production line) to manufacture, and as a bonus forces users to upgrade earlier, not to mention planned obsolescence. Same goes for the SSD. Anybody want to guess how an official Apple data recovery procedure looks like in case of soldered SSD and no cloud backup? I can tell you how - there isnt one, just like with phones.
- deleted 10y ago
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DonHopkins 10y ago
I would prefer a MacBook Pro that was 1" thicker, if only it had better cooling and kernel_task didn't go up to 3700% and freeze up all the time.
kimshibal 10y ago
Touch bar uses more power than ram.
- nicky0 10y ago
  Source?
mianos 10y ago
The credibility of the whole story fell to the floor when he said that sleep mode would kill more batteries because they fail when completely discharged. Apple has had top notch battery protection for years. Totally draining a macbook battery to failure has not been possible for many years.
- willtim 10y ago
  Continued deep discharge does however shorten the life of lithium ion batteries.
  - mianos 10y ago
    I'd really like to see a recent reference on how much. Given the discharge maintaining the batteries is very small and very manageable I highly doubt it is significant over any lesser depth with these lipo batteries manufactured specifically for Apple.
pier25 10y ago
Because of Apple's anorexia, that's why. The 10-15% increase in battery consumption could have been easily solved by having a 10-15% bigger battery.
chx 10y ago
That FAA thing is bullshit, 160 Wh is allowed in hand luggage just not checked in but who checks a three thousand dollar machine in.
pkd 10y ago
The RAM thing is a myth. LinusTechTips, the YouTube channel, even did their own survey about it and the results are here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axZBbgfEZf0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axZBbgfEZf0
- kmike84 10y ago
  Have you read an article? It mentions LinusTechTips and explains what's wrong with their analysis.
lunaru 10y ago
Alright, it's time to make a confession: my "laptop" is actually just a desktop. It's plugged in 90% of the time and the other 10% is composed of 9% of time spent under 2 hours away from the plug and the last 1% is sitting in an airplane pretending I can get work done. Does this sound familiar for anyone else? Give me the 32GB memory and an extra few mm of thickness. I'll just keep it plugged in and not notice the difference.
- xapata 10y ago
  Not familiar to me. I guess I'm an oddball, but I travel for work. A 15-inch screen is annoyingly bulky (and wonderfully luxurious).
- pentae 10y ago
  It’s really the "Macbook Air Pro” imo. Portable and powerful is PERFECT for digital nomads and business travellers. A portable powerhouse that can be thrown in a day bag and taken to cafe’s, coworking spaces, lugged through airports and around new cities. But that’s not the “Pro Market" Apple should have released this iteration as the new Macbook Air or dropped the Air and called it a “Macbook”. Nobody would have complained. Then, released a new lineup of Macbook Pros around the same size as the previous generation and dropped quad core processor in the 13” model. Maybe even squeeze in a discrete GPU like the new GTX 1060 or GTX 1080. Nobody would have complained then.
  - scholia 10y ago
    That's a great summary. Apple could also have brought out a new expandable, upgradeable cheesegrater tower for the many pros who need real power.
    - pentae 10y ago
      As much as that would be appreciated, its no longer Apple. Those users are typically building their own hardware to hackintosh spec instead - better than nothing but still many (myself included) would rather buy such a solution from Apple themselves as you say.
thaw13579 10y ago
Since the latest release, I've found that mentally substituting "Deluxe" for "Pro" helps to clarify Apple's design choices. I just can't see how a machine without USB non-C or display ports can be meant for professionals. I'd gladly pay for a heavier, thicker machine to have those things (and to avoid the dongles).
- lowbloodsugar 10y ago
  Exactly. There's nothing "Pro" about it. Maybe "Executive" or "Limited".
  - josho 10y ago
    Maybe this is all the natural progression towards the final marketing scheme. Eg. The automotive industry. Did you want the DLX, GS, or GX trim package? Obvious extreme sarcasm here. But it seems to be the trend.
- pentae 10y ago
  I think you’ve nailed it - this is a branding problem more than anything else. They have tried merging the Macbook Air and the Pro into one computer and its just pissed off both fanbases. If they had just called these the Macbook 13” and 15” everybody would have been impressed. Three laptops - Macbook 12”, Macbook 13” and Macbook 15” feels more Apple to me than this current frankenstein of brand names “Macbook, Macbook Pro, Macbook Pro w/ Touch Bar”
n1000 10y ago
The weird thing is that Apple did not use all the space they possibly could for the battery. Have a look at the teardowns. There is room to put ca. 5% more battery. Supposedly they wanted to stay below 3 pounds. That is the amount the other RAM type would have used... So this was likely more about weight than battery life.
bjn 10y ago
I don't mind 16GB of RAM, I get the job done with 8GB (2013 model) using (Chrome, Atom/Sublime, Xcode, Terminal, Spotify, External 4k monitor..), what I want is dedicated GPU and Quad Core CPU by default for a normal price.
bradfa 10y ago
Lenovo T460p comes with quad core Intel 6th gen processors and up to 32 GB of DDR4 and claims up to 12 hours battery life on a 72 Wh battery. Why is it neglected in the comparison?
- scholia 10y ago
  I'm not familiar with the ThinkPad T460, but the T560 has two batteries. If you need longer life, upgrading the second battery from 47WHr to 72WHr costs an extra £12.
kartickv 10y ago
I agree with many posters in this thread that Apple is taking "thin and light" to an extreme. I'd want other things than thinness and lightness, like being able to configure it with a 4TB spinning hard disc + a small SSD, configured as a Fusion Drive. This 4TB bus-powered hard disc https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZTRXFBA/?tag=thewire06-20&linkCode=xm2&ascsubtag=WC24562 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZTRXFBA/?tag=thewire06-20&linkC... is only 0.8 inch thick, as opposed to the Macbook Pro's 0.6 inch thickness. I'd gladly take the additional 0.2 inch thickness for having lots of storage. I'd also want it to have an upgradeable memory and storage. SSDs are still unaffordable — the Macbook Pro with 2TB SSD costs more than $4000! While the aforementioned 4TB hard disc costs only $100.
- deleted 10y ago
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bartread 10y ago
Be that as it may, I'd sacrifice some battery life to have the option of 32GB of RAM. The moment you need to start running Windows VMs on top of OSX along with Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc., that 16GB limit becomes incredibly aggravating. Battery life is an especially crappy excuse when you consider that most of the time I'm running on outlet power - it's very rare that I don't have access to a power point for 5 - 6 hours at a time. And lest we forget, this is a machine called the MacBook Pro. Pro, as in, for the use of professionals. And professionals need more system RAM. Hello Apple, are you getting this? I'd also like an option for a 2TB SSD and more (not less) ports, particularly USB, because I don't want to have to carry around a pile of dongles everywhere with me that all too easily become lost. Remember: the machine is called the MacBook PRO.
- izacus 10y ago
  Or you know, they could just remove a non necessary component eating a lot of power - like that powerhungry screen they added on top of the keyboard no-one asked for.
- metafunctor 10y ago
  A lot of these fights seem to revolve around the word Pro. I'm a professional: I've worked with computers and software my whole life, and I am very good at it. I don't think I'll particularly need 32GB of RAM or USB ports on my laptop. Does this mean I'm not a true professional? Real men need 32GB and USB? That said, I'd probably opt for 32GB and a bit more weight. There is a 2TB option, by the way.
  - bartread 10y ago
    That's a fair point and it wasn't my intent to start a "real men need X" style of discussion. Nevertheless, VMs, and particularly Windows VMs with VS and the rest - at least on the kind of systems I always seem to end up working with - are resource hungry. I'm not suggesting that 32GB is for everyone, but I'd at least like the option available knowing that I might be trading some battery life by selecting it. (Worth knowing about the 2TB option - thanks for the tip. I refreshed last year when 1TB was the top end. Fortunately I think the drive is still user-upgradeable.)
tdkl 10y ago
Apple are just victims of their own game - making stuff thinner/lighter every year as it's somehow the next world wonder. Unless they'll finally admit it and stop this BS, they'll get themselves cornered soon enough. I mean just use the advantage of new technology to fill up the gained space with batteries. The premise of limiting RAM is also pretty much BS - if I get a device with 16GB RAM I still get the same battery life as now, but if I put more memory inside, I do this willingly to sacrifice battery. NOTHING CHANGES for people with 8/16GB configuration. Unless they're doing this with the classic Apple smug "we know what's best for you" reason. Oh and to sell more adapters.
- scholia 10y ago
  Curiously enough, the new MacBook Pro 15 isn't smaller and isn't lighter than, for example, the Dell XPS 15. That's why Apple's launch compared it with previous MacBooks, not with the rest of the industry. I think it's going to need a new idea....
- 4ad 10y ago
  > I do this willingly to sacrifice battery. NOTHING CHANGES for people with 8/16GB configuration. Did you not read the article? Everyone would be affected because they would have to use a completely different RAM technology. Even for people with 8/16GB configurations.
  - panda88888 10y ago
    It probably won't affect 8/16 GB people. Since the RAM are soldered, each config will be a different board, so they can keep existing 16GB config, and offer a 32GB config with DDR4 + required controllers, etc.
    - 4ad 10y ago
      Oh, yeah, they should design and produce a completely different board that virtually nobody buys. That makes a lot of financial sense.
jawngee 10y ago
This is why I built a hackintosh last week. 64GB, 4.5ghz OC, 6GB CPU. I'll keep trudging along with my 2012 MBP when I travel, but considering I work from home 80% of the time it was more important to optimize that time. FWIW, building one is far easier than it used to be. Everything is working great, took me about an afternoon to get it there. Watching Photoshop open as quickly as Sublime text will never get boring. Edit: This is my build if anyone is interested, http://pcpartpicker.com/list/gwV6qk http://pcpartpicker.com/list/gwV6qk
- omni 10y ago
  How is Xcode support nowadays? I got a Hackintosh VM working circa 2013 but had a lot of problems getting the latest version of Xcode to function at all.
  - adamors 10y ago
    Xcode is fully functional on Hackintoshes.
  - jawngee 10y ago
    No problem here, though I haven't submitted anything to the store, but I can't imagine its an issue. The only thing that isn't working is handoff, but you can get a card that enables that.
- mtw 10y ago
  Have you tried installing macos on a windows laptop? Could be the best of both worlds
strooper 10y ago
Just curious relevant to this topic- who needs RAM over 16 GB in a thin, mid-range laptop whose processor ends with the letter "U"? An advice for the multimedia pros- please stop whining about the RAM limitation of MBP 2016 and get a real workstation. a Mac pro (and some iMac) of any generation available in the market shall deliver several multiple of power that any MBP can do.
faragon 10y ago
I would expect 64GB of RAM, and not 16. The MacBook Pro 2016 is supposed to be a powerful laptop, not a cheap netbook.
frusciante29 10y ago
Great article. However, good arguments have never convinced some people. I'm so tired of this hand-wringing over the amount of RAM in a computer. The entitlement of some people is ridiculous. Apple, unlike Microsoft, does not produce software and hardware products for software engineers. It's time for software engineers to accept that and move on. I have.
asadkn 10y ago
Too many factual errors in the article. Many of the comparisons state DDR3 - but DDR4 is not DDR3. > the difference of power draw between DDR3 and DDR4 is almost negligible. It's NOT. The article he's citing mentions IDLE standby power consumption. Not the same thing as active power consumption. - Correction: Power draw of DDR4 and LPDDR3 is very similar under active usage (i.e. not in standby). DDR4 might be possibly slightly lower. I couldn't find a direct comparison, but according to Samsung: * LPDDR3 vs DDR3L uses 15% less power in operation [1] * DDR4 vs DDR3L uses 37% less power [2] - Correction: LPDDR3 is much more efficient for STANDBY (yes, you can have that 30 days standby). [3] So without LPDDR3, in my opinion, the standby of MBP would be reduced to ~15 days from 30 days (haven't done proper calculations but it's roughly half). But it wouldn't matter in normal usage. I still believe Apple didn't consider DDR4 due to size concerns as even SODIMM DDR4 on the logic board would larger. [1]: http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global/file/media/Samsung_Mobile_DRAM_2013_Final_HR-0.pdf http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global/file/media/Samsu... [2]: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/file/media/DDR4_Brochure-0.pdf http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/file/me... [3]: https://www.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/product-flyer/why_dram_for_ultrathins_lo.pdf https://www.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/product-fl...
pasta 10y ago
What I find interesting in this PRO debate is that most +16GB users don't even use Apple, but brands like Dell, HP, Siemens and others. Apple is not stupid. They know the market. And imho the anger here on HN is mostly HN bias.
- PuffinBlue 10y ago
  Not sure I agree with you. I'm here because I'm moving into the tech world but I'm coming from a background in photography. Nearly all my friends in that world (me included) use topped out MacBooks for portable stuff and the video folks are using Mac Pros or hackintosh's. They certainly need more RAM, I know at least two guys who would have killed for 64GB RAM in a Macbook for their 4k video work. And I could certainly use it to speed up batch operations of hundreds of images, or even to be able to basically use the laptop when pushing around several 24mp RAW images in photoshop or even use a single RAW edit on a 42mp file from a Sony A7r2 which utterly killed my current MacBook with 8GB RAM. I see loads of retorts like 'just use a desktop for the heavy lifting stuff' but that's so ignorant of the requirements on some markets. Needing to edit on the go is essential for many creators, especially for location shoots, and not even particularly complex ones, so power in a portable package is absolutely essential to folks well outside the 'developer' or tech world. No one I know is thinking about getting the new MacBook. Some are hoping for next years update but others who are running older models and need an upgrade now are now casting around for alternatives. They may know their market, but their market might not be what we think it is. It may be their market is moving to be like their phone market with a significant portion buying the brand jewellery Apple carries. So I guess I'm saying that there is a large segment of media creators (who are often suckers like me for the styling of the Apple laptops) who are now not seemingly part of Apple target market, and that might be bad for the wider Apple brand. I'm not particularly beholden to any manufacturer and nor are most of my friends. They go where they need to to get the kit that lets them do their job. There's an elastic period where a few issues can be overlooked but for me and others coming from this creation world the limit has been reached.
  - pasta 10y ago
    But didn't the video world already switch to Dell over two years ago because Apple could not keep up with high res video editing? I might be totaly wrong, but I think the real pro world doesn't look for a nice looking tool but for one that does the job. That's why I think +16GB users already use other brands.
al_biglan 10y ago
The market forces around laptops would seem to be a ripe area for serious academic study. I honestly can't find a laptop I _want_ to buy only ones I weigh silly trade-offs. (to be fair: my biggest complaint is around the lack of keyboard choices). It seems that the market desires either can't drive laptop options, or the market is vastly different than I perceive. For example: Why did it take so long for 720 screens to die as an option? For $50 more you get a 1080. I watched this for 6 years (2009 to 2014) and really can't fathom it. Now... this is for Windows based machines, and I'm sure the forces are different for Apple, but it would be lovely to read a serious study on this. I suspect there is something along the lines of cost and supply chain factors dominating the "refresh cycle" but this used to be handled by different product lines with wildly different configurations. (it still kinda is... Alienware vs Inspiron vs Yoga vs T vs P series but Apple seems to buck this trend completely) Anyway... I just need the cathartic release of posting (venting) with these laptop articles.
- vishalh 10y ago
  Companies use projections for how well the line up will perform when they refresh it. They might be optimizing for different factors so the underlying logic is not always obvious but you can get a fair idea about where they are coming from if you visit a big box retailer during a weekend and just watch the sales interactions that are taking place. The 'average' consumer's needs are vastly different from the HN crowd, and even among such 'average' consumers preferences can vary widely by geography (primarily because of the difference in income) - something that companies other than Apple try to cover with product lines.
- lotsofpulp 10y ago
  My theory behind this is that the most efficient functioning market needs intelligent buyers and sellers. The buyers have to be able to discern what the specs mean, what the quality of the parts are, what the expected lifetime is, and with computers not only that, but they have to be able to evaluate the software options (Windows vs OS X, malware subsidized laptops versus not)? Even explaining malware to a layman is difficult. So you had the two markets, business and professional consumers who knew what they were buying, and then regular consumers who mostly cared about price but are also swayed by large numbers (more GB, more HZ, bigger screen, more software a.k.a. malware). Then I think the tide sort of turned in the past decade where even the common populace had realized Windows consumer laptops were full of crap that caused it to run slow and unexpectedly and people noticed Apple's laptops were more consistent with user experience (which they were), so now Apple has a reputation of being the no nonsense brand (which they deserve). Of course, now Apple can also charge a premium for this so you see people with disposable income sticking to Apple's ecosystem, and then the rest of the OEMs fight for price conscious consumers and getting barely any profit out of it. Obviously for Apple, keeping things simple keeps their operating costs down, so they don't need to cater to every purchaser, and they probably decided that now they're the default brand to purchase if you have the money, they don't need to waste resources chasing after a small segment of the market looking for extremely high specifications.
nathanvanfleet 10y ago
I kind of feel like Apple's design philosophy is off. It's not like the Oxo brand of having tools that are easy to use. - I still can't hold my iPhone 6 without it slipping out of my hand (and I even have a case) - My Macbook Pro Unibody is very sleek but it just slides off my lap because the bottom surface is so smooth. - Off-boarding useful connections like USB, HDMI, DisplayPort etc meaning you have to purchase and carry around a bunch of dongles for whatever tiny saving they get from the battery / footprint. - The new Macbooks are, as always choosing sleekness over just making a laptop that is more powerful than they've made over the last 4 years. - People are complaining about the trackpad in the new MBP not having space to rest their wrists. etc etc They seem to just be optimizing for design's sake and not really considering the use case of what people use the computers for. It's starting to be a great little sleek computer for an executive to put in their carry-on and less like a strong office computer that can do hard work (for me it's software engineering) and be good enough to USE ALL DAY.
srott 10y ago
On the other side the SSD is very fast (rumors say 2.2GB/s, that is not so far from DDR2) so at least swapping will be seamless...
youdontknowtho 10y ago
I can't even imagine buying an Apple laptop if performance was a critical issue.
overcast 10y ago
I'm basically going to run my 2008 Mac Pro desktop until it completely seizes up. It's been constantly upgraded since then, and is still going strong. When the day comes, I'll have to make the decision on whether to continue with MacOS, because nothing is going to replace this anytime soon apparently.
onetom 10y ago
I have a Mid 2015 15" rMBP w 16GB RAM. I'm actually worried about the SSD wear and that's why I would like to have 32GB RAM. I'm quite okay with its performance but I routinely have ~4GB of memory swapped out, even though I'm trying hard to keep my browser tab count below 20. I have 4-5 Clojure/ClojureScript projects open in IntelliJ; that eats ~1-2GB RAM. For 3-4 of them I'm running a REPL; that's around ~1GB each, which is ~3-4GB in total. Safari with 10-20 tabs; 1-2GB Google Chrome Canary 4-5 tabs for the webapp under development (logged in with different type of users into different environments [dev/stg/prod]); ~300MB/tab => ~1-1.5GB total Everyday utilities also add up to 1.5GB at least: • Slack 0.4GB • (sometimes Gitter 0.3GB) • Spotify 0.3GB • AirMail 0.3GB • OneNote 0.2GB • SublimeText 0.2GB • iTerm 0.1GB • 1Password 0.1GB (and I don't even mention Box Sync or Dropbox or Google Drive or Ethereum or IPFS node because I usually keep them turned off while I'm coding...) My kernel_task is usually round 1.5GB but sometimes grows up to 2+GB So that's 2 + 4 + 3 + 1.5 + 1.5 + 1.5 = 13.5GB Then there is only 2.5GB left for disk cache and ~0.2GB memory is compressed at this point. So that's the minimum memory requirement after a cold boot for work. Anything else I do start to force memory to be compressed then swapped out. BUT THEN I also have a personal account for non-work related things which obviously forces swapping. I have to say though I see very little stuttering or beach balling, though typing in IntelliJ can get jittery while it's indexing. I think macOS' memory management is quite good for desktop usage. I do try Ubuntu/Fedora from time to time on Macs and I do envy how much less RAM they require, BUT everything else is rather clunky on them compared to macOS, IF they even boot. • TouchPad dynamics are terrible. • Gestures; forget it. • WiFi connects a lot slower. • Skype?... no comment. • Multiple thunderbolt or HDMI displays with mirroring. • HiDPI support with lower than physical virtual resolutions. • Stable Built-in VNC server and client, especially when there are multiple screens? • Wake up after sleep can still be a problem in 2016 (eg it sets the display brightness to 100%). and finally why is there no desktop environment which provides macOS' keyboard shortcuts out of the box? That would really help transitioning from macOS to Linux. (just to put things into perspective I was an http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ user for a year back in the day...)
halilim 10y ago
I am divided on this. I think we as the software industry have serious performance issues, maybe except for some legitimate use cases like number crunching, video editing etc. I don't know of a non-trivial Rails app which uses less than a couple hundred MBs of RAM. We have a VM with a minimum RAM requirement of 8 GBs at work which runs a conglomerate of Rails APIs, which makes 16 GB a minimum on my laptop. The only reason the memory bloat/leak of a freelance Rails project I'm working on goes undetected is that Heroku restarts their dynos daily. For comparison, an Elixir/Phoenix app is using < 40 MB right now. AFAIK base RAM requirements of many Java apps are even worse. Opening Gmail in Chrome immediately eats 1 GB of RAM, vs. 60 MB for Apple Mail app. Many Electron apps like Slack, Atom and Spotify use hundreds of MBs to GBs of memory, vs. 150 MB for Sublime Text (5 MB for Vim!). And they are sluggish. As much as I love the open web (and I'm mostly a web/backend dev myself), I hate the fact that I often have to prefer native apps. I'm seriously considering other laptops right now, but can't find a serious alternative, especially considering the fact that there are no Linux-rated laptops close to my location. And shoehorning Linux into Windows machines is pain, I tried that for ~1 years both at work and at home. The best non-Mac laptop candidate I'm considering right now has a long article written by someone describing how to install Linux on it, with some "slight" annoyances like a non-functioning webcam and a problematic wifi in the end. Windows? Nothing there comes even close to iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh combo (and many other tools, workflows etc). And I haven't even touched the subject of design. None of this is heavy computing. I think we seriously need to consider slowing down this madness and try to improve. I'd normally love the 16 GB limitation so that we'd be somewhat forced to that direction but since there is no "kill the bloat!" initiative or something, we sadly need beefier machines for the short/mid term.
jandrese 10y ago
16MB may be enough for today for 95% of the users, but in 3 years when Apple is still selling this model it is going to be an issue, especially when you consider that those laptops sold 3 years from now will be expected to run for another 5 years or so.

257 points by feelix 10y ago

I think this article misses the point that it seems many customers are disappointed they can't get more than 16gb and many would be willing to have the trade-off of 50% less battery life. How many people work away from power for more than 5 hours at a single stretch?

krapht 10y ago
When I travel with my laptop, I often don't have access to power. Most trips in a car are less than 100 miles. Yet nobody wants to purchase a low range EV. Extended battery life is useful on the occasions you need it.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  FWIW, a lot of vehicles nowadays have inverters. Both my car and my truck have one, with a standard "plug-in" that you can plug any normal AC device into. I've run my laptop off of my truck's power many times.
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arvinsim 10y ago
I agree. There is a point where thinness and long battery life have diminishing returns.
- chrischen 10y ago
  Not there yet. Smaller battery capacities also charge faster.
  - thinkmassive 10y ago
    Do they charge faster, or just reach capacity sooner?
    - chrischen 10y ago
      Smaller batteries charge faster by reaching full capacity sooner. So if you jam a large battery into a computer, you'll get more battery life, and most components will not be optimized to be as power efficient. This means charging to X % of battery life will take longer than on a smaller battery but more power efficient machine.
      - mthoms 10y ago
        So smaller batteries don't charge quicker(?) You seem to be talking about something completely different (efficiency of components).
      - thinkmassive 10y ago
        Capacity, rate of charge, and efficiency are not mutually exclusive. They aren't even really related, based on what you're talking about, which appears to be limited solely to operating efficiency.
debinguy 10y ago
This exactly. As a developer applications like docker and vagrant are part of my normal activities. The 16GB limit just does not work in this model. FWIW I was waiting on a laptop upgrade, and after seeing the new lineup from Apple I ordered a Linux laptop with 32GB of memory.
- bardworx 10y ago
  I have the new MbP w/ 8GB RAM and ram 3 VMs (2 MS build for IE testing and 1 hetoku build-pack) + IDE consuming close to 1GB of ram and compared it to a mid-2014 MbP with 16GB ram with similar performance. Yes the 8GB was a touch slower but I assume with 16GB, it will outperform similar or upgraded systems.
- corv 10y ago
  A major point of containerization is more efficient resource utilization, memory in particular. How has it come to this?
  - pritambaral 10y ago
    > A major point of containerization is more efficient resource utilization It's actually "more efficient resource utilization per instance". Perhaps, with increased capability comes increased utilization. While before one would run only one or two VMs and try to run all their apps within that, now one can run many containers. ---- That, and shareable memory across host and guests. But I guess that works only if the host and guest run the same kernel. Docker and vagrant on OS X still have to dedicate some RAM to the Linux VM running as docker host, and I don't know how efficient other facets of docker on OS X are; but on Linux, I find containerization's memory usage almost at par with running the apps directly on the host.
    - debinguy 10y ago
      For my situation I work for a large CDN and we have over 15k servers deployed globally and software I write has to run on all of them. This means various OS and kernel versions. This means in a given day I can work on 20+ different containers. The more time I spend spinning up or down containers to save system resources the more angry I get. I also travel a lot for work, so connecting to a cloud based instance from a plane is not possible, plugging into a power outlet in a plane seat is. For me the issue comes down to lack of choice. Previously lack of choice from Apple was not a concern because the choices I would make were inline with what they are offering. This is no longer the case. For those that asked, I am replacing 10 years of using MBP's with a System76 laptop. I don't have it yet so I can't comment but I am excited for the change as have been growing more and more frustrated with Apple.
userbinator 10y ago
And furthermore, Intel CPUs can already power down caches to lower power consumption; there are ways to power down unused RAM too: https://lwn.net/Articles/446493/ https://lwn.net/Articles/446493/
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bardworx 10y ago
I think it's a catch-22, if the laptop had 32GB ram but 5hr battery life, folks would complain about it because, for example, it wouldn't last on a flight from East/West coast flight or across the pond. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. This whole MbP experience feels rushed; Like a new tech release. You see the possibilities but it just falls short...
- bdcravens 10y ago
  I suspect the iPhone approach of new release then a higher performance "S" release of the same device a year later has taken hold in the MacBook division.
  - bardworx 10y ago
    If what you say materializes, the outrage would be real..i mean the "Pro" monicker should already denote higher performance...
    - bdcravens 10y ago
      It's believed there will be 32gb options next year: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/31/macbooks-2017-price-cuts-32gb-ram/ http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/31/macbooks-2017-price-cuts... As for the "Pro" moniker, the new machines are pretty high performance (especially on the video front). That doesn't preclude Apple making some tradeoff and/or leaving some performance on the table.
- tw04 10y ago
  > it wouldn't last on a flight from East/West coast flight or across the pond. Anyone making that flight on a regular basis is going to have access to a power outlet. Any run-of-the-mill consumer isn't going to be working and will be just fine with a tablet or a book.
  - monksy 10y ago
    At least you're going to figure out which plane+airline tends to have the outlets.
tinodotim 10y ago
First I don't think that the people who want (need) more than 16 gb ram would be okay with 50% less battery, at least not the majority, but, if apple would do that, how should they put that device on the market? As a MacBook Pro+-, the one with 32 gb ram but only 50% battery life? Or just a note on the site that this device only gets up to 5 hrs of battery life? In my eyes, the number of people confused and/or pissed of by that would be far higher, than of those who need 32 gb and would be okay with 50% less battery life.
- Retric 10y ago
  For many people 16GB of ram is just to low to be useful. Forcing them to buy a different machine. 5hour battery life is quite a bit for someone that mostly leaves it plugged in. Worst case just use an external battery if you really cant't find an outlet. Really, it feels like a MacBook not a MacBook Pro. Non power users are going to be happy with 16GB of RAM and get a lot more from extra battery life. PS: And yea, I was one of those people ready to upgrade who kind of scratched their head and decided to skip this release. I was thinking of getting a new Mac Pro, but they did not upgrade that at all even though the current model is over 2 and a half years old.
  - tinodotim 10y ago
    I'm not saying you guys who would go for a 32 gb / 5 hrs battery life version aren't out there and there are probably comparatively quite many on hn. You are, as much as it sucks, probably just not worth the hassle. I just don't see a way to market / communicate it without all that hassle. And something you should never forget. Those 5 hrs are 5 hrs when you buy the device. 1,5 - 2 years later you may end up with 3-3,5 hrs. If those 5 hrs were what you need, you'll already need your first battery replacement. > Non power users are going to be happy with 16GB of RAM That hurts btw. :( Let's agree on "non ram power users", because I would probably consider myself a power user but i'm quite fine with the 16 gb of my MBPr 13 from last year.
    - jpalomaki 10y ago
      It is also 5 hours of video playback or web surfing - not 5 hours of "professional" use.
jlgaddis 10y ago
Personally, I would've went for the model with 32 GB of RAM. I've got a MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM sitting here on my desk right now, the same spot it's in 95% of the time. Sitting right next to it is a 3.5 year old ThinkPad with 32 GB of RAM.
fnj 10y ago
Why promulgate the absurd premise that doubling the RAM would cut the battery life in half? As the article is at pains to say, 16 GB of RAM only consumes 1.49 A, while the CPU is 4.61A, and the display is a very big power hog. I am not in a position to prove it, but I suspect that increasing the RAM from 16 to 32 GB would only cut the battery life by 10%; maybe 15% at the outside.
lowbloodsugar 10y ago
Yes. Bottom line I switched to Apple in 2009, but my next laptop wont be an apple. My 2011 MBP has 16GB of RAM FFS. Back to linux for me.

userbinator 10y ago

The Intel chipset being used supports the following kinds of RAM: DDR3 RAM, Low Power DDR3 RAM (LPDDR), and DDR4 RAM. However, LPDDR3 only goes up to 1600 megahertz in speed, but Apple uses 1866Mhz RAM. How is this possible? That is because there yet another RAM standard, known as LPDDR3E (E for enhanced) RAM, that does go up to 1866Mhz. LPDDR4 is not supported by Intel’s CPU, and the DDR4L (another low voltage RAM type) standard is not finished yet. So desktop class memory (plainly spoken DDR4) would be the only option if they wanted to go past 16GB. I don't follow the argument here. Why not just put another 16GB of LPDDR3E on the board?

rincebrain 10y ago
AIUI Intel's non-Xeon chipsets won't go over 16GB for DDR3 in most cases.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Does Apple not have enough pull to get that already-existing feature on the chips they're buying? My ivy bridge laptop supports 32GB of DDR3, for what it's worth.
  - rincebrain 10y ago
    I would guess that it would require more than one vendor, even one as large as Apple, to request it aggressively earlier in the dev process for something like that to get done, because of the amounts of QA required. I would further guess that 4 DIMMs, more than just memory controller support, might have required too much precious board space - which, when combined with the power requirements and additional feature enhancement requirements for Intel, might have made it a nonstarter.
  - chx 10y ago
    That's the big question, right there, indeed. This is an artificial limit by Intel, after all. 16GB DIMM DDR3 modules do exist, it's just that Intel put an assert into the firmware to not allow for those.
- 10y ago

nodesocket 10y ago

Great writeup and detail. However: > Even if it weighed 10 kilos and cost $10k I would still buy it. > (To show you exactly what I mean in terms of personal needs, I recently rendered a music video in HD using a neural net called Style app. Due to the 16GB RAM limitation it took several days and wrote 20.44 Terabytes to my drive in swap space (yes, over 20,000 gigabytes). This would have been an order of magnitude faster on a system with 32GB of RAM). If your rendering video and can afford a $10k computer, then you should be using a Mac Pro. You can get a 2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache and 64GB of memory for around 8.5k.

lolive 10y ago
Why not rent a supercomputer on the cloud just for the time of such an experiment? I rent a 16 core/128GB machine at a cloud provider. I use it for heavy database treatments. And my laptop merely became a tmux terminal ever since.
- nodesocket 10y ago
  I don't know of a cloud provider that rents OS X machines do you? OS X is needed for Final Cut Pro, etc. If you're using Adobe Premier then you could use Microsoft Azure or another cloud provider that supports Windows.
  - hairyhenderson 10y ago
    I doubt video editing would go very smoothly over an RDP connection to a Windows VM in the cloud ;)
    - brazzledazzle 10y ago
      You might be surprised. It wouldn't be ideal but you can do some amazing stuff these days with low enough latency to the data center.
  - disordinary 10y ago
    I'd imagine the latency of running a video editor in the cloud would be a pain, also transferring hundreds of gigabytes of raw video information into the cloud isn't insignificant.

jrcii 10y ago

tldr: https://youtu.be/VEfIYZox1GM?t=8s https://youtu.be/VEfIYZox1GM?t=8s

einarvollset 10y ago

I wish Apple would do a portable computer without a battery. I work on power 99% of the time, and would love e.g. A portable iMac.

disordinary 10y ago
Isn't that the mac mini?
- dabockster 10y ago
  I think he means one with a screen.
- jacquesc 10y ago
  Apple should actually make a mac mini (again)
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    You call always get a NUC or whatever they're called and Hackintosh it
  - disordinary 10y ago
    The apple store still has them for sale, they just haven't been upgraded for a couple of years.
- neohaven 10y ago
  No screen on that.
  - disordinary 10y ago
    Yeah I was being somewhat facetious :) In the pro video camera space the mid range cameras and up are modular, so you have an imaging device which is just a cage with a sensor in it to which you attach storage, lenses, monitors, handles, etc. There must be similar things in the pro laptop space, but it would have to be a hackentosh.

mark-r 10y ago

So the blame is on Intel, not Apple. What does it matter? Apple is a big enough customer of Intel's that their needs should have been accommodated in the chip requirements before they were designed. Either way it makes no difference to the pro customers who need >16GB.

chrischen 10y ago
Of course the computer can always be improved. But the point is Apple is improved it the best they can, and certainly better than any competing manufacturer.
- peonicles 10y ago
  Competing laptop manufacturers have options for more ram.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    >> Competing laptop manufacturers have options for more ram. And not just for 32GB, many mobile workstation makers offer up to 64GB. You can also get ECC and mobile Xeons too.

mantis369 10y ago

I don't understand the imperatives to make the machine thinner and increase battery life. I would have paid for a 32 or even 64 GB model, but instead I'm going to delay my upgrade for 6-8 months so that I can see if something better than the new MBP comes along. I am of the opinion that a Pro machine does not need to be the thinnest available model.

chrischen 10y ago
I have a laptop purely because it's portable. It has to strike the right balance between performance and portability of course. To counter your vocal opposition, I think the new macbook strikes that balance perfectly. Longer battery life, and smaller battery also have benefits. Particularly, a smaller battery can be charged faster. Lower power consumption allows this, and their design decisions such as limiting RAM to 16 was made to achieve this. I run a linux VM and do dev work and even on 8GB is fine. I'm a programmer, and technical guy, but I understand that Apple can still make better computer building decisions than me, or any other nerds who just like to ramp up spec numbers in their custom build PC.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  8GB is most definitely not fine for anyone who works with media. Considering the number of people who make YouTube videos, memes, SoundCloud tracks, web pages, blog posts, photo uploads and shares, and so on - that's a lot of users. 16GB means they're going to be waiting around the disk to thrash its way through a swap whenever they switch between applications. My iMac has 32GB, and it's a bare minimum for comfortable thrash-free media creation. Remember when media and creation was an Apple thing? That.
  - moyta 10y ago
    Not defending the MBP, but at least they have SSDs that can push 3.1GB/s [1] which is much better than most devices, esp. spinning rust. What Apple has done on the iPhones with their SSD's bus (moving off eMMC to a much faster bus) is also a big performance boosting move, really helps to keep RAM costs down now with the ongoing RAM shortage. [1] - https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/01/2016-macbook-pro-ssd/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/01/2016-macbook-pro-ssd/

jacquesc 10y ago

Come on, are we really blaming the RAM for battery life? Apple chose to put a much smaller battery in this model (75 watt) compared to last year (100 watt) for the purpose of thinness. Find me a single review that laments the thickness and bulkiness of the 2015 model. This is plain and simple industrial design gone amuck. Apple has beautiful hardware, but day to day use is important too (performance, ram, battery). Shaving millimeters and ounces hits the point of diminishing returns, especially when you focus on it to the exclusion of all else.

ant6n 10y ago
It's also important to have a bit of travel for the keyboard - I for one don't like tapping on a hard surface to type.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  With the size/weight you saved, you can now carry a much nicer external keyboard if you really care. Personally I think the new keyboard is marginally nicer than the old one: more snap, but less travel. In that case, I’d rather have the thinner one. But then again, in my opinion laptop keyboards have been crap ever since they decided laptops needed to be usable on a lap and couldn’t be 3 inches thick or weigh 10 pounds, sometime in the early 1990s. ;-) (The IBM P70 and 5140, the Macintosh Portable, and the NEC Powermate Portable all had amazing keyboards. Toshiba and Zenith luggables of the same era also had nice enough keyboards. Of course, those machines aren’t exactly “laptops” by any reasonable standard.)
  - Aldo_MX 10y ago
    I like most laptop keyboards, just not the one from the recent macbooks, it feels... exaggeratedly flat
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      Have you tried the new MBP keyboard? It’s substantially different than the one from the 12" Macbook. (You still might not like it; it’s not my favorite either, but it’s definitely an improvement. Hopefully they’ll put the new keyboards on the next iteration of the 12" Macbook.)

meshko 10y ago

I wonder if it would be possible to design a system which would power down some of the memory when not plugged to a power source. I do all my dev on an MBP and would be more or less fine if the memory-intensive things were only available when plugged in. That said, I don't really feel like 16gb limits me in any way except for doing data processing, but that should be happening on the cluster anyways.

qb45 10y ago
Possible but hard because: 1. OSs are generally unaware of the details of memory controller configuration, everything is preconfigured by firmware. Apple's vertical integration could help here, but they would probably need help from Intel and it would work only in OSX. 2. It's not the case that if you install four 8GB sticks they will be mapped at 0-8G, 8-16G, etc. and the OS can simply move data from one area to another. For performance, data are striped RAID0-style across all modules. They would have to disable this. 3. I don't know if OSX supports non-identity VM-mapping of kernel memory pages. Linux for example doesn't afaik. Without this it's impossible to move arbitrary kernel objects because you can't find and update all pointers pointing to them.

rileymat2 10y ago

>"However, LPDDR3 only goes up to 1600 megahertz in speed, but Apple uses 1866Mhz RAM. How is this possible? That is because there yet another RAM standard, known as LPDDR3E (E for enhanced) RAM, that does go up to 1866Mhz." Why does apple claim 2133Mhz?

qb45 10y ago
Nothing unusual for vendors to certify their RAM for nonstandard speed.
Chyzwar 10y ago
Probably because its single channel. They bump voltage and freq to catch up in performance. If they would choose 2x16 and lower freq, voltage resulting performance would be even better with similar power usage. Apple prefer to make more money. They use power of brand to sell overpriced products to clueless crowd. Just go apple store to see audience, most people there do not even know what is RAM. [1] http://nucblog.net/2015/09/dual-channel-vs-single-channel-does-it-matter/ http://nucblog.net/2015/09/dual-channel-vs-single-channel-do...

Spooky23 10y ago

I'm sure they've focus grouped this to death. Everyone wants battery life. It differentiates the product and sells computers. Many people claim to need >16GB, but many of those folks really don't. The folks who need to run VMs (the biggest group, IMO) have workarounds. The folks left are a small number and have alternatives, mostly in the cloud. And they make the Mac Pro to address those folks, although obviously that's a flawed product as well.

dvtv75 10y ago
I know quite a few people who require >16GB, and not one of them is a power user nor do they use a VM. What they do is edit large amounts of 4K video in FCP, and they're rather screwed without an actual MacBook Pro. No, there are no cloud options for them, they need the RAM for the video. No, the Mac Pro isn't a viable option for them at that price, nor is it portable. I'm pretty sure they don't give a damn about battery life, either. They do their editing at a desk, and then take the MBP with them. So, for now, they're stuck with old models until there's a better one, or they spend a fair amount of money building a new pipeline and purchasing new software.
- cSoze 10y ago
  So their old MBPs have 32 GB? Have they just been unable to get anything done these past 40 years? The tech just isn't quite there yet. Next year.
- comex 10y ago
  What old models? As far as I know there aren't any older MacBooks that support more than 16GB of RAM either. If you're going to compare to desktops, start with the iMac, which is "only" a year old at this point, unlike the Mac Pro which is several :(. The iMac with 5K display starts at $1,800 and is configurable to 32GB RAM, while the MacBook Pro 15" starts at $2,400, and then you probably want an external display too. (That doesn't include the rather high price of actually configuring the iMac for 32GB, but its RAM is [still] user-upgradeable, so better to buy it somewhere else.) Actually, considering that the Mac Pro starts at $3,000, which is not that much more than $2,400, I'm not sure why you think the price puts it out of range... But I definitely understand why you'd want it in a laptop.

rasz_pl 10y ago

The real why is: Because we say so, you will buy it anyway. Its cheaper(no slot) and easier(same production line) to manufacture, and as a bonus forces users to upgrade earlier, not to mention planned obsolescence. Same goes for the SSD. Anybody want to guess how an official Apple data recovery procedure looks like in case of soldered SSD and no cloud backup? I can tell you how - there isnt one, just like with phones.

deleted 10y ago
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DonHopkins 10y ago

I would prefer a MacBook Pro that was 1" thicker, if only it had better cooling and kernel_task didn't go up to 3700% and freeze up all the time.

kimshibal 10y ago

Touch bar uses more power than ram.

nicky0 10y ago
Source?

mianos 10y ago

The credibility of the whole story fell to the floor when he said that sleep mode would kill more batteries because they fail when completely discharged. Apple has had top notch battery protection for years. Totally draining a macbook battery to failure has not been possible for many years.

willtim 10y ago
Continued deep discharge does however shorten the life of lithium ion batteries.
- mianos 10y ago
  I'd really like to see a recent reference on how much. Given the discharge maintaining the batteries is very small and very manageable I highly doubt it is significant over any lesser depth with these lipo batteries manufactured specifically for Apple.

pier25 10y ago

Because of Apple's anorexia, that's why. The 10-15% increase in battery consumption could have been easily solved by having a 10-15% bigger battery.

chx 10y ago

That FAA thing is bullshit, 160 Wh is allowed in hand luggage just not checked in but who checks a three thousand dollar machine in.

pkd 10y ago

The RAM thing is a myth. LinusTechTips, the YouTube channel, even did their own survey about it and the results are here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axZBbgfEZf0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axZBbgfEZf0

kmike84 10y ago
Have you read an article? It mentions LinusTechTips and explains what's wrong with their analysis.

lunaru 10y ago

Alright, it's time to make a confession: my "laptop" is actually just a desktop. It's plugged in 90% of the time and the other 10% is composed of 9% of time spent under 2 hours away from the plug and the last 1% is sitting in an airplane pretending I can get work done. Does this sound familiar for anyone else? Give me the 32GB memory and an extra few mm of thickness. I'll just keep it plugged in and not notice the difference.

xapata 10y ago
Not familiar to me. I guess I'm an oddball, but I travel for work. A 15-inch screen is annoyingly bulky (and wonderfully luxurious).
pentae 10y ago
It’s really the "Macbook Air Pro” imo. Portable and powerful is PERFECT for digital nomads and business travellers. A portable powerhouse that can be thrown in a day bag and taken to cafe’s, coworking spaces, lugged through airports and around new cities. But that’s not the “Pro Market" Apple should have released this iteration as the new Macbook Air or dropped the Air and called it a “Macbook”. Nobody would have complained. Then, released a new lineup of Macbook Pros around the same size as the previous generation and dropped quad core processor in the 13” model. Maybe even squeeze in a discrete GPU like the new GTX 1060 or GTX 1080. Nobody would have complained then.
- scholia 10y ago
  That's a great summary. Apple could also have brought out a new expandable, upgradeable cheesegrater tower for the many pros who need real power.
  - pentae 10y ago
    As much as that would be appreciated, its no longer Apple. Those users are typically building their own hardware to hackintosh spec instead - better than nothing but still many (myself included) would rather buy such a solution from Apple themselves as you say.

thaw13579 10y ago

Since the latest release, I've found that mentally substituting "Deluxe" for "Pro" helps to clarify Apple's design choices. I just can't see how a machine without USB non-C or display ports can be meant for professionals. I'd gladly pay for a heavier, thicker machine to have those things (and to avoid the dongles).

lowbloodsugar 10y ago
Exactly. There's nothing "Pro" about it. Maybe "Executive" or "Limited".
- josho 10y ago
  Maybe this is all the natural progression towards the final marketing scheme. Eg. The automotive industry. Did you want the DLX, GS, or GX trim package? Obvious extreme sarcasm here. But it seems to be the trend.
pentae 10y ago
I think you’ve nailed it - this is a branding problem more than anything else. They have tried merging the Macbook Air and the Pro into one computer and its just pissed off both fanbases. If they had just called these the Macbook 13” and 15” everybody would have been impressed. Three laptops - Macbook 12”, Macbook 13” and Macbook 15” feels more Apple to me than this current frankenstein of brand names “Macbook, Macbook Pro, Macbook Pro w/ Touch Bar”

n1000 10y ago

The weird thing is that Apple did not use all the space they possibly could for the battery. Have a look at the teardowns. There is room to put ca. 5% more battery. Supposedly they wanted to stay below 3 pounds. That is the amount the other RAM type would have used... So this was likely more about weight than battery life.

bjn 10y ago

I don't mind 16GB of RAM, I get the job done with 8GB (2013 model) using (Chrome, Atom/Sublime, Xcode, Terminal, Spotify, External 4k monitor..), what I want is dedicated GPU and Quad Core CPU by default for a normal price.

bradfa 10y ago

Lenovo T460p comes with quad core Intel 6th gen processors and up to 32 GB of DDR4 and claims up to 12 hours battery life on a 72 Wh battery. Why is it neglected in the comparison?

scholia 10y ago
I'm not familiar with the ThinkPad T460, but the T560 has two batteries. If you need longer life, upgrading the second battery from 47WHr to 72WHr costs an extra £12.

kartickv 10y ago

I agree with many posters in this thread that Apple is taking "thin and light" to an extreme. I'd want other things than thinness and lightness, like being able to configure it with a 4TB spinning hard disc + a small SSD, configured as a Fusion Drive. This 4TB bus-powered hard disc https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZTRXFBA/?tag=thewire06-20&linkCode=xm2&ascsubtag=WC24562 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZTRXFBA/?tag=thewire06-20&linkC... is only 0.8 inch thick, as opposed to the Macbook Pro's 0.6 inch thickness. I'd gladly take the additional 0.2 inch thickness for having lots of storage. I'd also want it to have an upgradeable memory and storage. SSDs are still unaffordable — the Macbook Pro with 2TB SSD costs more than $4000! While the aforementioned 4TB hard disc costs only $100.

deleted 10y ago
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bartread 10y ago

Be that as it may, I'd sacrifice some battery life to have the option of 32GB of RAM. The moment you need to start running Windows VMs on top of OSX along with Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc., that 16GB limit becomes incredibly aggravating. Battery life is an especially crappy excuse when you consider that most of the time I'm running on outlet power - it's very rare that I don't have access to a power point for 5 - 6 hours at a time. And lest we forget, this is a machine called the MacBook Pro. Pro, as in, for the use of professionals. And professionals need more system RAM. Hello Apple, are you getting this? I'd also like an option for a 2TB SSD and more (not less) ports, particularly USB, because I don't want to have to carry around a pile of dongles everywhere with me that all too easily become lost. Remember: the machine is called the MacBook PRO.

izacus 10y ago
Or you know, they could just remove a non necessary component eating a lot of power - like that powerhungry screen they added on top of the keyboard no-one asked for.
metafunctor 10y ago
A lot of these fights seem to revolve around the word Pro. I'm a professional: I've worked with computers and software my whole life, and I am very good at it. I don't think I'll particularly need 32GB of RAM or USB ports on my laptop. Does this mean I'm not a true professional? Real men need 32GB and USB? That said, I'd probably opt for 32GB and a bit more weight. There is a 2TB option, by the way.
- bartread 10y ago
  That's a fair point and it wasn't my intent to start a "real men need X" style of discussion. Nevertheless, VMs, and particularly Windows VMs with VS and the rest - at least on the kind of systems I always seem to end up working with - are resource hungry. I'm not suggesting that 32GB is for everyone, but I'd at least like the option available knowing that I might be trading some battery life by selecting it. (Worth knowing about the 2TB option - thanks for the tip. I refreshed last year when 1TB was the top end. Fortunately I think the drive is still user-upgradeable.)

tdkl 10y ago

Apple are just victims of their own game - making stuff thinner/lighter every year as it's somehow the next world wonder. Unless they'll finally admit it and stop this BS, they'll get themselves cornered soon enough. I mean just use the advantage of new technology to fill up the gained space with batteries. The premise of limiting RAM is also pretty much BS - if I get a device with 16GB RAM I still get the same battery life as now, but if I put more memory inside, I do this willingly to sacrifice battery. NOTHING CHANGES for people with 8/16GB configuration. Unless they're doing this with the classic Apple smug "we know what's best for you" reason. Oh and to sell more adapters.

scholia 10y ago
Curiously enough, the new MacBook Pro 15 isn't smaller and isn't lighter than, for example, the Dell XPS 15. That's why Apple's launch compared it with previous MacBooks, not with the rest of the industry. I think it's going to need a new idea....
4ad 10y ago
> I do this willingly to sacrifice battery. NOTHING CHANGES for people with 8/16GB configuration. Did you not read the article? Everyone would be affected because they would have to use a completely different RAM technology. Even for people with 8/16GB configurations.
- panda88888 10y ago
  It probably won't affect 8/16 GB people. Since the RAM are soldered, each config will be a different board, so they can keep existing 16GB config, and offer a 32GB config with DDR4 + required controllers, etc.
  - 4ad 10y ago
    Oh, yeah, they should design and produce a completely different board that virtually nobody buys. That makes a lot of financial sense.

jawngee 10y ago

This is why I built a hackintosh last week. 64GB, 4.5ghz OC, 6GB CPU. I'll keep trudging along with my 2012 MBP when I travel, but considering I work from home 80% of the time it was more important to optimize that time. FWIW, building one is far easier than it used to be. Everything is working great, took me about an afternoon to get it there. Watching Photoshop open as quickly as Sublime text will never get boring. Edit: This is my build if anyone is interested, http://pcpartpicker.com/list/gwV6qk http://pcpartpicker.com/list/gwV6qk

omni 10y ago
How is Xcode support nowadays? I got a Hackintosh VM working circa 2013 but had a lot of problems getting the latest version of Xcode to function at all.
- adamors 10y ago
  Xcode is fully functional on Hackintoshes.
- jawngee 10y ago
  No problem here, though I haven't submitted anything to the store, but I can't imagine its an issue. The only thing that isn't working is handoff, but you can get a card that enables that.
mtw 10y ago
Have you tried installing macos on a windows laptop? Could be the best of both worlds

strooper 10y ago

Just curious relevant to this topic- who needs RAM over 16 GB in a thin, mid-range laptop whose processor ends with the letter "U"? An advice for the multimedia pros- please stop whining about the RAM limitation of MBP 2016 and get a real workstation. a Mac pro (and some iMac) of any generation available in the market shall deliver several multiple of power that any MBP can do.

faragon 10y ago

I would expect 64GB of RAM, and not 16. The MacBook Pro 2016 is supposed to be a powerful laptop, not a cheap netbook.

frusciante29 10y ago

Great article. However, good arguments have never convinced some people. I'm so tired of this hand-wringing over the amount of RAM in a computer. The entitlement of some people is ridiculous. Apple, unlike Microsoft, does not produce software and hardware products for software engineers. It's time for software engineers to accept that and move on. I have.

asadkn 10y ago

Too many factual errors in the article. Many of the comparisons state DDR3 - but DDR4 is not DDR3. > the difference of power draw between DDR3 and DDR4 is almost negligible. It's NOT. The article he's citing mentions IDLE standby power consumption. Not the same thing as active power consumption. - Correction: Power draw of DDR4 and LPDDR3 is very similar under active usage (i.e. not in standby). DDR4 might be possibly slightly lower. I couldn't find a direct comparison, but according to Samsung: * LPDDR3 vs DDR3L uses 15% less power in operation [1] * DDR4 vs DDR3L uses 37% less power [2] - Correction: LPDDR3 is much more efficient for STANDBY (yes, you can have that 30 days standby). [3] So without LPDDR3, in my opinion, the standby of MBP would be reduced to ~15 days from 30 days (haven't done proper calculations but it's roughly half). But it wouldn't matter in normal usage. I still believe Apple didn't consider DDR4 due to size concerns as even SODIMM DDR4 on the logic board would larger. [1]: http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global/file/media/Samsung_Mobile_DRAM_2013_Final_HR-0.pdf http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global/file/media/Samsu... [2]: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/file/media/DDR4_Brochure-0.pdf http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/file/me... [3]: https://www.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/product-flyer/why_dram_for_ultrathins_lo.pdf https://www.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/product-fl...

pasta 10y ago

What I find interesting in this PRO debate is that most +16GB users don't even use Apple, but brands like Dell, HP, Siemens and others. Apple is not stupid. They know the market. And imho the anger here on HN is mostly HN bias.

PuffinBlue 10y ago
Not sure I agree with you. I'm here because I'm moving into the tech world but I'm coming from a background in photography. Nearly all my friends in that world (me included) use topped out MacBooks for portable stuff and the video folks are using Mac Pros or hackintosh's. They certainly need more RAM, I know at least two guys who would have killed for 64GB RAM in a Macbook for their 4k video work. And I could certainly use it to speed up batch operations of hundreds of images, or even to be able to basically use the laptop when pushing around several 24mp RAW images in photoshop or even use a single RAW edit on a 42mp file from a Sony A7r2 which utterly killed my current MacBook with 8GB RAM. I see loads of retorts like 'just use a desktop for the heavy lifting stuff' but that's so ignorant of the requirements on some markets. Needing to edit on the go is essential for many creators, especially for location shoots, and not even particularly complex ones, so power in a portable package is absolutely essential to folks well outside the 'developer' or tech world. No one I know is thinking about getting the new MacBook. Some are hoping for next years update but others who are running older models and need an upgrade now are now casting around for alternatives. They may know their market, but their market might not be what we think it is. It may be their market is moving to be like their phone market with a significant portion buying the brand jewellery Apple carries. So I guess I'm saying that there is a large segment of media creators (who are often suckers like me for the styling of the Apple laptops) who are now not seemingly part of Apple target market, and that might be bad for the wider Apple brand. I'm not particularly beholden to any manufacturer and nor are most of my friends. They go where they need to to get the kit that lets them do their job. There's an elastic period where a few issues can be overlooked but for me and others coming from this creation world the limit has been reached.
- pasta 10y ago
  But didn't the video world already switch to Dell over two years ago because Apple could not keep up with high res video editing? I might be totaly wrong, but I think the real pro world doesn't look for a nice looking tool but for one that does the job. That's why I think +16GB users already use other brands.

al_biglan 10y ago

The market forces around laptops would seem to be a ripe area for serious academic study. I honestly can't find a laptop I _want_ to buy only ones I weigh silly trade-offs. (to be fair: my biggest complaint is around the lack of keyboard choices). It seems that the market desires either can't drive laptop options, or the market is vastly different than I perceive. For example: Why did it take so long for 720 screens to die as an option? For $50 more you get a 1080. I watched this for 6 years (2009 to 2014) and really can't fathom it. Now... this is for Windows based machines, and I'm sure the forces are different for Apple, but it would be lovely to read a serious study on this. I suspect there is something along the lines of cost and supply chain factors dominating the "refresh cycle" but this used to be handled by different product lines with wildly different configurations. (it still kinda is... Alienware vs Inspiron vs Yoga vs T vs P series but Apple seems to buck this trend completely) Anyway... I just need the cathartic release of posting (venting) with these laptop articles.

vishalh 10y ago
Companies use projections for how well the line up will perform when they refresh it. They might be optimizing for different factors so the underlying logic is not always obvious but you can get a fair idea about where they are coming from if you visit a big box retailer during a weekend and just watch the sales interactions that are taking place. The 'average' consumer's needs are vastly different from the HN crowd, and even among such 'average' consumers preferences can vary widely by geography (primarily because of the difference in income) - something that companies other than Apple try to cover with product lines.
lotsofpulp 10y ago
My theory behind this is that the most efficient functioning market needs intelligent buyers and sellers. The buyers have to be able to discern what the specs mean, what the quality of the parts are, what the expected lifetime is, and with computers not only that, but they have to be able to evaluate the software options (Windows vs OS X, malware subsidized laptops versus not)? Even explaining malware to a layman is difficult. So you had the two markets, business and professional consumers who knew what they were buying, and then regular consumers who mostly cared about price but are also swayed by large numbers (more GB, more HZ, bigger screen, more software a.k.a. malware). Then I think the tide sort of turned in the past decade where even the common populace had realized Windows consumer laptops were full of crap that caused it to run slow and unexpectedly and people noticed Apple's laptops were more consistent with user experience (which they were), so now Apple has a reputation of being the no nonsense brand (which they deserve). Of course, now Apple can also charge a premium for this so you see people with disposable income sticking to Apple's ecosystem, and then the rest of the OEMs fight for price conscious consumers and getting barely any profit out of it. Obviously for Apple, keeping things simple keeps their operating costs down, so they don't need to cater to every purchaser, and they probably decided that now they're the default brand to purchase if you have the money, they don't need to waste resources chasing after a small segment of the market looking for extremely high specifications.

nathanvanfleet 10y ago

I kind of feel like Apple's design philosophy is off. It's not like the Oxo brand of having tools that are easy to use. - I still can't hold my iPhone 6 without it slipping out of my hand (and I even have a case) - My Macbook Pro Unibody is very sleek but it just slides off my lap because the bottom surface is so smooth. - Off-boarding useful connections like USB, HDMI, DisplayPort etc meaning you have to purchase and carry around a bunch of dongles for whatever tiny saving they get from the battery / footprint. - The new Macbooks are, as always choosing sleekness over just making a laptop that is more powerful than they've made over the last 4 years. - People are complaining about the trackpad in the new MBP not having space to rest their wrists. etc etc They seem to just be optimizing for design's sake and not really considering the use case of what people use the computers for. It's starting to be a great little sleek computer for an executive to put in their carry-on and less like a strong office computer that can do hard work (for me it's software engineering) and be good enough to USE ALL DAY.

srott 10y ago

On the other side the SSD is very fast (rumors say 2.2GB/s, that is not so far from DDR2) so at least swapping will be seamless...

youdontknowtho 10y ago

I can't even imagine buying an Apple laptop if performance was a critical issue.

overcast 10y ago

I'm basically going to run my 2008 Mac Pro desktop until it completely seizes up. It's been constantly upgraded since then, and is still going strong. When the day comes, I'll have to make the decision on whether to continue with MacOS, because nothing is going to replace this anytime soon apparently.

onetom 10y ago

I have a Mid 2015 15" rMBP w 16GB RAM. I'm actually worried about the SSD wear and that's why I would like to have 32GB RAM. I'm quite okay with its performance but I routinely have ~4GB of memory swapped out, even though I'm trying hard to keep my browser tab count below 20. I have 4-5 Clojure/ClojureScript projects open in IntelliJ; that eats ~1-2GB RAM. For 3-4 of them I'm running a REPL; that's around ~1GB each, which is ~3-4GB in total. Safari with 10-20 tabs; 1-2GB Google Chrome Canary 4-5 tabs for the webapp under development (logged in with different type of users into different environments [dev/stg/prod]); ~300MB/tab => ~1-1.5GB total Everyday utilities also add up to 1.5GB at least: • Slack 0.4GB • (sometimes Gitter 0.3GB) • Spotify 0.3GB • AirMail 0.3GB • OneNote 0.2GB • SublimeText 0.2GB • iTerm 0.1GB • 1Password 0.1GB (and I don't even mention Box Sync or Dropbox or Google Drive or Ethereum or IPFS node because I usually keep them turned off while I'm coding...) My kernel_task is usually round 1.5GB but sometimes grows up to 2+GB So that's 2 + 4 + 3 + 1.5 + 1.5 + 1.5 = 13.5GB Then there is only 2.5GB left for disk cache and ~0.2GB memory is compressed at this point. So that's the minimum memory requirement after a cold boot for work. Anything else I do start to force memory to be compressed then swapped out. BUT THEN I also have a personal account for non-work related things which obviously forces swapping. I have to say though I see very little stuttering or beach balling, though typing in IntelliJ can get jittery while it's indexing. I think macOS' memory management is quite good for desktop usage. I do try Ubuntu/Fedora from time to time on Macs and I do envy how much less RAM they require, BUT everything else is rather clunky on them compared to macOS, IF they even boot. • TouchPad dynamics are terrible. • Gestures; forget it. • WiFi connects a lot slower. • Skype?... no comment. • Multiple thunderbolt or HDMI displays with mirroring. • HiDPI support with lower than physical virtual resolutions. • Stable Built-in VNC server and client, especially when there are multiple screens? • Wake up after sleep can still be a problem in 2016 (eg it sets the display brightness to 100%). and finally why is there no desktop environment which provides macOS' keyboard shortcuts out of the box? That would really help transitioning from macOS to Linux. (just to put things into perspective I was an http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ user for a year back in the day...)

halilim 10y ago

I am divided on this. I think we as the software industry have serious performance issues, maybe except for some legitimate use cases like number crunching, video editing etc. I don't know of a non-trivial Rails app which uses less than a couple hundred MBs of RAM. We have a VM with a minimum RAM requirement of 8 GBs at work which runs a conglomerate of Rails APIs, which makes 16 GB a minimum on my laptop. The only reason the memory bloat/leak of a freelance Rails project I'm working on goes undetected is that Heroku restarts their dynos daily. For comparison, an Elixir/Phoenix app is using < 40 MB right now. AFAIK base RAM requirements of many Java apps are even worse. Opening Gmail in Chrome immediately eats 1 GB of RAM, vs. 60 MB for Apple Mail app. Many Electron apps like Slack, Atom and Spotify use hundreds of MBs to GBs of memory, vs. 150 MB for Sublime Text (5 MB for Vim!). And they are sluggish. As much as I love the open web (and I'm mostly a web/backend dev myself), I hate the fact that I often have to prefer native apps. I'm seriously considering other laptops right now, but can't find a serious alternative, especially considering the fact that there are no Linux-rated laptops close to my location. And shoehorning Linux into Windows machines is pain, I tried that for ~1 years both at work and at home. The best non-Mac laptop candidate I'm considering right now has a long article written by someone describing how to install Linux on it, with some "slight" annoyances like a non-functioning webcam and a problematic wifi in the end. Windows? Nothing there comes even close to iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh combo (and many other tools, workflows etc). And I haven't even touched the subject of design. None of this is heavy computing. I think we seriously need to consider slowing down this madness and try to improve. I'd normally love the 16 GB limitation so that we'd be somewhat forced to that direction but since there is no "kill the bloat!" initiative or something, we sadly need beefier machines for the short/mid term.

jandrese 10y ago

16MB may be enough for today for 95% of the users, but in 3 years when Apple is still selling this model it is going to be an issue, especially when you consider that those laptops sold 3 years from now will be expected to run for another 5 years or so.