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The intensity 16GB RAM limit complaints really surprised me. I don't remember such complaints about the 2015 model lacking a 32GB option. We've been stuck at 16

by nsxwolf 10y ago

The intensity 16GB RAM limit complaints really surprised me. I don't remember such complaints about the 2015 model lacking a 32GB option. We've been stuck at 16GB on the MacBook Pro for years now. Did something happen in the last year that made everyone demand 32GB?

sixothree 10y ago
16GB SODIMMs. Actually it was about this time last year that they started to become available.
- yuhong 10y ago
  More precisely, 8Gbit DDR4 which is beginning to reach crossover now. There is also 8Gbit DDR3 that is less popular (and I think only made by Micron and Intelligent Memory), but Broadwell supports it for example.
veidr 10y ago
The opposite; nothing happened for many years and people kind of accepted that the "new" models were just slight refreshes to the existing 16GB-limited line. But when Apple finally introduced a brand new generation, and it was still limited to 16 GB, that really set everybody off.
protomyth 10y ago
My memory usage under Sierra and El Capitan really went up to the point a 4gb Mac is painful to non-usable. Not sure the cause, but what could be upgrade got upgraded and what couldn't (MacBook Air) got retired.
pentae 10y ago
Me personally I could care less about the extra memory, but what I really wanted was a quad core in a 13" form factor
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
  Judging from Apple’s focus on silent, 10-hour-battery-life laptops, you’ll see quad-core CPUs in Apple 13" laptops only when the chip’s TDP drops to 15 W. In my opinion, it is sad that Apple changed the meaning of its Pro label from “professionals” to “consumers with lots of money”. As another commenter once said, replace “Pro” with “Deluxe” in your head, e.g. MacBook Deluxe, and suddenly it all makes sense. The machines trade potential increases in performance for increases in thinness.
glenndebacker 10y ago
I think the problem of the RAM is mostly because the things are soldered and non upgradable. And while 16GB may be definitely enough today, that "may" change in the future. When I bought my Macbook Pro in 2011 it came with 4GB RAM and at that time it was suffice but through the years I did upgrade it. The RAM and SSD upgrade makes that I still use my machine till today. The fact that you can use a Macbook Pro for years makes it a bit sweeter to swallow the bitter price pill. With the "limited" 16GB RAM I'm not sure that will be also the case here. Although it's at the point I simply can't afford it anymore. While it's nice to show off all the accessibility options for people with disabilities or health problems, the irony is that because of my disability (which has a big influence on my income) the apple ecosphere is becoming just to expensive.
- undersuit 10y ago
  From the explanations offered about why 16GB is the limit it's probably a good thing. If there was DIMMs someone would go out and buy 2 16GB SODIMMs and find out their MacBook Pro doesn't boot, behaves strangely, or just doesn't use the entire available ram.
romanovcode 10y ago
>Did something happen in the last year that made everyone demand 32GB? Yeah, microservice hype. Now you need a lot of RAM to open all those services to develop on local.
dagw 10y ago
Did something happen in the last year that made everyone demand 32GB? It became available. No one was demanding 16 or 4 or 1 or 0.1 GB of RAM either before the option became available. Personally I find that for everything I do either "4 GB or RAM is plenty" or "16 GB of RAM is barely enough". If I'm buying a laptop for only the first category of work, then the MBP is way too expensive for me (esp. since I'd also have to buy a second computer), and if I'm buying a laptop to handle both categories of work then it's under-powered.
addicted 10y ago
My Macs last me 4-5 years. The idea that 16GB will be sufficient 2 years from now is not believable to me. As good as the MBP might be, if you don't need a new laptop right now, it's just not a good buy. The worst part is that it cannot be upgraded.
Fnoord 10y ago
> Did something happen in the last year that made everyone demand 32GB? Yes, RAM-wise applications become more bloated due to containers, VMs, and the (ab)use of JS-based applications or 'apps'. Take into account I am typing this on a MBP from 2010, 6 years old, which shipped with 4 GB RAM which I was able to upgrade easily to 8 GB RAM, with a 256 GB SSD which I put in myself after updating from a 512 GB 5400 RPM HDD. By some (certainly not everyone) MBPs are bought to be an investment of several years, yet MBPs are no longer 'pimpable'. You can't upgrade their internals anymore. So what happens? People buy them with higher specs than they need. Which means a bigger or quicker SSD, and bigger or quicker RAM. Which brings me to the following point: the MBP used to be a relatively bulky laptop/notebook, but a beast. A compact, less powerful version was the Macbook Air which as the name suggests was also lighter. At best, it has shifted. At worst, this is no longer the case. Because the MBP is designed to be light itself. Finally, the battery. If it is already bad with 5 hours out of the box, this can be improved perhaps via software. Who knows? That is the risk of buying. You don't wanna take that risk. A product as expensive as this one needs to have high uptime out of the box. Plus, the battery will degrade over time as well, and Apple products haven't been known to have easily replaceable battery (compare to Dell XPS). Now, the problem with all of the above points is that they're all made so that the MBP -supposedly the powerhorse of notebooks/laptops of Apple- is smaller and weights less. Whereas they had the Macbook Air line for that purpose before. It just doesn't make sense from a customer PoV to pay more for less! You see, those who'd like to buy a device for years to come don't mind the USB-C debacle that much. Because in x years, it'll be everywhere (lets assume x=2 for the sake of argument, while the device is being used for 5 years and even if the device isn't used for 5 years it has resale value!).
- iwritestuff 10y ago
  I get more than 5 hours on my MBP 15". Battery issues are unfounded on my device. Have you used one and tested it yourself? If so, return it to the store and get new one.
- SomeHacker44 10y ago
  I have a 2011 MacBook Pro 15". It has two hard drives in it including a SATA III SSD, and 16G RAM. It's still running strong. I can't imagine why Apple has not been able to improve on the computer's specifications for serious professional engineer use in five years. The CPU increase and GPU increase is unimpressive. (Why no quad core in 13"?) Retina is fantastic, but not a substitute for proper amounts of memory. The only major improvement is the awesome bandwidth of the 1T SSD in the new models. I use the F-keys extensively in my workflow. I could barely even reliably hit the ESC key at the Apple Store when testing vi. The keyboard was also atrocious, but I would probably adjust if it had F-keys. The bottom line is this is just not a useful laptop for me. Super sad, cause I would have liked a top-of-the-line computer. I am going to get an Alienware 13R3 or Razer Blade instead. Sorry, Apple, you've taken too long to put out a reasonable professional laptop.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by nsxwolf 10y ago

sixothree 10y ago

16GB SODIMMs. Actually it was about this time last year that they started to become available.

yuhong 10y ago
More precisely, 8Gbit DDR4 which is beginning to reach crossover now. There is also 8Gbit DDR3 that is less popular (and I think only made by Micron and Intelligent Memory), but Broadwell supports it for example.

veidr 10y ago

The opposite; nothing happened for many years and people kind of accepted that the "new" models were just slight refreshes to the existing 16GB-limited line. But when Apple finally introduced a brand new generation, and it was still limited to 16 GB, that really set everybody off.

protomyth 10y ago

My memory usage under Sierra and El Capitan really went up to the point a 4gb Mac is painful to non-usable. Not sure the cause, but what could be upgrade got upgraded and what couldn't (MacBook Air) got retired.

pentae 10y ago

Me personally I could care less about the extra memory, but what I really wanted was a quad core in a 13" form factor

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
Judging from Apple’s focus on silent, 10-hour-battery-life laptops, you’ll see quad-core CPUs in Apple 13" laptops only when the chip’s TDP drops to 15 W. In my opinion, it is sad that Apple changed the meaning of its Pro label from “professionals” to “consumers with lots of money”. As another commenter once said, replace “Pro” with “Deluxe” in your head, e.g. MacBook Deluxe, and suddenly it all makes sense. The machines trade potential increases in performance for increases in thinness.

glenndebacker 10y ago

I think the problem of the RAM is mostly because the things are soldered and non upgradable. And while 16GB may be definitely enough today, that "may" change in the future. When I bought my Macbook Pro in 2011 it came with 4GB RAM and at that time it was suffice but through the years I did upgrade it. The RAM and SSD upgrade makes that I still use my machine till today. The fact that you can use a Macbook Pro for years makes it a bit sweeter to swallow the bitter price pill. With the "limited" 16GB RAM I'm not sure that will be also the case here. Although it's at the point I simply can't afford it anymore. While it's nice to show off all the accessibility options for people with disabilities or health problems, the irony is that because of my disability (which has a big influence on my income) the apple ecosphere is becoming just to expensive.

undersuit 10y ago
From the explanations offered about why 16GB is the limit it's probably a good thing. If there was DIMMs someone would go out and buy 2 16GB SODIMMs and find out their MacBook Pro doesn't boot, behaves strangely, or just doesn't use the entire available ram.

romanovcode 10y ago

>Did something happen in the last year that made everyone demand 32GB? Yeah, microservice hype. Now you need a lot of RAM to open all those services to develop on local.

dagw 10y ago

Did something happen in the last year that made everyone demand 32GB? It became available. No one was demanding 16 or 4 or 1 or 0.1 GB of RAM either before the option became available. Personally I find that for everything I do either "4 GB or RAM is plenty" or "16 GB of RAM is barely enough". If I'm buying a laptop for only the first category of work, then the MBP is way too expensive for me (esp. since I'd also have to buy a second computer), and if I'm buying a laptop to handle both categories of work then it's under-powered.

addicted 10y ago

My Macs last me 4-5 years. The idea that 16GB will be sufficient 2 years from now is not believable to me. As good as the MBP might be, if you don't need a new laptop right now, it's just not a good buy. The worst part is that it cannot be upgraded.

Fnoord 10y ago

> Did something happen in the last year that made everyone demand 32GB? Yes, RAM-wise applications become more bloated due to containers, VMs, and the (ab)use of JS-based applications or 'apps'. Take into account I am typing this on a MBP from 2010, 6 years old, which shipped with 4 GB RAM which I was able to upgrade easily to 8 GB RAM, with a 256 GB SSD which I put in myself after updating from a 512 GB 5400 RPM HDD. By some (certainly not everyone) MBPs are bought to be an investment of several years, yet MBPs are no longer 'pimpable'. You can't upgrade their internals anymore. So what happens? People buy them with higher specs than they need. Which means a bigger or quicker SSD, and bigger or quicker RAM. Which brings me to the following point: the MBP used to be a relatively bulky laptop/notebook, but a beast. A compact, less powerful version was the Macbook Air which as the name suggests was also lighter. At best, it has shifted. At worst, this is no longer the case. Because the MBP is designed to be light itself. Finally, the battery. If it is already bad with 5 hours out of the box, this can be improved perhaps via software. Who knows? That is the risk of buying. You don't wanna take that risk. A product as expensive as this one needs to have high uptime out of the box. Plus, the battery will degrade over time as well, and Apple products haven't been known to have easily replaceable battery (compare to Dell XPS). Now, the problem with all of the above points is that they're all made so that the MBP -supposedly the powerhorse of notebooks/laptops of Apple- is smaller and weights less. Whereas they had the Macbook Air line for that purpose before. It just doesn't make sense from a customer PoV to pay more for less! You see, those who'd like to buy a device for years to come don't mind the USB-C debacle that much. Because in x years, it'll be everywhere (lets assume x=2 for the sake of argument, while the device is being used for 5 years and even if the device isn't used for 5 years it has resale value!).

iwritestuff 10y ago
I get more than 5 hours on my MBP 15". Battery issues are unfounded on my device. Have you used one and tested it yourself? If so, return it to the store and get new one.
SomeHacker44 10y ago
I have a 2011 MacBook Pro 15". It has two hard drives in it including a SATA III SSD, and 16G RAM. It's still running strong. I can't imagine why Apple has not been able to improve on the computer's specifications for serious professional engineer use in five years. The CPU increase and GPU increase is unimpressive. (Why no quad core in 13"?) Retina is fantastic, but not a substitute for proper amounts of memory. The only major improvement is the awesome bandwidth of the 1T SSD in the new models. I use the F-keys extensively in my workflow. I could barely even reliably hit the ESC key at the Apple Store when testing vi. The keyboard was also atrocious, but I would probably adjust if it had F-keys. The bottom line is this is just not a useful laptop for me. Super sad, cause I would have liked a top-of-the-line computer. I am going to get an Alienware 13R3 or Razer Blade instead. Sorry, Apple, you've taken too long to put out a reasonable professional laptop.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]