Actually, the company at fault here isn't Apple, but Intel. Skylake doesn't support the needed LPDDR4 that would allow them to go to higher capacities. And Kaby Lake will only have support in the U chips, and U chips aren't mobile quad cores, so the 15" won't be able to get the upgrade even when they do go to KBL.
In short, Intel continues to drop the ball. It's hard to imagine Apple isn't getting tired of this kind of crap.
True but still. Apple could make the macbook Pro a bit thicker and heavier to incorporate a bigger battery.
This thinness is everything is idiotic. It is function follows form, which is just plain wrong doing.
The other thing to consider is it's possible the SSD which is three times faster than before, will offset any limitation in physical RAM. Keep in mind also that macOS has the ability to compress RAM contents and dynamically expand it to make more efficient use of RAM. Having "only" 16 GB of RAM is either a very small segment of the market or not an actual issue.
Well, OS X/Mac OS continues to be bad at paging/swapping, and it comes to a complete screeching halt if you try and run two 6GB VMs in 16GB. (Sometimes just one and Safari is enough to bring about zero response from the trackpad for many minutes, until I give up and power it off.)
I'll be surprised if 3x faster SSD helps, and I'll wait for others to try and see how they get on.
It sucks that you can't opt for 16gb ram on 13 inch pro. Going for 15 inch pro just for more ram doesn't make sense. That is too heavy and big for me. I was expecting that pros will start at 16gb this year. 8gb just doesn't cut it for professional work now. And you can't even add more ram down the years when softwares get more heavy. Absolutely sucks.
It sucks that you can't opt for 16gb ram on 13 inch pro. Going for 15 inch pro just for more ram doesn't make sense. That is too heavy and big for me. I was expecting that pros will start at 16gb this year. 8gb just doesn't cut it for professional work now. And you can't even add more ram down the years when softwares get more heavy. Absolutely sucks.
Wrong. The base models start at 8 GB but you can upgrade to 16 GB when you customize.
2015 13-inch MacBook Pro: 74.9 WHr battery 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro: 54.5 WHr battery 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar: 49 WHr battery
The quest for thinness in a "Pro" machine is bringing out the causalities.
The other thing to consider is it's possible the SSD which is three times faster than before, will offset any limitation in physical RAM. Keep in mind also that macOS has the ability to compress RAM contents and dynamically expand it to make more efficient use of RAM. Having "only" 16 GB of RAM is either a very small segment of the market or not an actual issue.
SSD makes this discussion pointless. One would prefer swapping, because RAM draws power continuously, even when idle, larger RAM draws more power, obviously. More RAM was a requirement of the spinning-plate hard disk era, because swapping on these disks is slow. Even with desktop machines, a PC dealer would suggest a faster hard disk before suggesting RAM upgrade. Upgradable RAM is no longer a solution, because RAM also affects the very delicate thermal balance of the system and some (mostly undocumented) thermal specifics must be considered, which is beyond the capabilities of even the most experienced users. Apple has always been very strict on these issues, including the amount of RAM in iOS devices.
Actually, the company at fault here isn't Apple, but Intel. Skylake doesn't support the needed LPDDR4 that would allow them to go to higher capacities. And Kaby Lake will only have support in the U chips, and U chips aren't mobile quad cores, so the 15" won't be able to get the upgrade even when they do go to KBL.
In short, Intel continues to drop the ball. It's hard to imagine Apple isn't getting tired of this kind of crap.
Desktop chips in a laptop enclosure !!! That thing would get fire before completing the first level of the game !!!
Did you see how thick that laptop was? Geez it was like what I used in 2003. It's basically a desktop case being sold as a laptop. I mean holy crap, look at picture of the bottom of the laptop. It's filled with vents. It looks like you have to keep it on a hard surface or it will overheat!
The other thing to consider is it's possible the SSD which is three times faster than before, will offset any limitation in physical RAM. Keep in mind also that macOS has the ability to compress RAM contents and dynamically expand it to make more efficient use of RAM. Having "only" 16 GB of RAM is either a very small segment of the market or not an actual issue.
Well, OS X/Mac OS continues to be bad at paging/swapping, and it comes to a complete screeching halt if you try and run two 6GB VMs in 16GB. (Sometimes just one and Safari is enough to bring about zero response from the trackpad for many minutes, until I give up and power it off.)
I'll be surprised if 3x faster SSD helps, and I'll wait for others to try and see how they get on.
It seems like most people who need gobs of RAM have made some mention of running multiple VMs. I guess I need to ask th question... why? It seems like a terribly inefficient way to run your laptop. I guess I don't have a need to run Windows or Linux when on my Mac or can virtualize that in the cloud. May I ask what is the use case of running two VMs simultaneously that's not a server configuration? Do they need to be using 6 GB at a clip?
The other thing to consider is it's possible the SSD which is three times faster than before, will offset any limitation in physical RAM.
Depends on the software, I think. Pro Tools, the definitive professional audio software, caches the timeline in RAM. I know less than zero about coding so take my observations with a grain of salt, but my impression is that Avid writes software in a way no one else does, and it's not always a good thing. I don't think disk swapping will work in Pro Tools, at least not the way you'd expect. 16GB of RAM could be a limitation for some projects, and I would have preferred a 32GB option, even if it meant sacrificing LOTS of battery time. I need to take my computer from place to place, but there's almost always a power outlet wherever I go.
I did a lousy job of sending Apple that message though, since I ordered the damn thing anyway.
The other thing to consider is it's possible the SSD which is three times faster than before, will offset any limitation in physical RAM. Keep in mind also that macOS has the ability to compress RAM contents and dynamically expand it to make more efficient use of RAM. Having "only" 16 GB of RAM is either a very small segment of the market or not an actual issue.
Well, OS X/Mac OS continues to be bad at paging/swapping, and it comes to a complete screeching halt if you try and run two 6GB VMs in 16GB. (Sometimes just one and Safari is enough to bring about zero response from the trackpad for many minutes, until I give up and power it off.)
I'll be surprised if 3x faster SSD helps, and I'll wait for others to try and see how they get on.
I understand your point but macOS is not to blame in such extreme cases, these are directly related to the VM itself. Parallels was limited to only 1GB of the available 2GB VRAM. I've dismissed Parallels and switched to BootCamp, then last year's Retina MBP 15 has proven itself as a killer game machine despite the old Radeon R9.
Apple could make the macbook Pro a bit thicker and heavier to incorporate a bigger battery.
This thinness is everything is idiotic. It is function follows form, which is just plain wrong doing.
High performance -- Long battery life -- Small and light form factor. Pick any two. You can't have all three.
I would prefer either a larger. heavier device with better performance, or a small, thin high performance computer with crappy battery life, over a small, light device with long battery life but compromised performance. As I said in another thread, a bigger, heavier MacBook Pro with a two-hour battery is still a helluvalot better than trying to lug around an iMac!
So yeah, I don't get it either. I understand that thinner and lighter are desirable and why Apple is striving to keep size down, but I find myself wondering how many of its users would make different choices. I know every design is a balancing act so compromises have to be made. What I wonder is if those of us who would make different decisions are the bulk of the target market, or are we just a noisy minority?
2015 13-inch MacBook Pro: 74.9 WHr battery 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro: 54.5 WHr battery 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar: 49 WHr battery
The quest for thinness in a "Pro" machine is bringing out the causalities.
iPad 4: 42.5wh. iPad Air: 32.4wh iPad Air 2: 27.3wh
Guess what? Each successive model was thinner, more powerful and capable, and got the same 10+ hour battery life.
The reductions in battery size, improvements in battery life and reduced energy consumption are pretty incredible. The numbers quoted by Mazda and thewhitefalcon appear to improve by about 15-25% annually. I assume these gains are chiefly explained by smaller and more efficient electronics (processors) and better software design. I don't believe battery technology is improving very rapidly, or could explain Apple's trend toward smaller batteries.
Adding more than 16GB of memory to MacBook Pro is technically feasible, but Apple is not supporting it. So that makes it a business decision.
That means the incremental value of extra memory to a limited number of users does not justify the number of customers (profits) lost by adding costly hardware that most users would find superfluous. The same logic explains why cars don't include every option as standard equipment. Niche demands don't dominate product design, because that opens the door to competitors who won't try to force those options on to every customer. Apple already faces this problem, and indulging its engineering fantasies (and those of some users) would make it worse. "The best is the enemy of the good."
My comments are null and void if a majority of users would benefit from more than 16GB of ram on their MacBook Pros. (But I doubt if that is the case.)
The other thing to consider is it's possible the SSD which is three times faster than before, will offset any limitation in physical RAM. Keep in mind also that macOS has the ability to compress RAM contents and dynamically expand it to make more efficient use of RAM. Having "only" 16 GB of RAM is either a very small segment of the market or not an actual issue.
Well, OS X/Mac OS continues to be bad at paging/swapping, and it comes to a complete screeching halt if you try and run two 6GB VMs in 16GB. (Sometimes just one and Safari is enough to bring about zero response from the trackpad for many minutes, until I give up and power it off.)
I'll be surprised if 3x faster SSD helps, and I'll wait for others to try and see how they get on.
It seems like most people who need gobs of RAM have made some mention of running multiple VMs. I guess I need to ask th question... why? It seems like a terribly inefficient way to run your laptop. I guess I don't have a need to run Windows or Linux when on my Mac or can virtualize that in the cloud. May I ask what is the use case of running two VMs simultaneously that's not a server configuration? Do they need to be using 6 GB at a clip?
I own a software development company. A typical setup of one of my developers is: 3 Docker containers for a MongoDB cluster, 1 instance of the IDE (Webstorm) for the webclient, 1 IDE instance (Pycharm) for the Webserver, a mongodb gui, a browser with 10 tabs open, with a total RAM consumption of about 22 GB. (Docker containers use less resources than VM, so with VM's it would be worse). The moment they do end to end testing they need an additional VM with Windows to test the compatibility with Internet Edge.
Apple could make the macbook Pro a bit thicker and heavier to incorporate a bigger battery.
This thinness is everything is idiotic. It is function follows form, which is just plain wrong doing.
High performance -- Long battery life -- Small and light form factor. Pick any two. You can't have all three.
I would prefer either a larger. heavier device with better performance, or a small, thin high performance computer with crappy battery life, over a small, light device with long battery life but compromised performance. As I said in another thread, a bigger, heavier MacBook Pro with a two-hour battery is still a helluvalot better than trying to lug around an iMac!
So yeah, I don't get it either. I understand that thinner and lighter are desirable and why Apple is striving to keep size down, but I find myself wondering how many of its users would make different choices. I know every design is a balancing act so compromises have to be made. What I wonder is if those of us who would make different decisions are the bulk of the target market, or are we just a noisy minority?
Always difficult to tell. But this is what usually happens: Apple makes a decision. Folk here an in other forums have a collective seizure and swear to the almighty that Apple will not see another penny from them ever again. Apple sells the product that "no one will ever buy" in ridiculous numbers. The screaming Mac users are STILL here.
It's quite it's possible that the people in this forum are not Apple's core market which is off taking fab pictures of its ridiculously attractive base-jumping, hip-hop-mixing girlfriend.
Apple could make the macbook Pro a bit thicker and heavier to incorporate a bigger battery.
This thinness is everything is idiotic. It is function follows form, which is just plain wrong doing.
High performance -- Long battery life -- Small and light form factor. Pick any two. You can't have all three.
I would prefer either a larger. heavier device with better performance, or a small, thin high performance computer with crappy battery life, over a small, light device with long battery life but compromised performance. As I said in another thread, a bigger, heavier MacBook Pro with a two-hour battery is still a helluvalot better than trying to lug around an iMac!
So yeah, I don't get it either. I understand that thinner and lighter are desirable and why Apple is striving to keep size down, but I find myself wondering how many of its users would make different choices. I know every design is a balancing act so compromises have to be made. What I wonder is if those of us who would make different decisions are the bulk of the target market, or are we just a noisy minority?
You ignore your other god and only revolt against one god. Your other god is the heat. Performance is directly related to the temperature, and heat is generated by the CPU and, obviously larger RAM, which puts a load on the CPU for bigger memory management (moving memory blocks around to create continuous free space, compressing memory and things like that). Put more RAM, you generate more heat, and the CPU is slowed down more frequently (and the battery is exhausted faster because of the fans kicking in). So running the laptop continuously with wall power is illusory, since the CPU will slow down whenever the temperature reaches critical levels. Fans may degrade over time capturing dust, so isn't it wiser to manage heat at the very source instead of relying on cooling?
Mobile computing depends on a delicate balance with hundreds of finely tuned hardware parameters resulting from several years of research. There is no room for absolutism in mobile computing, the goal is to find the optimum and the balance.
The other thing to consider is it's possible the SSD which is three times faster than before, will offset any limitation in physical RAM. Keep in mind also that macOS has the ability to compress RAM contents and dynamically expand it to make more efficient use of RAM. Having "only" 16 GB of RAM is either a very small segment of the market or not an actual issue.
Well, OS X/Mac OS continues to be bad at paging/swapping, and it comes to a complete screeching halt if you try and run two 6GB VMs in 16GB. (Sometimes just one and Safari is enough to bring about zero response from the trackpad for many minutes, until I give up and power it off.)
I'll be surprised if 3x faster SSD helps, and I'll wait for others to try and see how they get on.
It seems like most people who need gobs of RAM have made some mention of running multiple VMs. I guess I need to ask th question... why? It seems like a terribly inefficient way to run your laptop. I guess I don't have a need to run Windows or Linux when on my Mac or can virtualize that in the cloud. May I ask what is the use case of running two VMs simultaneously that's not a server configuration? Do they need to be using 6 GB at a clip?
I own a software development company. A typical setup of one of my developers is: 3 Docker containers for a MongoDB cluster, 1 instance of the IDE (Webstorm) for the webclient, 1 IDE instance (Pycharm) for the Webserver, a mongodb gui, a browser with 10 tabs open, with a total RAM consumption of about 22 GB. (Docker containers use less resources than VM, so with VM's it would be worse). The moment they do end to end testing they need an additional VM with Windows to test the compatibility with Internet Edge.
I've owned a digital and mobile agency and am now the tech lead of two mobile app companies. I'm not trying to tell you how to run your business since I don't have a clue as to what sort of apps you're building, but that sounds like a really inefficient and expensive development environment. I would think you could spin up your development environment either in the cloud or on a separate VM server and use source control with a CI server to push to the dev environment for testing instead of duplicating those resources for each developer. There are services you can use for browser compatibility testing too.
I've done similar things before containers with queuing up a Windows machine in a VM for VS and web server emulation and that was with far less RAM.
Perhaps instead of bitching on Internet forums ya'll send Apple a message and don't buy these new machines? You want Apple to do things differently? They will when sales drop significantly. Alternatively you could wait for reviews to drop before assuming these machines won't meet your needs.
The Information ran a piece yesterday about people inside Apple saying under Tim Cook the company is run by sales and operations. I'm actually inclined to believe it. I doubt not allowing a BTO option for 32GB RAM is coming from the engineering or design teams. I doubt they made the decision to no longer include the extension cord for the power adapter in the box. And I doubt they set prices on these machines.
So long as sales and operations run the show I think this is what we're going to see. Instead of Apple bringing the iPhone SE concept to all their product lines we get keeping around older machines with older specs to fill the low end of the price spectrum. And you end up wit bloated product lines trying to fill all these different price points. There are cheap Chrombooks with better displays than the $999 13" MBA Apple is still selling. It's ridiculous that Apple would be selling any device without a Retina display at this point. And for products like Mac mini and Mac Pro....either update them or kill them off. But don't leave them in the product line outdated without any price cuts. That's ridiculous too.
if Apple had real courage they'd blow up their product lines and start over with a simple strategy of good, better and best. And good would be more than a product with 2-3 (or more) year old tech hanging around to fill a price point. Each one of those silos would get frequent refreshes and would be the best that price point has to offer. Considering how successful the iPhone SE has been you'd think this idea would be a no brainier. But it would actually take real courage because it might eat into margins. Of course that begs the question is Apple a company obsessed with making great products or not?
Apple could make the macbook Pro a bit thicker and heavier to incorporate a bigger battery.
This thinness is everything is idiotic. It is function follows form, which is just plain wrong doing.
High performance -- Long battery life -- Small and light form factor. Pick any two. You can't have all three.
I would prefer either a larger. heavier device with better performance, or a small, thin high performance computer with crappy battery life, over a small, light device with long battery life but compromised performance. As I said in another thread, a bigger, heavier MacBook Pro with a two-hour battery is still a helluvalot better than trying to lug around an iMac!
So yeah, I don't get it either. I understand that thinner and lighter are desirable and why Apple is striving to keep size down, but I find myself wondering how many of its users would make different choices. I know every design is a balancing act so compromises have to be made. What I wonder is if those of us who would make different decisions are the bulk of the target market, or are we just a noisy minority?
Based on the specs and benchmarks, I don't think they've made compromises concerning performance. Maybe software manufacturers ought to use RAM more effectively and learn to code properly. 16 GB with superfast SSD should give you the tools you need to create a performant app.
So why are video editors using laptops designed to be highly portable? Perhaps Apple needs to release a workstation as well as a laptop? ... One with desktop specs that is capable of being moved, but not meant to be light or be used for extended periods on battery.
It sucks that you can't opt for 16gb ram on 13 inch pro. Going for 15 inch pro just for more ram doesn't make sense. That is too heavy and big for me. I was expecting that pros will start at 16gb this year. 8gb just doesn't cut it for professional work now. And you can't even add more ram down the years when softwares get more heavy. Absolutely sucks.
Wrong. The base models start at 8 GB but you can upgrade to 16 GB when you customize.
You can configure it in USA, but not in the country I live in. Here, you only get 8gb on 13 inch model.
Comments
I'll be surprised if 3x faster SSD helps, and I'll wait for others to try and see how they get on.
It sucks that you can't opt for 16gb ram on 13 inch pro. Going for 15 inch pro just for more ram doesn't make sense. That is too heavy and big for me. I was expecting that pros will start at 16gb this year. 8gb just doesn't cut it for professional work now. And you can't even add more ram down the years when softwares get more heavy. Absolutely sucks.
Depends on the software, I think. Pro Tools, the definitive professional audio software, caches the timeline in RAM. I know less than zero about coding so take my observations with a grain of salt, but my impression is that Avid writes software in a way no one else does, and it's not always a good thing. I don't think disk swapping will work in Pro Tools, at least not the way you'd expect. 16GB of RAM could be a limitation for some projects, and I would have preferred a 32GB option, even if it meant sacrificing LOTS of battery time. I need to take my computer from place to place, but there's almost always a power outlet wherever I go.
I did a lousy job of sending Apple that message though, since I ordered the damn thing anyway.
High performance -- Long battery life -- Small and light form factor. Pick any two. You can't have all three.
I would prefer either a larger. heavier device with better performance, or a small, thin high performance computer with crappy battery life, over a small, light device with long battery life but compromised performance. As I said in another thread, a bigger, heavier MacBook Pro with a two-hour battery is still a helluvalot better than trying to lug around an iMac!
So yeah, I don't get it either. I understand that thinner and lighter are desirable and why Apple is striving to keep size down, but I find myself wondering how many of its users would make different choices. I know every design is a balancing act so compromises have to be made. What I wonder is if those of us who would make different decisions are the bulk of the target market, or are we just a noisy minority?
That means the incremental value of extra memory to a limited number of users does not justify the number of customers (profits) lost by adding costly hardware that most users would find superfluous. The same logic explains why cars don't include every option as standard equipment. Niche demands don't dominate product design, because that opens the door to competitors who won't try to force those options on to every customer. Apple already faces this problem, and indulging its engineering fantasies (and those of some users) would make it worse. "The best is the enemy of the good."
My comments are null and void if a majority of users would benefit from more than 16GB of ram on their MacBook Pros. (But I doubt if that is the case.)
Always difficult to tell. But this is what usually happens:
Apple makes a decision.
Folk here an in other forums have a collective seizure and swear to the almighty that Apple will not see another penny from them ever again.
Apple sells the product that "no one will ever buy" in ridiculous numbers.
The screaming Mac users are STILL here.
It's quite it's possible that the people in this forum are not Apple's core market which is off taking fab pictures of its ridiculously attractive base-jumping, hip-hop-mixing girlfriend.
Mobile computing depends on a delicate balance with hundreds of finely tuned hardware parameters resulting from several years of research. There is no room for absolutism in mobile computing, the goal is to find the optimum and the balance.
I've done similar things before containers with queuing up a Windows machine in a VM for VS and web server emulation and that was with far less RAM.
The Information ran a piece yesterday about people inside Apple saying under Tim Cook the company is run by sales and operations. I'm actually inclined to believe it. I doubt not allowing a BTO option for 32GB RAM is coming from the engineering or design teams. I doubt they made the decision to no longer include the extension cord for the power adapter in the box. And I doubt they set prices on these machines.
So long as sales and operations run the show I think this is what we're going to see. Instead of Apple bringing the iPhone SE concept to all their product lines we get keeping around older machines with older specs to fill the low end of the price spectrum. And you end up wit bloated product lines trying to fill all these different price points. There are cheap Chrombooks with better displays than the $999 13" MBA Apple is still selling. It's ridiculous that Apple would be selling any device without a Retina display at this point. And for products like Mac mini and Mac Pro....either update them or kill them off. But don't leave them in the product line outdated without any price cuts. That's ridiculous too.
if Apple had real courage they'd blow up their product lines and start over with a simple strategy of good, better and best. And good would be more than a product with 2-3 (or more) year old tech hanging around to fill a price point. Each one of those silos would get frequent refreshes and would be the best that price point has to offer. Considering how successful the iPhone SE has been you'd think this idea would be a no brainier. But it would actually take real courage because it might eat into margins. Of course that begs the question is Apple a company obsessed with making great products or not?
Perhaps Apple needs to release a workstation as well as a laptop?
... One with desktop specs that is capable of being moved, but not meant to be light or be used for extended periods on battery.