I'm not trolling; I'm looking for informed advice ("and you're posting here??").
I've had a 13" MPB with 8/512 for a few years now as my primary computer, running XCode, MS Office, some games, and various other things. I don't run Photoshop and I don't do any video editing. I run for months at a time without rebooting and have no stability issues. I've ordered a new 13" MBP w/ TB so I can pass my current MBP to my college student daughter. I ordered $2000 8/512 configuration.
So the question is, for my situation, is $200 to upgrade to 16 gig of RAM a reasonable investment or a waste of money? I don't think I've suffered at all from only having 8 gig to date, so there is some probability that I would literally never notice the difference between 8 and 16 gig. I'll likely replace this MBP in about 3 years just to have a new toy to play with.
What would you do in my situation?
Go with 16.
Storage limitations can be lived with. If RAM ever becomes an issue, there is nothing you can do, and at $200, it's worth the peace of mind, resale value, and possible subtle speed improvement, even if you never actually *need* it.
Yep. 16GB LPDDR3 (which is what Apple uses) is industry norm. They'd use LPDDR4, if that existed.
I've read that even Kaby Lake won't support LPDDR4 so we'll be stuck with 16GiB until at least Cannonlake in 2018. But given Intel's very long release cycle where the proper chips for the performance notebooks come last in the cycle, and repeated delays with their chips, I wouldn't be surprised if 32GiB doesn't happen until 2019. God, I hope that isn't the case.
Dell XPS15 with Kaby Lake supports 32GB of RAM, so your info must be wrong,
As the user of the system, do I care? Battery life will obviously not be as good, but if I accept that compromise, is there any reason I would care whether the RAM was designed for a desktop computer?
"What I said, and I made it very, very clear, was that the base line specs were not fitting of the pro label. 256GB, at this point in time is not pro. Dual core is not pro. Integrated graphics is not pro. "
By that definition, only the 15" MBP would qualify as Pro. Apple is not going to put a quad-core CPU & discreet GPU into the 13" version.
And why on earth not? Ah! Silly me! I should have known better. They'd end up too thick!!
The lowest-end Skylake quad-core that Apple uses consumes 45W.
Apple CANNOT stick a 45W processor into that case. A quad-core processor generates way too much heat. The limit for the 13" thermal envelope is about 30W, and has been for over a decade (the initial Core Duo MacBook from May 2006 used a 31W processor in its higher configuration).
Go search out a 13" quad-core laptop — by any manufacturer. Go on. We'll wait. They might even exist.
"What I said, and I made it very, very clear, was that the base line specs were not fitting of the pro label. 256GB, at this point in time is not pro. Dual core is not pro. Integrated graphics is not pro. "
By that definition, only the 15" MBP would qualify as Pro. Apple is not going to put a quad-core CPU & discreet GPU into the 13" version.
And why on earth not? Ah! Silly me! I should have known better. They'd end up too thick!!
The lowest-end Skylake quad-core that Apple uses consumes 45W.
Apple CANNOT stick a 45W processor into that case. A quad-core processor generates way too much heat. The limit for the 13" thermal envelope is about 30W, and has been for over a decade (the initial Core Duo MacBook from May 2006 used a 31W processor in its higher configuration).
Go search out a 13" quad-core laptop — by any manufacturer. Go on. We'll wait. They might even exist.
I see humour is not your strong point. I'm sure you get my gist, though. As for existing, I think they do (Gigabyte Aorus X3 Plus??) But as I said, I am sure you get the gist.
As the user of the system, do I care? Battery life will obviously not be as good, but if I accept that compromise, is there any reason I would care whether the RAM was designed for a desktop computer?
Serious question, not a snark.
Judging by our comment, you personally wouldn't care and that would be your perogative. But that means your vision of what Pro laptop is vs Apple's is not aligned. Apple has prioritized battery life / portability over MAXIMUM performance.
I wonder how many commenters are paid by Apple about these things. Along with how many commenters are only getting this new computer cause they work at a tech site.
Apple is a joke without Steve Jobs. Their new business strategy is change everything just slightly enough to get gullible tech geeks that still think Apple is high end to buy their product.
Let's just change all the ports so people t Have to buy out our new cords. Lets claim everything not sold directly from us is a fake. Let's over price our computer that is using technology from 4 years ago.
Funny how all you claim so many people are buying Apple. All my Mac friends have switched to PC in the last few years. So I guess the claim goes both ways.
You are right. Steve Jobs would never have released a Mac that dropped every legacy port Apple had ever used in the past. /S.
You might want to check your /s at the door and take a look at the complete history, not just one cherry picked example. Yes, Jobs did this once, in the late 90s with the original iMac. At the time, pretty much the only thing anyone plugged into two of the "lost" ports (SCSI and serial) was a printer. Any other devices were quite rare. (ADB was also removed, but Apple included a USB keyboard and mouse in the box, so no functionality was lost. And the iMac still had built-in modem and Ethernet ports.)
There are at least two more recent examples where Jobs did, in fact, leave the old ports in place...the first Apple laptop with FW800 (still had FW400) and the first one with Thunderbolt (still had FW800).
So you conveniently ignore these much more recent examples of Apple providing an orderly port migration design iteration and have to go back 15 years to find an example that supports your position. Not really a very solid argument.
Since you're now talking about examples where they dropped individual ports, let's have a look:
— Removing the PCMCIA slot in 2009 (and replacing it with the consumer-toy SD card slot). There wasn't even ANY alternative available until Thunderbolt happened, in 2011. — Removing the dedicated audio in. — Removing Ethernet. — Removing the modem. — Removing VGA. — Removing DVI. — Heck, ANY of the (feels like a dozen) monitor connection transitions Apple has gone through - VGA, DVI-I, DVI-D, ADC (remember ADC?), mini-DVI, micro-DVI, mini Displayport (not to mention Target Display Mode on the 27" iMac), whatever else I can't remember…
Most of those (except PCMCIA) allowed the use of older peripherals via dongles (ADC to DVI adapter brick for, what was it, 149€?) or new cables. Just like today.
And, of course, — non-Mac, but still: 30-pin iPod connector to Lightning.
Apple has CONSTANTLY dropped ports and replaced them with alternatives they considered more useful in the long term, or (as with the thankfully short-lived micro-DVI) which they required for engineering reasons.
The point isn't the dropping of ports, it's how it is done. Dropping everything for the new in ONE foul swoop is unnecessary.
I correct my reply #85 here since it is stated that the memory allocated to a Virtual Machine is wired, not swappable. I'd already removed VM on behalf of BootCamp and I overlooked that fact. (The memory you allocate to the virtual machine is the virtual memory, not live RAM. If your virtual machine application limits this virtual memory allocation to the amount of available RAM this is its fault.)
Even in this case, 4 GB allocated to each VM under 16 GB host would do the job. You don't play heavy games on both VM at once, do you? If you are a power user, you are supposed to be able to tweak each guest operating system to run peacefully under 4 GB. And If you are ready to pay half of a second laptop for a 32 GB option (which is not even ready) on a notebook, you're supposed as a power user to figure out that actually buying a second laptop would be better. Beyond that, there are also many cloud options.
Exactly. No one has yet presented a real world example where these new laptops couldn't meet their needs. They're just going off of specs and internet freakout.
Here you go....
I’m a developer. That means I need to run Xcode, Mail, Messages, Calendar and Slack and Terminal windows and Remote Desktop. I run SourceTree and Photoshop and Word and Excel. I have a dozen Mission Control spaces in which I keep open many, many, many Safari windows and tabs.
Not to mention my occasional need to run custom Linux and Windows Server test environments in VMWare. VMs take memory. Lots of memory.
So what’s my problem? Lack of RAM. I’m forever running out of space on my 16GB machine. I reboot at least once every 3–4 days or face crashing and an unstable machine.
As the user of the system, do I care? Battery life will obviously not be as good, but if I accept that compromise, is there any reason I would care whether the RAM was designed for a desktop computer?
I wonder how many commenters are paid by Apple about these things. Along with how many commenters are only getting this new computer cause they work at a tech site.
Apple is a joke without Steve Jobs. Their new business strategy is change everything just slightly enough to get gullible tech geeks that still think Apple is high end to buy their product.
Let's just change all the ports so people t Have to buy out our new cords. Lets claim everything not sold directly from us is a fake. Let's over price our computer that is using technology from 4 years ago.
Funny how all you claim so many people are buying Apple. All my Mac friends have switched to PC in the last few years. So I guess the claim goes both ways.
You are right. Steve Jobs would never have released a Mac that dropped every legacy port Apple had ever used in the past. /S.
You might want to check your /s at the door and take a look at the complete history, not just one cherry picked example. Yes, Jobs did this once, in the late 90s with the original iMac. At the time, pretty much the only thing anyone plugged into two of the "lost" ports (SCSI and serial) was a printer. Any other devices were quite rare. (ADB was also removed, but Apple included a USB keyboard and mouse in the box, so no functionality was lost. And the iMac still had built-in modem and Ethernet ports.)
There are at least two more recent examples where Jobs did, in fact, leave the old ports in place...the first Apple laptop with FW800 (still had FW400) and the first one with Thunderbolt (still had FW800).
So you conveniently ignore these much more recent examples of Apple providing an orderly port migration design iteration and have to go back 15 years to find an example that supports your position. Not really a very solid argument.
Since you're now talking about examples where they dropped individual ports, let's have a look:
— Removing the PCMCIA slot in 2009 (and replacing it with the consumer-toy SD card slot). There wasn't even ANY alternative available until Thunderbolt happened, in 2011. — Removing the dedicated audio in. — Removing Ethernet. — Removing the modem. — Removing VGA. — Removing DVI. — Heck, ANY of the (feels like a dozen) monitor connection transitions Apple has gone through - VGA, DVI-I, DVI-D, ADC (remember ADC?), mini-DVI, micro-DVI, mini Displayport (not to mention Target Display Mode on the 27" iMac), whatever else I can't remember…
Most of those (except PCMCIA) allowed the use of older peripherals via dongles (ADC to DVI adapter brick for, what was it, 149€?) or new cables. Just like today.
And, of course, — non-Mac, but still: 30-pin iPod connector to Lightning.
Apple has CONSTANTLY dropped ports and replaced them with alternatives they considered more useful in the long term, or (as with the thankfully short-lived micro-DVI) which they required for engineering reasons.
The point isn't the dropping of ports, it's how it is done. Dropping everything for the new in ONE foul swoop is unnecessary.
The point is that nothing was dropped that isn't still available to those that need it. They've done worse than that in the past.
This isn't "one fell swoop"; this is strike two after the MacBook happened over a year ago. Anybody who wasn't expecting to deal with this, and who doesn't understand why, simply wasn't paying attention.
Judging by our comment, you personally wouldn't care and that would be your perogative. But that means your vision of what Pro laptop is vs Apple's is not aligned. Apple has prioritized battery life / portability over MAXIMUM performance.
Understood. I probably could have phrased the question better, like this:
Aside from reduced battery time, does using desktop RAM instead of LP result in any consequences the user will notice?
As the user of the system, do I care? Battery life will obviously not be as good, but if I accept that compromise, is there any reason I would care whether the RAM was designed for a desktop computer?
Serious question, not a snark.
It's a laptop. Battery life matters.
As does portability. I actually would have wanted a 13" quad machine for portability reasons. I knew it wasn't going to happen, so I'm thankful for every bit they managed to shave off the 15" model. Now, it's almost identical to the 2011 13" MBP it's replacing.
Judging by our comment, you personally wouldn't care and that would be your perogative. But that means your vision of what Pro laptop is vs Apple's is not aligned. Apple has prioritized battery life / portability over MAXIMUM performance.
Understood. I probably could have phrased the question better, like this:
Aside from reduced battery time, does using desktop RAM instead of LP result in any consequences the user will notice?
If I understand correctly, it requires more space and extra controlling architecture that doesn't come with Skylake. This may cause additional engineering restrictions.
The point isn't the dropping of ports, it's how it is done. Dropping everything for the new in ONE foul swoop is unnecessary.
I actually perceived that as a positive. To me, using an adapter is an acceptable compromise in order to be able to use ANY port for anything I want, rather than being stuck with unused ports dedicated to something I don't need at any given moment while possibly running out of something I do. Now what used to be a dedicated HDMI port can be HDMI or Thunderbolt or USB or Ethernet or...
Different views of the same move, possibly due to different ways of using the machine.
Yep. 16GB LPDDR3 (which is what Apple uses) is industry norm. They'd use LPDDR4, if that existed.
I've read that even Kaby Lake won't support LPDDR4 so we'll be stuck with 16GiB until at least Cannonlake in 2018. But given Intel's very long release cycle where the proper chips for the performance notebooks come last in the cycle, and repeated delays with their chips, I wouldn't be surprised if 32GiB doesn't happen until 2019. God, I hope that isn't the case.
Dell XPS15 with Kaby Lake supports 32GB of RAM, so your info must be wrong,
Is it really that hard to read before you reply? No one is saying that these Skylake chips can't support more than 16GiB, what everyone is saying is they can't support more than 16GiB when using LP RAM. The LP refers to Low Power. Why is that so hard to grasp? Why does it confound you that Apple wants to maintain a 10 hour battery life within a certain weight and volume ratio? Why can't you understand that it's not possible without LPDDR4 which isn't available for this Skylake architecture. It's been explained and rehashed on every fucking tech site since last Thursday.
Guess Steve Jobs was right. People truly don't read anymore.
Yep. 16GB LPDDR3 (which is what Apple uses) is industry norm. They'd use LPDDR4, if that existed.
I've read that even Kaby Lake won't support LPDDR4 so we'll be stuck with 16GiB until at least Cannonlake in 2018. But given Intel's very long release cycle where the proper chips for the performance notebooks come last in the cycle, and repeated delays with their chips, I wouldn't be surprised if 32GiB doesn't happen until 2019. God, I hope that isn't the case.
Dell XPS15 with Kaby Lake supports 32GB of RAM, so your info must be wrong,
Is it really that hard to read before you reply? No one is saying that these Skylake chips can't support more than 16GiB, what everyone is saying is they can't support more than 16GiB when using LP RAM. The LP refers to Low Power. Why is that so hard to grasp? Why does it confound you that Apple wants to maintain a 10 hour battery life within a certain weight and volume ratio? Why can't you understand that it's not possible without LPDDR4 which isn't available for this Skylake architecture. It's been explained and rehashed on every fucking tech site since last Thursday.
Guess Steve Jobs was right. People truly don't read anymore.
Bottom Line: There's no way to use 32GB of RAM and still meet Apple's other design criteria.
Apparently 32GB *can* be crammed in if one is prepared to sacrifice size, weight, heat, noise, and battery life.
Judging by our comment, you personally wouldn't care and that would be your perogative. But that means your vision of what Pro laptop is vs Apple's is not aligned. Apple has prioritized battery life / portability over MAXIMUM performance.
Understood. I probably could have phrased the question better, like this:
Aside from reduced battery time, does using desktop RAM instead of LP result in any consequences the user will notice?
Yes. The message included "not efficient enough for a laptop" statement as the second reason along with the battery.
As the user of the system, do I care? Battery life will obviously not be as good, but if I accept that compromise, is there any reason I would care whether the RAM was designed for a desktop computer?
Comments
Storage limitations can be lived with. If RAM ever becomes an issue, there is nothing you can do, and at $200, it's worth the peace of mind, resale value, and possible subtle speed improvement, even if you never actually *need* it.
Not applicable.
As the user of the system, do I care? Battery life will obviously not be as good, but if I accept that compromise, is there any reason I would care whether the RAM was designed for a desktop computer?
Serious question, not a snark.
Even in this case, 4 GB allocated to each VM under 16 GB host would do the job. You don't play heavy games on both VM at once, do you? If you are a power user, you are supposed to be able to tweak each guest operating system to run peacefully under 4 GB. And If you are ready to pay half of a second laptop for a 32 GB option (which is not even ready) on a notebook, you're supposed as a power user to figure out that actually buying a second laptop would be better. Beyond that, there are also many cloud options.
Aside from reduced battery time, does using desktop RAM instead of LP result in any consequences the user will notice?
I actually perceived that as a positive. To me, using an adapter is an acceptable compromise in order to be able to use ANY port for anything I want, rather than being stuck with unused ports dedicated to something I don't need at any given moment while possibly running out of something I do. Now what used to be a dedicated HDMI port can be HDMI or Thunderbolt or USB or Ethernet or...
Different views of the same move, possibly due to different ways of using the machine.
Bottom Line: There's no way to use 32GB of RAM and still meet Apple's other design criteria.
Apparently 32GB *can* be crammed in if one is prepared to sacrifice size, weight, heat, noise, and battery life.
Is that right?