10 ms·

The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane. I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack an

The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane. I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background. I do all this on 8GB ram on a macbook from 2012 and it runs fast and smoothly, even with up to 4 hours of battery life. I can't imagine the new one would be less performant in any way. It's completely understandable that now they can optimize for other things, since performance is generally a nonissue now. Apple is not blaming anything. They've designed a computer for a purpose instead of pumping specs and numbers to gratify a bunch of vocal geeks. I'd rather much trust in Apple's design than a collaboratively designed PC by technical dilettantes with maximum performance everything. It's not just a about specs, especially in a laptop. Versatility, weight, battery, ease of use. These all come into play aside from raw technical component power.

thinkmassive 10y ago
A single VM, sure. I get by with 8GB RAM (not a Mac) and can easily handle that. For more complex architectures I use cloud instances. It would be nice to run as many VMs as necessary locally. What is the purpose for which the "Pro" model is designed, with its limited memory? Other laptops on the market support double the memory, which is useful for numerous applications... video editing, analysis of large datasets, development of applications that require more than just a webserver.
jacquesc 10y ago
This is supposedly the Pro model. Until my video processing and compile times are instantaneous, there's always room for performance increases. Phil Schiller specially blamed RAM battery drain for it being limited to 16GB. http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13460496/apple-macbook-pro-16gb-ram-battery-life-phil-schiller http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13460496/apple-macbook-pr...
- mpweiher 10y ago
  Your compile times not being instantaneous is not a hardware problem and will never be solved by throwing hardware at it. "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster" -- With's Law. I just ran some experiments with tcc: it compiled + ran 300KLOC in around 0.158 seconds. My system cc (clang+llvm) took 9.3 seconds, so roughly a factor 60 difference. And clang+llvm is considered fast by today's standards, languages such as Scala or Swift are typically at least an order of magnitude slower than that. So compile times will improve when we make it a priority.
  - jacquesc 10y ago
    I agree. The age of hardware performance gains papering over software optimizations is definitely over. The developer world has to get used to it. People also run a lot of code that "compiles" (not strictly converting to binary). Transpiling js, packaging assets, or just running spec suite. Any small performance we can get is much appreciated and over 2-3years will add up to something significant (justifying a large cost, which I never had a problem paying the Apple premium price).
usaphp 10y ago
> "I do all this on 8GB ram on a macbook from 2012 and it runs fast and smoothl" Either you found a marmaid MacBook or your idea of "fast" is different from mine. I had to upgrade my maxed out 2012 rMBP because even when I have only photoshop/sketch and chrome browser open it will struggle. Now I have the 2015 maxed out rMBP and whenever I watch YouTube, use photoshop/sketch, mamp and browser tabs with dev console open it just strugglea...
- jacobolus 10y ago
  The problem here is Chrome. Much more resource use than Safari. (In particular, Safari is great at throttling CPU to background tabs.)
  - usaphp 10y ago
    Well I don't like safari for web debugging and their dev console to edit elements is just much more cumbersome than one in Chrome, I've tried many times to go back to Safari but it was not as good for me as chrome
    - wingworks 10y ago
      Yeah I agree, I do find Safari is MUCH faster than Chrome, even with things like Google's of Google Maps. I've also tried Safari's dev tools, and like you, I much prefer Google Chrome's dev tools. Also Google seems to be much more active in the web space then Safari.
  - rahimnathwani 10y ago
    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
  - arthurfm 10y ago
    > The problem here is Chrome. Chrome 55 (due to be released on 6th December) is meant to use upto 50% less RAM [1]. [1] https://chromeunboxed.com/chrome-update-significantly-reduces-memory-usage/ https://chromeunboxed.com/chrome-update-significantly-reduce...
kalleboo 10y ago
Now try editing a Swift Playground
- ttflee 10y ago
  Perhaps it's a good chance for Xcode/SourceKitService team to prioritize the fixes to the memory leakage issues, after they switch to the new MBP.
Yaggo 10y ago
> The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane. > I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background. It's all relative. Please don't judge other people's needs by your needs. I typically have five virtual desktops, each containing a project like yours. Plus five more virtual desktops for other stuff. More than 16 GB ram would be welcome (but thanks to SSD, I can manage with 16 GB pretty well). The article very well explains Apple's rational choice, but it's frustrating (for us, the users) that the industry haven't come up with anything better in half-decade. I guess the line between ram and storage will blur more in the future thanks to super fast SSD techonology, ram becoming just one more level of cache.
- sheepmullet 10y ago
  I can get away with 16gb most of the time as I can push my workload to the cloud. It's still not as nice as doing it locally and thankfully I'm not the one paying for our cloud compute.
- chrischen 10y ago
  Exactly, and relatively, more people don't need 32gb of RAM.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    so they buy the non PRO version
    - freehunter 10y ago
      So I'm not a pro unless I need 32GB of RAM? That's how we're going to define that term?
      - danudey 10y ago
        You're not a pro unless you need 32 GB of RAM but only 4-5 hours of battery life.
sheepmullet 10y ago
> I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background In other words fairly light use. The pro was originally for power users.
- chrischen 10y ago
  I run my neural networks in EC2, or on my desktop at home that has a GTX 1080. If you consider a whole Linux VM, webpack (also an instance of Node in the background), and gulp to be light use, then yes I think you're in the vocal minority of people who have some extreme expectations for a portable computer.
  - eropple 10y ago
    As with most programmers so isolated in the web bubble, you have no idea that you're describing light use. Yes, your usually-fully-idle virtual machine is light use. Yes, your marginal text processing is light use. Sometimes, I need to render video. At one point, MBPs were more than sufficient for state-of-the-art video work on the fly. But time has marched on, and Apple has not. That's why people are pissed, and it's a reasonable state of pissedness given that these are professional machines. It's gotten to the point where I have ditched Final Cut entirely for Premiere just so I can run it on Windows on a machine that is adequately specced for professional work. I hate Premiere. Apple does not offer a product that isn't priced dumb-as-dirt that can actually run Final Cut adequately, though, so that's the only choice I have. But, hell. The current lines of Mac spin up to near-screaming, even despite those special, so-quiet fans, when one watches a video, so I guess asking for performance when you make one is downright unprofessional.
    - 4ad 10y ago
      > The current lines of Mac spin up to near-screaming, even despite those special, so-quiet fans, when one watches a video Ugh, no they don't. Video decoding is CPU intensive in Chrome and VLC. Video decoding in Safari and QuickTime uses negligible CPU resources. This difference is so striking that I abandoned Chrome. I use Safari, which I don't like, but 100% vs. 2% CPU usage it's so worth it. Mpv has pretty good performance too, sometimes approaching QuickTime.
banachtarski 10y ago
Yea and then you open photoshop and try to do something non-trivial and 8gb vanishes and you start swapping like crazy. Programmers often do NOT have the highest performance needs (unless you're dealing with native compilations of large projects, literally doing perf-work, etc).
- chronic6l 10y ago
  > try to do something non-trivial and 8gb vanishes and you start swapping like crazy. Perhaps you should stop trying to do all your intensive college assignments on a machine optimized for portability and use a proper workstation or desktop. You know, the "old" computers?
  - addicted 10y ago
    Sounds like a great idea. Let me go have a look at powerful up to date Mac desktops that I can purchase. Oh. ---- Apologies for the snark. I think a lot of the backlash towards the new MBP is being caused by the uncertainty Apple has injected into its desktop line. Even if Apple wants to update their desktops, but for various reasons (e.g. Intel) cannot do so until next year, a simple statement saying that Apple will be updating the desktops soon would have quelled a lot of the concerns. The "surprise" factor worked for Pros when Apple was updating its devices in a consistent and regular manner. Since they haven't been doing the same with their Pro Macs, they are being highly irresponsible by not giving their Pro users more insight into their future roadmaps.
    - eropple 10y ago
      > I think a lot of the backlash towards the new MBP is being caused by the uncertainty Apple has injected into its desktop line. Agreed. The mediocre laptop offerings (nothing exists that surpasses my 2014 rMBP) and the complete jokestore that are the less-than-multiple-thousands desktop lines--which isn't to say that the Mac Pro isn't silly too, it's just so silly I can't imagine ever even considering it--mean that I'm probably moving off of OS X over the next two years. It would be more cost-effective, at my full billable rate, to get back into the Hackintosh game and spend God-knows-how-long on that than to buy any Mac on the market right now. That's insane.
MaulingMonkey 10y ago
> The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane. > I run a browser [...] Building a single config & platform - with no other significant processes running - will cause OOM crashes on 12GB CI boxes with swap files enabled, when 4-5x 4GB linker process spin up in parallel when building my projects. This is my bread and butter, and it's still way too slow for my tastes on a 16GB box that isn't swapping excessively, which is the new MBP's maximum "give Apple all my money" spec. Your day to day works on it? Great. Mine hasn't for around a year at least, nevermind next year's. I could theoretically use it as a dedicated docs machine, or as a dumb terminal to an actually decent machine... or I could buy a quad-core laptop with twice the RAM - throw in an extra 4K monitor for good measure - and still end up paying less than a MBP configured with half the cores and down 0.6Ghz in speed. > It's not just a about specs, especially in a laptop. Versatility, weight, battery, ease of use. MBP's max specs aren't enough to handle my workload. MBP's 8GB models may not even handle Chrome, if the people bellow are to be believed. That's not "versatile". Weight is just another spec - 33% (~1.5lbs) lighter than the laptop I'm comparing against is nice, but not "who cares about any of the other spec" nice. Battery? More specs! Battery wattage just went down, as pointed out in the post you're replying to. Ease of use - finally something squishy and subjective! ...I'll prefer the numpad over the touch bar. Perhaps, on that front, I'm a weirdo. But hey, if it works for your specific case, and you like 'em, enjoy!
- chrischen 10y ago
  Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1%. Expecting Apple to completely gimp the macbook for the average pro user (dev, photoshop, video editing) to satisfy your computing needs is unreasonable. They can't cover all use cases, but they can cover most. For your use case I recommend buying a spec'd up PC, such as a gaming laptop or desktop replacement laptop.
  - uabstraction 10y ago
    Except no one's asking them to "gimp" the available models. People are asking for more options in the high performance space. If Apple doesn't make it, you can't simply go to HP and get it there. You have no choice. It's either run out of memory, or abandon your whole OS and software stack. Apple is forcing a segment of it's customers to abandon it's ecosystem to continue getting their work done . Their lack of reassuring response insinuates that macOS is a non-scalable toy platform. I have no horses in this race myself, but if I had hundreds+ invested in Mac software and accessories, with no machines available on the market to handle my workload, I would be pretty bent.
oblio 10y ago
Get back to me when you have to work on a Java/Oracle project. Oracle XE idling uses 1GB of RAM. The average Java process uses around 1GB (Eclipse, Tomcat, Gradle). Add a browser and a VM and I have to start stopping processes whenever I need to do something else otherwise I start swapping.
- ssijak 10y ago
  I was doing exact same type of work on macbook air for a few months. It was slow but it worked. Now I do it without issues on mbp 13. On 15 inch it would fly.
- mpweiher 10y ago
  I developed Java backend systems on my 12" PowerBook G4, 867MHz, 256MB DRAM and it was fast. Hardware is not the problem. Software is. Software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster -- Wirth's Law.
beedogs 10y ago
> The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane. I can almost guarantee Ableton Live and other audio applications will not work well on the new MBP.
jpkeisala 10y ago
> I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background. Sounds like you do coding that does not really need much RAM. I don't think nearly all developers have your requirements. I was hoping that with new MBP. I could move my MongoDB/MS SQL Server to local virtual enviroment. For that I needed Virtual Windows Server which eats about 12-15 GB ram with Mongo and SQL instances running.
scotu 10y ago
I think they are falling in the "pumping specs" too, just not the same specs the vocal geeks want: they are pumping "thinner", "lighter" for no other reason than vanity?
the8472 10y ago
My 2012 thinkpad w530 already had 32GB. And it's usually fairly full. windows vm + browser + a few JVMs + office + analyzing memory dumps... and you want some spare capacity for the disk cache. Some occasional photoshop too. Analyzing memory dumps probably is the most demanding thing I do regularly. But all those pieces add up either way.
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
designed PC by technical dilettantes with maximum performance everything. Half a TB of RAM, four Titan X, two 24-core Xeons, and a battery that lasts four weeks sounds good to me.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
overcast 10y ago
Justifying Apple's decision because YOU don't need it, doesn't mean it's all of a sudden OK. I've had 16GB or greater in all of my machines for at least the last six years. Apple is notorious for underspec hardware. It's just that in the last couple of years, it's really starting to piss people off, because the commodity stuff is so cheap at this point. 16GB base iphone6s , MacBook Pro 16GB RAM. I can't think of anyone who says gee, I wish the next iPhone was EVEN THINNER. And yet they focus on shaving off .00011mm each iteration, reducing battery life, and allowing less space for necessary components. You think it's coincidence they didn't offer a 32GB version last year? 16 base, 64 at a $100 more. Jack up the camera, to create larger and large image/video sizes, forcing people to spend the extra $100 to get more storage space. It's a racket. Blind "trust" is a company is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. People are allowed to speak up if something isn't right. 20 tabs in a browser and a VM isn't what I would consider a power user. We have accounting people in our office doing more than that, because of antiquated software requirements.
- danudey 10y ago
  Condemning Apple's decision because YOU don't like it similarly does not mean it was a bad one. Apple makes laptops for its target market; if your needs aren't met, there are other laptops out there. Apple had design reasons for doing what they did: optimizing battery life at the cost of a feature that I would wager very few people, statistically speaking, would use. It's alright if that means this laptop doesn't meet your needs, because everyone's needs are different, but I would wager that more people would take advantage of longer battery life than would take advantage of 32 GB of RAM.
  - overcast 10y ago
    No, that's the problem. There aren't other laptops out there. If I want to use MacOS, I have zero choice, but to go along with watered down "PRO" version, that is being catered to grandma. Defending Apple from not even offering 32GB as an OPTION doesn't even make any sense. Please don't give me that silly RAM/battery debate. If someone wants more battery life, then stick with the 16GB. I'll take that imaginary risk, and order the 32GB upgrade. Like you stated, "everyone's needs are different", and yet, they don't cater to anyone but the lowest common denominator anymore. It started with abandoning their pro apps, then their pro desktops, and now their pro laptops.
iask 10y ago
I have a 17" MacBook Pro from 2010 8gb ram. I boot in Windows 7, with 15 tabs open in FF and 3 instances of Visual Studio 2012 open as well as multiple Notepad++, Excel and runs smoothly. I really love the 17" screen.

thinkmassive 10y ago

A single VM, sure. I get by with 8GB RAM (not a Mac) and can easily handle that. For more complex architectures I use cloud instances. It would be nice to run as many VMs as necessary locally. What is the purpose for which the "Pro" model is designed, with its limited memory? Other laptops on the market support double the memory, which is useful for numerous applications... video editing, analysis of large datasets, development of applications that require more than just a webserver.

jacquesc 10y ago

This is supposedly the Pro model. Until my video processing and compile times are instantaneous, there's always room for performance increases. Phil Schiller specially blamed RAM battery drain for it being limited to 16GB. http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13460496/apple-macbook-pro-16gb-ram-battery-life-phil-schiller http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13460496/apple-macbook-pr...

mpweiher 10y ago
Your compile times not being instantaneous is not a hardware problem and will never be solved by throwing hardware at it. "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster" -- With's Law. I just ran some experiments with tcc: it compiled + ran 300KLOC in around 0.158 seconds. My system cc (clang+llvm) took 9.3 seconds, so roughly a factor 60 difference. And clang+llvm is considered fast by today's standards, languages such as Scala or Swift are typically at least an order of magnitude slower than that. So compile times will improve when we make it a priority.
- jacquesc 10y ago
  I agree. The age of hardware performance gains papering over software optimizations is definitely over. The developer world has to get used to it. People also run a lot of code that "compiles" (not strictly converting to binary). Transpiling js, packaging assets, or just running spec suite. Any small performance we can get is much appreciated and over 2-3years will add up to something significant (justifying a large cost, which I never had a problem paying the Apple premium price).

usaphp 10y ago

> "I do all this on 8GB ram on a macbook from 2012 and it runs fast and smoothl" Either you found a marmaid MacBook or your idea of "fast" is different from mine. I had to upgrade my maxed out 2012 rMBP because even when I have only photoshop/sketch and chrome browser open it will struggle. Now I have the 2015 maxed out rMBP and whenever I watch YouTube, use photoshop/sketch, mamp and browser tabs with dev console open it just strugglea...

jacobolus 10y ago
The problem here is Chrome. Much more resource use than Safari. (In particular, Safari is great at throttling CPU to background tabs.)
- usaphp 10y ago
  Well I don't like safari for web debugging and their dev console to edit elements is just much more cumbersome than one in Chrome, I've tried many times to go back to Safari but it was not as good for me as chrome
  - wingworks 10y ago
    Yeah I agree, I do find Safari is MUCH faster than Chrome, even with things like Google's of Google Maps. I've also tried Safari's dev tools, and like you, I much prefer Google Chrome's dev tools. Also Google seems to be much more active in the web space then Safari.
- rahimnathwani 10y ago
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
- arthurfm 10y ago
  > The problem here is Chrome. Chrome 55 (due to be released on 6th December) is meant to use upto 50% less RAM [1]. [1] https://chromeunboxed.com/chrome-update-significantly-reduces-memory-usage/ https://chromeunboxed.com/chrome-update-significantly-reduce...

kalleboo 10y ago

Now try editing a Swift Playground

ttflee 10y ago
Perhaps it's a good chance for Xcode/SourceKitService team to prioritize the fixes to the memory leakage issues, after they switch to the new MBP.

Yaggo 10y ago

> The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane. > I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background. It's all relative. Please don't judge other people's needs by your needs. I typically have five virtual desktops, each containing a project like yours. Plus five more virtual desktops for other stuff. More than 16 GB ram would be welcome (but thanks to SSD, I can manage with 16 GB pretty well). The article very well explains Apple's rational choice, but it's frustrating (for us, the users) that the industry haven't come up with anything better in half-decade. I guess the line between ram and storage will blur more in the future thanks to super fast SSD techonology, ram becoming just one more level of cache.

sheepmullet 10y ago
I can get away with 16gb most of the time as I can push my workload to the cloud. It's still not as nice as doing it locally and thankfully I'm not the one paying for our cloud compute.
chrischen 10y ago
Exactly, and relatively, more people don't need 32gb of RAM.
- walshemj 10y ago
  so they buy the non PRO version
  - freehunter 10y ago
    So I'm not a pro unless I need 32GB of RAM? That's how we're going to define that term?
    - danudey 10y ago
      You're not a pro unless you need 32 GB of RAM but only 4-5 hours of battery life.

sheepmullet 10y ago

> I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background In other words fairly light use. The pro was originally for power users.

chrischen 10y ago
I run my neural networks in EC2, or on my desktop at home that has a GTX 1080. If you consider a whole Linux VM, webpack (also an instance of Node in the background), and gulp to be light use, then yes I think you're in the vocal minority of people who have some extreme expectations for a portable computer.
- eropple 10y ago
  As with most programmers so isolated in the web bubble, you have no idea that you're describing light use. Yes, your usually-fully-idle virtual machine is light use. Yes, your marginal text processing is light use. Sometimes, I need to render video. At one point, MBPs were more than sufficient for state-of-the-art video work on the fly. But time has marched on, and Apple has not. That's why people are pissed, and it's a reasonable state of pissedness given that these are professional machines. It's gotten to the point where I have ditched Final Cut entirely for Premiere just so I can run it on Windows on a machine that is adequately specced for professional work. I hate Premiere. Apple does not offer a product that isn't priced dumb-as-dirt that can actually run Final Cut adequately, though, so that's the only choice I have. But, hell. The current lines of Mac spin up to near-screaming, even despite those special, so-quiet fans, when one watches a video, so I guess asking for performance when you make one is downright unprofessional.
  - 4ad 10y ago
    > The current lines of Mac spin up to near-screaming, even despite those special, so-quiet fans, when one watches a video Ugh, no they don't. Video decoding is CPU intensive in Chrome and VLC. Video decoding in Safari and QuickTime uses negligible CPU resources. This difference is so striking that I abandoned Chrome. I use Safari, which I don't like, but 100% vs. 2% CPU usage it's so worth it. Mpv has pretty good performance too, sometimes approaching QuickTime.

banachtarski 10y ago

Yea and then you open photoshop and try to do something non-trivial and 8gb vanishes and you start swapping like crazy. Programmers often do NOT have the highest performance needs (unless you're dealing with native compilations of large projects, literally doing perf-work, etc).

chronic6l 10y ago
> try to do something non-trivial and 8gb vanishes and you start swapping like crazy. Perhaps you should stop trying to do all your intensive college assignments on a machine optimized for portability and use a proper workstation or desktop. You know, the "old" computers?
- addicted 10y ago
  Sounds like a great idea. Let me go have a look at powerful up to date Mac desktops that I can purchase. Oh. ---- Apologies for the snark. I think a lot of the backlash towards the new MBP is being caused by the uncertainty Apple has injected into its desktop line. Even if Apple wants to update their desktops, but for various reasons (e.g. Intel) cannot do so until next year, a simple statement saying that Apple will be updating the desktops soon would have quelled a lot of the concerns. The "surprise" factor worked for Pros when Apple was updating its devices in a consistent and regular manner. Since they haven't been doing the same with their Pro Macs, they are being highly irresponsible by not giving their Pro users more insight into their future roadmaps.
  - eropple 10y ago
    > I think a lot of the backlash towards the new MBP is being caused by the uncertainty Apple has injected into its desktop line. Agreed. The mediocre laptop offerings (nothing exists that surpasses my 2014 rMBP) and the complete jokestore that are the less-than-multiple-thousands desktop lines--which isn't to say that the Mac Pro isn't silly too, it's just so silly I can't imagine ever even considering it--mean that I'm probably moving off of OS X over the next two years. It would be more cost-effective, at my full billable rate, to get back into the Hackintosh game and spend God-knows-how-long on that than to buy any Mac on the market right now. That's insane.

MaulingMonkey 10y ago

> The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane. > I run a browser [...] Building a single config & platform - with no other significant processes running - will cause OOM crashes on 12GB CI boxes with swap files enabled, when 4-5x 4GB linker process spin up in parallel when building my projects. This is my bread and butter, and it's still way too slow for my tastes on a 16GB box that isn't swapping excessively, which is the new MBP's maximum "give Apple all my money" spec. Your day to day works on it? Great. Mine hasn't for around a year at least, nevermind next year's. I could theoretically use it as a dedicated docs machine, or as a dumb terminal to an actually decent machine... or I could buy a quad-core laptop with twice the RAM - throw in an extra 4K monitor for good measure - and still end up paying less than a MBP configured with half the cores and down 0.6Ghz in speed. > It's not just a about specs, especially in a laptop. Versatility, weight, battery, ease of use. MBP's max specs aren't enough to handle my workload. MBP's 8GB models may not even handle Chrome, if the people bellow are to be believed. That's not "versatile". Weight is just another spec - 33% (~1.5lbs) lighter than the laptop I'm comparing against is nice, but not "who cares about any of the other spec" nice. Battery? More specs! Battery wattage just went down, as pointed out in the post you're replying to. Ease of use - finally something squishy and subjective! ...I'll prefer the numpad over the touch bar. Perhaps, on that front, I'm a weirdo. But hey, if it works for your specific case, and you like 'em, enjoy!

chrischen 10y ago
Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1%. Expecting Apple to completely gimp the macbook for the average pro user (dev, photoshop, video editing) to satisfy your computing needs is unreasonable. They can't cover all use cases, but they can cover most. For your use case I recommend buying a spec'd up PC, such as a gaming laptop or desktop replacement laptop.
- uabstraction 10y ago
  Except no one's asking them to "gimp" the available models. People are asking for more options in the high performance space. If Apple doesn't make it, you can't simply go to HP and get it there. You have no choice. It's either run out of memory, or abandon your whole OS and software stack. Apple is forcing a segment of it's customers to abandon it's ecosystem to continue getting their work done . Their lack of reassuring response insinuates that macOS is a non-scalable toy platform. I have no horses in this race myself, but if I had hundreds+ invested in Mac software and accessories, with no machines available on the market to handle my workload, I would be pretty bent.

oblio 10y ago

Get back to me when you have to work on a Java/Oracle project. Oracle XE idling uses 1GB of RAM. The average Java process uses around 1GB (Eclipse, Tomcat, Gradle). Add a browser and a VM and I have to start stopping processes whenever I need to do something else otherwise I start swapping.

ssijak 10y ago
I was doing exact same type of work on macbook air for a few months. It was slow but it worked. Now I do it without issues on mbp 13. On 15 inch it would fly.
mpweiher 10y ago
I developed Java backend systems on my 12" PowerBook G4, 867MHz, 256MB DRAM and it was fast. Hardware is not the problem. Software is. Software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster -- Wirth's Law.

beedogs 10y ago

> The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane. I can almost guarantee Ableton Live and other audio applications will not work well on the new MBP.

jpkeisala 10y ago

> I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background. Sounds like you do coding that does not really need much RAM. I don't think nearly all developers have your requirements. I was hoping that with new MBP. I could move my MongoDB/MS SQL Server to local virtual enviroment. For that I needed Virtual Windows Server which eats about 12-15 GB ram with Mongo and SQL instances running.

scotu 10y ago

I think they are falling in the "pumping specs" too, just not the same specs the vocal geeks want: they are pumping "thinner", "lighter" for no other reason than vanity?

the8472 10y ago

My 2012 thinkpad w530 already had 32GB. And it's usually fairly full. windows vm + browser + a few JVMs + office + analyzing memory dumps... and you want some spare capacity for the disk cache. Some occasional photoshop too. Analyzing memory dumps probably is the most demanding thing I do regularly. But all those pieces add up either way.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

designed PC by technical dilettantes with maximum performance everything. Half a TB of RAM, four Titan X, two 24-core Xeons, and a battery that lasts four weeks sounds good to me.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

overcast 10y ago

Justifying Apple's decision because YOU don't need it, doesn't mean it's all of a sudden OK. I've had 16GB or greater in all of my machines for at least the last six years. Apple is notorious for underspec hardware. It's just that in the last couple of years, it's really starting to piss people off, because the commodity stuff is so cheap at this point. 16GB base iphone6s , MacBook Pro 16GB RAM. I can't think of anyone who says gee, I wish the next iPhone was EVEN THINNER. And yet they focus on shaving off .00011mm each iteration, reducing battery life, and allowing less space for necessary components. You think it's coincidence they didn't offer a 32GB version last year? 16 base, 64 at a $100 more. Jack up the camera, to create larger and large image/video sizes, forcing people to spend the extra $100 to get more storage space. It's a racket. Blind "trust" is a company is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. People are allowed to speak up if something isn't right. 20 tabs in a browser and a VM isn't what I would consider a power user. We have accounting people in our office doing more than that, because of antiquated software requirements.

danudey 10y ago
Condemning Apple's decision because YOU don't like it similarly does not mean it was a bad one. Apple makes laptops for its target market; if your needs aren't met, there are other laptops out there. Apple had design reasons for doing what they did: optimizing battery life at the cost of a feature that I would wager very few people, statistically speaking, would use. It's alright if that means this laptop doesn't meet your needs, because everyone's needs are different, but I would wager that more people would take advantage of longer battery life than would take advantage of 32 GB of RAM.
- overcast 10y ago
  No, that's the problem. There aren't other laptops out there. If I want to use MacOS, I have zero choice, but to go along with watered down "PRO" version, that is being catered to grandma. Defending Apple from not even offering 32GB as an OPTION doesn't even make any sense. Please don't give me that silly RAM/battery debate. If someone wants more battery life, then stick with the 16GB. I'll take that imaginary risk, and order the 32GB upgrade. Like you stated, "everyone's needs are different", and yet, they don't cater to anyone but the lowest common denominator anymore. It started with abandoning their pro apps, then their pro desktops, and now their pro laptops.

iask 10y ago

I have a 17" MacBook Pro from 2010 8gb ram. I boot in Windows 7, with 15 tabs open in FF and 3 instances of Visual Studio 2012 open as well as multiple Notepad++, Excel and runs smoothly. I really love the 17" screen.