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.
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.
Is that right?
If you want to buy a 32 GB PC laptop then proceed. But beware of fire hazard under heavy use. Desktop grade components require a desktop grade cooling system.
You know, I wonder if part of the conflict arises from some people never having lived with the advantages of thin, light, and quiet computers. If you've never been exposed to that experience, the benefits may not be apparent.
I'm coming from a 2009 17" MacBook Pro. Before that a monster Sony Vaio workhorse. Both were big, relatively heavy, and the Sony was as loud as a bathroom fan. Both were built for work, not to be cute. I could never understand why anyone with serious work to do would care if a computer was half-a-pound lighter or a couple mm thinner. I wanted a desktop computer I could take with me. As I've said in other threads, even a big, heavy laptop is better than trying to lug around an iMac!
Then my beloved 17 succumbed to a graphics card ailment (apparently there was a recall I missed) and the new MacBook Pros weren't ready yet. I picked up a maxed-out Air to tide me over until the Pros came out.
I now understand a bit better what the thin-and-light crowd are on about. It's kinda nice being able to pick it up with one hand and carry it around like a tablet. It's nice only hearing the fan when it's really struggling. It's nice being able to walk away from shore power and not worry about whether I'll make it back before the battery dies. It's just a more comfortable experience.
Obviously I'm still more interested in performance than creature comforts, but I now understand that it may be reasonable to make some concessions to size, weight, power consumption and heat to make the device nicer to work with. A year ago I would have dismissed the idea of even considering those things as relevant to a decision about RAM allotments or other, similar issues. Now I understand that it's a valid consideration. One among many.
You know, I wonder if part of the conflict arises from some people never having lived with the advantages of thin, light, and quiet computers. If you've never been exposed to that experience, the benefits may not be apparent.
I'm coming from a 2009 17" MacBook Pro. Before that a monster Sony Vaio workhorse. Both were big, relatively heavy, and the Sony was as loud as a bathroom fan. Both were built for work, not to be cute. I could never understand why anyone with serious work to do would care if a computer was half-a-pound lighter or a couple mm thinner. I wanted a desktop computer I could take with me. As I've said in other threads, even a big, heavy laptop is better than trying to lug around an iMac!
Then my beloved 17 succumbed to a graphics card ailment (apparently there was a recall I missed) and the new MacBook Pros weren't ready yet. I picked up a maxed-out Air to tide me over until the Pros came out.
I now understand a bit better what the thin-and-light crowd are on about. It's kinda nice being able to pick it up with one hand and carry it around like a tablet. It's nice only hearing the fan when it's really struggling. It's nice being able to walk away from shore power and not worry about whether I'll make it back before the battery dies. It's just a more comfortable experience.
Obviously I'm still more interested in performance than creature comforts, but I now understand that it may be reasonable to make some concessions to size, weight, power consumption and heat to make the device nicer to work with. A year ago I would have dismissed the idea of even considering those things as relevant to a decision about RAM allotments or other, similar issues. Now I understand that it's a valid consideration. One among many.
With Touch Bar MBPs, you'll never have to make some concessions to size, weight, power consumption and heat to make the device nicer to work with.
They are already nice to work with without forcing you to make concessions. Don't exaggerate that memory issue so much. Even the defenders of 32 GB admit that their usage pattern is very extreme one. If you disregard these machines for just a supposedly some undefined nicety then that would be a painful mistake.
I'd upgraded an early-2011 MBP 15" to double the RAM. No noticeable improvement. But a hard disk upgrade to 7500 RPM brought significant improvement. A similar HD upgrade on a 13" 2009 MBP still prevents me from buying a new one. A relative runs both macOS Sierra and Windows 8.1 Pro on a 4 GB Macbook Air mid-2011, allocating 2 GB to Parallels VM. You may find many other similar real-life stories regarding RAM usage.
It is Apple's typical up-sell strategy.
They launch new form factors. They charge hell of a lot for shabby specs on purpose for the first year.
Because they know it sells just by the different look.
Then the next year, they reduce price hell of a lot, give the huge spec bump.
Phil Schiller said 16GB RAM is for battery. It's an obvious lie.
It's because they wanna sell 32GB models next year.
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.
Mail, Messages, Calendar, Terminal, SourceTree are noise. Under 100MB of RAM each. I'm sitting at 9.2GB used with both Android Studio and Eclipse running along with postgresql, Safari, chrome and postman. Xcode is also up because once in a while I click something that opens Xcode by default.
The only thing you listed that's a real memory hog are VMs and Photoshop. If I really need to use VMs I just spin up one of our AWS instances but I can afford to run a VM locally if I really need to. The only time I need to that is on a flight without WiFi.
I guess that's not strictly true. I have genymotion up emulating a Nexus 10 in a VM. 297MB RAM used for that.
Even with Resolve 12 up grading 1080p it only uses another 4.35GB (i just opened it up for giggles). I could see having FCPX and Resolve 12 up being a bit of a squeeze but for 99% of pro users not doing 4K video editing and grading getting 32GB is mostly just a nice to have that helps future proof the laptop a little.
As a "pro" user my refresh time is 3 years. Not too worried about future proofing. I'll get the new MBP in early 2017 and it will be replaced in 2020.
With Touch Bar MBPs, you'll never have to make some concessions to size, weight, power consumption and heat to make the device nicer to work with.
Well, Schiller is saying they kinda did. It is *possible* to build a Skylake laptop with 32 GB of RAM, but it would be bigger, heavier, hotter, and have shorter battery life. Apple decided that wasn't a good plan.
To be clear, I'm saying that, contrary to what I would have thought a year ago, I think Apple made the right choice.
I'd upgraded an early-2011 MBP 15" to double the RAM. No noticeable improvement.
Then I suspect you weren't running large sessions on a recent version of Pro Tools HD, or the improvement would have been obvious. Of course, the number of people who need to run Pro Tools HD on a portable computer is a tiny segment of the market, and even among those who do, the number who will be seriously affected by a 16GB RAM limit is even smaller. The number of people who will benefit from a very capable, nice to use computer is thousands of times higher.
Even if the new machine isn't exactly what I might have wanted, I recognize that my situation is not common, and the machine as it stands is still really, really good. Now that I know some of the background and technical info around RAM limits, and now having had a little time to realize the advantages of the thin-and-light form factor, I think Apple's RAM decision was the right one, under current circumstances.
i mostly like the new macbook pro, but wish there was an option for those of us who aren't utterly obsessed with the thinnest, lightest possible laptop uber alles. sticking with my mid-2012 13" for as long as it'll run.
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.
To be fair, many of today's laptops are in fact 'desktop replacements' (I think Apple coined that term), so while battery life is important, it isn't as critical as it once was for a very large number of users. It's also true that smartphones are also, to a large degree, 'laptop replacements'. The amount of users that require on-the-go power for long periods is nowhere near what it once was.
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.
It clearly was one swoop. Don't mix lines as they cater to different needs. Few, and I mean very few people would buy a MacBook as a main computer and exactly because of the one port mantra (panned by just about everyone).Even less would get one at all as It is severely compromised on specs and very overpriced.
The point, which you still ignore, is that this wholesale change just wasn't necessary. Keep your legacy ports and add two USB-C ports. That would give you three of each if we apply your reasoning. You wouldn't have to cart around a pile of dongles or even buy them. No headaches. You would future proof the machine and, and this is the killer, you would 'present proof' it.
And let's be clear on this. Apple's dongles are rarely full substitutes for the real ports. Having a dongle in the chain often brings limitations or other issues.
Let me repeat this again. A transition is a gradual move from one state to another. It takes away the unnecessary pain, cost and hassle of dongles. Wholesale switch is both unnecessary and inconvenient. I will add something else. If I remember correctly (I could be wrong), having a port that can carry different legacy protocols doesn't mean that the machine will actually be able to implement them if the vendor doesn't offer support for them. Having a real port guarantees that it complies with the port specification and eliminates headaches. HDMI is something that is notoriously picky. We will see if the HDMI dongle provides a trouble free experience.
i mostly like the new macbook pro, but wish there was an option for those of us who aren't utterly obsessed with the thinnest, lightest possible laptop uber alles. sticking with my mid-2012 13" for as long as it'll run.
The machine is fine on most levels (the need for a bag full of dongles, not being one of them) . The problem is price and what you get for it. I am not poor but I'm not going to pay 2,699€ for a 15" base system with 256GB SSD. That's one lost sale. I think there are millions more in my situation. Apple's next earnings call may well be very interesting.
USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 is a really clean vision of the future of connectivity. Apple will lead and accelerate the industry, that will follow and transfer. Dongles during the transfer period. This is great. A year from now most peripherals will be USB-C ready. Perhaps USB to USB-C cables will surface (with built in dongle), and then a dongle won't be necessary anyway.
The SD card slot I will immediately miss. I'm using it all the time for video editing straight from the cards. The card formats are changing rapidly though. SD might be sort of end of cycle. I can see why it had to go.
The prices are really high. It's unfortunate. The specs I'm after are many hundreds of dollars more than the previous model. It stings, and makes me hold off my order for a while. The specs are good though. Surprised by the lack of 32GB. But if the memory and SSD are so much faster, and it helps with battery, then I'm ok with that.
USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 is a really clean vision of the future of connectivity. Apple will lead and accelerate the industry, that will follow and transfer. Dongles during the transfer period. This is great. A year from now most peripherals will be USB-C ready. Perhaps USB to USB-C cables will surface (with built in dongle), and then a dongle won't be necessary anyway.
The SD card slot I will immediately miss. I'm using it all the time for video editing straight from the cards. The card formats are changing rapidly though. SD might be sort of end of cycle. I can see why it had to go.
The prices are really high. It's unfortunate. The specs I'm after are many hundreds of dollars more than the previous model. It stings, and makes me hold off my order for a while. The specs are good though. Surprised by the lack of 32GB. But if the memory and SSD are so much faster, and it helps with battery, then I'm ok with that.
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.
I'm a developer also and there is no reason to have that much stuff going at once. It just seems like you're unorganized tbqh.
But every development setup is different. If I make an iOS apps 8 GB is sufficient, or for a multi platform web app 16 GB is sufficient, but for serious back end systems, this might be completely different. A customer of me reported a race issue between different nodes on a MongoDB cluster; in order to solve this I needed such a cluster on my development machine (running in Docker containers) and 16 GB is not enough to avoid swapping.
Wow, they haven't even shipped yet and Glorious Leader and Savant Ming-Chi has already decreed them to be a failure. That might be a new record.
Here, let me try: New Mac Pro refresh doomed, iPad Pro 2 sales 'disappointing'.
Wow, that was easy. Got my numbers from the same source too (thin air).
I think Kuo has a far better analysis than thin air (which is perhaps where the logic for the comment came from)... or more likely the knee-jerk (emphasis on the second word) fear comment reaction that you see here all the time from folks that have their entire future (and post-retired homeless status) tied up in AAPL stock
Analysis has feelers into the shipment velocity and models to gauge estimates with...
Can someone explain what was 'pro' about MacBook Pros prior to this update that is no longer 'pro'? What has made these machines less 'pro' then the ones that came before?
USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 is a really clean vision of the future of connectivity. Apple will lead and accelerate the industry, that will follow and transfer. Dongles during the transfer period. This is great. A year from now most peripherals will be USB-C ready. Perhaps USB to USB-C cables will surface (with built in dongle), and then a dongle won't be necessary anyway.
The SD card slot I will immediately miss. I'm using it all the time for video editing straight from the cards. The card formats are changing rapidly though. SD might be sort of end of cycle. I can see why it had to go.
The prices are really high. It's unfortunate. The specs I'm after are many hundreds of dollars more than the previous model. It stings, and makes me hold off my order for a while. The specs are good though. Surprised by the lack of 32GB. But if the memory and SSD are so much faster, and it helps with battery, then I'm ok with that.
Not many hundreds dollars more. People claimed that the base 13" without Touch Bar was $200 more than last year's entry level 13". A quick lookup revealed that this year's 13", with it's 256 GB SSD, was priced the same as last year's model with 256 GB option. If you compare spec by spec you'll find that prices are carefully fine tuned and fairly match the specs. There are absolutely no deliberately inflated prices.
Can someone explain what was 'pro' about MacBook Pros prior to this update that is no longer 'pro'? What has made these machines less 'pro' then the ones that came before?
The people that buy the new MBPs are PROfessionals, and those that claim that it's Apple's fault that they aren't using 32GiB RAM or even claiming that Apple reduced the RAM down to 16GiB which now make it impossible for them to do their job are the PROblem.
USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 is a really clean vision of the future of connectivity. Apple will lead and accelerate the industry, that will follow and transfer. Dongles during the transfer period. This is great. A year from now most peripherals will be USB-C ready. Perhaps USB to USB-C cables will surface (with built in dongle), and then a dongle won't be necessary anyway.
The SD card slot I will immediately miss. I'm using it all the time for video editing straight from the cards. The card formats are changing rapidly though. SD might be sort of end of cycle. I can see why it had to go.
The prices are really high. It's unfortunate. The specs I'm after are many hundreds of dollars more than the previous model. It stings, and makes me hold off my order for a while. The specs are good though. Surprised by the lack of 32GB. But if the memory and SSD are so much faster, and it helps with battery, then I'm ok with that.
Not many hundreds dollars more. People claimed that the base 13" without Touch Bar was $200 more than last year's entry level 13". A quick lookup revealed that this year's 13", with it's 256 GB SSD, was priced the same as last year's model with 256 GB. If you compare spec by spec you'll find that prices are carefully fine tuned and fairly match the specs.
And this isn't just a spec bump, but an entire redesigned case with all new components, which makes the whiners an even more perplexing group.
USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 is a really clean vision of the future of connectivity. Apple will lead and accelerate the industry, that will follow and transfer. Dongles during the transfer period. This is great. A year from now most peripherals will be USB-C ready. Perhaps USB to USB-C cables will surface (with built in dongle), and then a dongle won't be necessary anyway.
The SD card slot I will immediately miss. I'm using it all the time for video editing straight from the cards. The card formats are changing rapidly though. SD might be sort of end of cycle. I can see why it had to go.
The prices are really high. It's unfortunate. The specs I'm after are many hundreds of dollars more than the previous model. It stings, and makes me hold off my order for a while. The specs are good though. Surprised by the lack of 32GB. But if the memory and SSD are so much faster, and it helps with battery, then I'm ok with that.
Not many hundreds dollars more. People claimed that the base 13" without Touch Bar was $200 more than last year's entry level 13". A quick lookup revealed that this year's 13", with it's 256 GB SSD, was priced the same as last year's model with 256 GB. If you compare spec by spec you'll find that prices are carefully fine tuned and fairly match the specs.
And this isn't just a spec bump, but an entire redesigned case with all new components, which makes the whiners an even more perplexing group.
What exactly is perplexing about users complaining about being raped, pillaged then burnt at the stake on Apple's forced SSD options? Absolutely nothing. Or do you think that locking users into your system at the point of sale and with exorbitant pricing is the right way to do business?
I cringe every time Tim Cook speaks of 'values'. Apple has a 13 billion euro tax bill with the Irish Government as it is happy for the company to decide how much of its earnings it wants to make available for tax. Values? How about being competitive and letting users decide how much and when to add higher capacity SSD, RAM etc? Wouldn't that be both 'right' and 'fair'.
Apple, took that option off the table and it's one of many reasons that people complain. The other is to make their voices heard. That combined with not buying the hardware will send a message loud and clear to Apple. If sales implode, they will know why. I'm perplexed by you not understanding this. Apple is taking a pummeling on the pricing of the new MBPs from all over the world and you still think the critics are whiners.
Comments
I'm coming from a 2009 17" MacBook Pro. Before that a monster Sony Vaio workhorse. Both were big, relatively heavy, and the Sony was as loud as a bathroom fan. Both were built for work, not to be cute. I could never understand why anyone with serious work to do would care if a computer was half-a-pound lighter or a couple mm thinner. I wanted a desktop computer I could take with me. As I've said in other threads, even a big, heavy laptop is better than trying to lug around an iMac!
Then my beloved 17 succumbed to a graphics card ailment (apparently there was a recall I missed) and the new MacBook Pros weren't ready yet. I picked up a maxed-out Air to tide me over until the Pros came out.
I now understand a bit better what the thin-and-light crowd are on about. It's kinda nice being able to pick it up with one hand and carry it around like a tablet. It's nice only hearing the fan when it's really struggling. It's nice being able to walk away from shore power and not worry about whether I'll make it back before the battery dies. It's just a more comfortable experience.
Obviously I'm still more interested in performance than creature comforts, but I now understand that it may be reasonable to make some concessions to size, weight, power consumption and heat to make the device nicer to work with. A year ago I would have dismissed the idea of even considering those things as relevant to a decision about RAM allotments or other, similar issues. Now I understand that it's a valid consideration. One among many.
They are already nice to work with without forcing you to make concessions. Don't exaggerate that memory issue so much. Even the defenders of 32 GB admit that their usage pattern is very extreme one. If you disregard these machines for just a supposedly some undefined nicety then that would be a painful mistake.
I'd upgraded an early-2011 MBP 15" to double the RAM. No noticeable improvement. But a hard disk upgrade to 7500 RPM brought significant improvement. A similar HD upgrade on a 13" 2009 MBP still prevents me from buying a new one. A relative runs both macOS Sierra and Windows 8.1 Pro on a 4 GB Macbook Air mid-2011, allocating 2 GB to Parallels VM. You may find many other similar real-life stories regarding RAM usage.
The only thing you listed that's a real memory hog are VMs and Photoshop. If I really need to use VMs I just spin up one of our AWS instances but I can afford to run a VM locally if I really need to. The only time I need to that is on a flight without WiFi.
I guess that's not strictly true. I have genymotion up emulating a Nexus 10 in a VM. 297MB RAM used for that.
Even with Resolve 12 up grading 1080p it only uses another 4.35GB (i just opened it up for giggles). I could see having FCPX and Resolve 12 up being a bit of a squeeze but for 99% of pro users not doing 4K video editing and grading getting 32GB is mostly just a nice to have that helps future proof the laptop a little.
As a "pro" user my refresh time is 3 years. Not too worried about future proofing. I'll get the new MBP in early 2017 and it will be replaced in 2020.
Well, Schiller is saying they kinda did. It is *possible* to build a Skylake laptop with 32 GB of RAM, but it would be bigger, heavier, hotter, and have shorter battery life. Apple decided that wasn't a good plan.
To be clear, I'm saying that, contrary to what I would have thought a year ago, I think Apple made the right choice.
Then I suspect you weren't running large sessions on a recent version of Pro Tools HD, or the improvement would have been obvious. Of course, the number of people who need to run Pro Tools HD on a portable computer is a tiny segment of the market, and even among those who do, the number who will be seriously affected by a 16GB RAM limit is even smaller. The number of people who will benefit from a very capable, nice to use computer is thousands of times higher.
Even if the new machine isn't exactly what I might have wanted, I recognize that my situation is not common, and the machine as it stands is still really, really good. Now that I know some of the background and technical info around RAM limits, and now having had a little time to realize the advantages of the thin-and-light form factor, I think Apple's RAM decision was the right one, under current circumstances.
The point, which you still ignore, is that this wholesale change just wasn't necessary. Keep your legacy ports and add two USB-C ports. That would give you three of each if we apply your reasoning. You wouldn't have to cart around a pile of dongles or even buy them. No headaches. You would future proof the machine and, and this is the killer, you would 'present proof' it.
And let's be clear on this. Apple's dongles are rarely full substitutes for the real ports. Having a dongle in the chain often brings limitations or other issues.
Let me repeat this again. A transition is a gradual move from one state to another. It takes away the unnecessary pain, cost and hassle of dongles. Wholesale switch is both unnecessary and inconvenient. I will add something else. If I remember correctly (I could be wrong), having a port that can carry different legacy protocols doesn't mean that the machine will actually be able to implement them if the vendor doesn't offer support for them. Having a real port guarantees that it complies with the port specification and eliminates headaches. HDMI is something that is notoriously picky. We will see if the HDMI dongle provides a trouble free experience.
Dongles during the transfer period. This is great. A year from now most peripherals will be USB-C ready. Perhaps USB to USB-C cables will surface (with built in dongle), and then a dongle won't be necessary anyway.
The SD card slot I will immediately miss. I'm using it all the time for video editing straight from the cards. The card formats are changing rapidly though. SD might be sort of end of cycle. I can see why it had to go.
The prices are really high. It's unfortunate. The specs I'm after are many hundreds of dollars more than the previous model. It stings, and makes me hold off my order for a while. The specs are good though. Surprised by the lack of 32GB. But if the memory and SSD are so much faster, and it helps with battery, then I'm ok with that.
Dongles during the transfer period. This is great. A year from now most peripherals will be USB-C ready. Perhaps USB to USB-C cables will surface (with built in dongle), and then a dongle won't be necessary anyway.
The SD card slot I will immediately miss. I'm using it all the time for video editing straight from the cards. The card formats are changing rapidly though. SD might be sort of end of cycle. I can see why it had to go.
The prices are really high. It's unfortunate. The specs I'm after are many hundreds of dollars more than the previous model. It stings, and makes me hold off my order for a while. The specs are good though. Surprised by the lack of 32GB. But if the memory and SSD are so much faster, and it helps with battery, then I'm ok with that.
Analysis has feelers into the shipment velocity and models to gauge estimates with...
I cringe every time Tim Cook speaks of 'values'. Apple has a 13 billion euro tax bill with the Irish Government as it is happy for the company to decide how much of its earnings it wants to make available for tax. Values? How about being competitive and letting users decide how much and when to add higher capacity SSD, RAM etc? Wouldn't that be both 'right' and 'fair'.
Apple, took that option off the table and it's one of many reasons that people complain. The other is to make their voices heard. That combined with not buying the hardware will send a message loud and clear to Apple. If sales implode, they will know why. I'm perplexed by you not understanding this. Apple is taking a pummeling on the pricing of the new MBPs from all over the world and you still think the critics are whiners.