That said, I think Apple should do it, if only to take some venom out of the media-blog-o-sphere of very loud critics. It could be paid for out of the marketing budget, just to keep a more positive impression of the brand.
They will always find something else to complain about. These people do nothing to help give Apple a positive impression, and now Apple has a completely new machine with a very different board and setup that needs to be tested for macOS and every reasonable peripheral (wired and wireless) and app setup, yet this is impossible to do so someone will have some bug in some rare case and then claim that "Apple is no longer doing any QC before shipping products. All they care about is pushing out more MAC models to make more sales without caring about the customer after the sale. Steve Jobs wouldn't never done that." Yes, they would spell Mac in all caps, or, if it's about the iPhone they would spell it I-Phone. It's what they do.
Unfortunately, Intel's 10nm cannonlake won't be available soon enough for 2017 update of Macbook pro, Apple will have to adopt Kaby lake. Hope when Apple updates internals(Kabylake, 32GB RAM along with Optane SSD), also adds one or two extra Type-C ports to low end Mackbook pro and lower the price.
PS: I just spent a lot of time in Logic last night and realized my use of the tool keyboard shortcuts is done by touching of keys and the flat nonsense of the touch bar would greatly slow my usage. They should've been physical with OLED labels.
Long live physical keys!!
You mean a row of individual keys that are all separate OLED displays?
Yes, I do mean that. No doubt it's a goal for some day. The touch strip should've waited till then.
When is Cannonlake due? Seems like this year to use desktop-class RAM in a MBP in Kaby Lake when they can just avoid that with Cannonlake would be both the most reasonable as well as typical move for Apple. From my vantage point the cost to include it in Kaby Lake (or Skylake) given what I predict are very low sales volume means it's highly unlikely to happen.
What are your thoughts about the arrival time/ and guts inside of the next MacPro assuming there is one?
Different people have different needs! Nothing really surprising there. My problem with the mac Book is the small screen that is an issue only older people can really relate too. Even my 13" MBP challenges me at times.
I don't think I could ever use a 13" screen. I don't know how you do it.
The younger folk are often happy to sacrifice screen real estate for portability. Crank that resolution to max and get itty bitty text and it works great. The 12" Macbook is popular at college according to my college age daughter.
Watch them charge $2,000 extra just for the memory too. Crooks!
Let's see, they're going to release the 32GB memory "everyone" has been after, which is going to introduce engineering challenges - it won't be LPDDR4, as that's still not supported, so they're going to have to install desktop memory in a notebook, while not sacrifice portability or battery life, and you're complaining they might just charge a bit extra for?
Would you like them to bring you a pony, too?
I suppose it doesn't matter, they could offer everything everyone's been asking for, and we'd still only hear "but it doesn't come in Jet Black" or "it doesn't have a 5.25" floppy drive" or some other niggling complaint.
I'm not convinced that using desktop RAM in the rMBP is a great idea, mostly for the reasons I hinted at above.
Hey now those 5.25" drives are now collectors items.
As for the ""desktop RAM"" I thought the quote was desktop class RAM which could mean anything at this point. As for LPDRR4 RAM, who knows Intel could be working on a Kaby Lake variant to support that interface. Desktop RAM by the way could be construed to mean RAM in plug in modules.
In any event for me RAM isn't a shortcoming on these 2016 MBP, the tiny battery is. Until they address the batteries power capacity it really doesn't matter what they do with the rest of the machine. Real "pro" usage on battery power, just drains the battery to damn fast on these machines. We can only hope that the rumored new battery technology comes through and we get back real run time.
I keep seeing articles about a new generation of memory that is somewhere between Flash and conventional RAM. Apple is usually the one to jump into a new and expensive technology far ahead of others. I wonder if there is any possibility we might see this new technology in a similar way the Fusion drive was used for storage in for some Mac models.
Does anyone that has the new MacBook like it? Maybe Apple spent too much effort on that "nobody asked for it" led strip and forgot about what a pro needs from a pro machine.
Overall I like mine. I do not use the touch bar much. But like a previous post I love Touch ID. There are still some bugs to be worked out but after the next update it should be fine. The port change is a bit of an inconvenience but workable.
Does anyone that has the new MacBook like it? Maybe Apple spent too much effort on that "nobody asked for it" led strip and forgot about what a pro needs from a pro machine.
I really like mine. I'm not using the Touchbar much, but I do use TouchID all the time. And in terms of performance, it's running great.
I absolutely love my 15" MBP. It is a blazing fast, well built machine. It seems like most of the comments are from people that don't own what they are slamming. The new 10.12.3 seems to have fixed the battery challenge.
In the last two years, Apple sold 39M Mac units - averaged to 19.5M units per year. 100K units would be 0.5% of the Mac shipments. If you double that to 200K units per year (I think that is waaaayyy too optimistic for this hypothetical machine), you hit 1%. One percent of Mac sales! The Mac platform is in serious trouble if they don't make a machine for the 1% (or less)? It is hard to believe that.
Hey, we're bashing Apple here. No economical rationality allowed - party pooper!
Does anyone that has the new MacBook like it? Maybe Apple spent too much effort on that "nobody asked for it" led strip and forgot about what a pro needs from a pro machine.
I love mine. I have a base model 13 inch Touch Bar. Was going to get a MacBook but wanted something that could do some light Photoshop and video editing so it's perfect. Mostly use it for Logic.
Does the Touch Bar work with Logic and if so, how pls?
Not at all, at this point.
Apple has dropped in an announcement or interview somewhere that Logic support is coming early this year.
Garageband offers the basic controls you get via the Simple Controls view — Cutoff, Reverb, whatever is there. One press on the parameter button, and you get a slider for that parameter. Neat.
I really want to be able for MainStage to be able to assign Panic and Tap Tempo to the Touch Bar. Those are my HUGE wishes.
It's very unlikely we will see a MBP with 32 GB RAM this year. Both skylake and Kaby Lake professor families do support >16GB RAM but LPDDR3 is only supported up to 16GB. Anything more will need to be DDR4, which is too detrimental to battery life to be feasible.
DDR4 wouldn't be too bad for active battery life. The bigger impact is standby and background power draw, which desktops don't have to worry about:
Apple has a few options here. They already have a hibernate mode on their laptops that dumps the memory to the SSD and can power down the RAM then load it back in. This doesn't help background power saving though because you can't do that process quickly enough or frequently enough but this could be where Intel's XPoint memory helps out. It can manage 6GB/s per channel so they can dump the memory into an XPoint cache. It should also be possible for them to keep most of the RAM powered down until anything above 16GB is needed.
Instead of having 32GB DDR4, maybe a larger XPoint cache coupled with 16GB LPDDR3 would be best so e.g 16GB LPDDR3 + 32GB Xpoint (~$100) and it can stream the memory in and out of the cache. It wouldn't have to switch the memory out all the time and this would be like having 48GB RAM. They'd have multiple chips working in parallel so the XPoint memory should be able to flush the entire 16GB of main memory in less than a second. It should also behave like RAM so that you can access a contiguous 32GB allocation.
Video processing (not editing/cutting) uses a lot of memory as the second link above shows. Cutting video can leave the reference on the drive. Modifying frames with compositing creates a new framebuffer that has to be kept somewhere until it is written to disk. The main memory can process video frames in sequence and gradually buffer the results in the XPoint when the main memory storage is done. If undo caches aren't needed, these can be written out to the SSD.
More RAM can do the same caching as XPoint but XPoint would be cheaper without the power issue and is non-volatile. Hibernating a laptop with 32GB RAM in use will write 32GB to the SSD. If that's already in XPoint, it doesn't have to touch the SSD.
Some software also needs to be written better so that it's not using RAM when it doesn't need it. Virtual machines for example don't need to wire their entire RAM allocation to a VM at boot time. Apple could provide guidelines on how to use RAM for difference applications. They can encourage developers of video processing apps to cache more things to storage instead of filling up RAM and maybe have an API that allows easily referencing SSD cached data as if it was still in RAM so that the developer doesn't have to do this manually. They can create a memory buffer for a video frame that gets marked as being able to be cached to SSD and the system can transparently batch write these to the SSD when they have been inactive for a period of time and bring them back in when requested.
They should also compress memory caches before writing them to disk or storing in XPoint the way they compress memory normally. This will cut down the read/write times and save space.
Bring all Macs with upgradable/replaceable RAM and SSD at least, and even microprocessor if possible.
Unlikely to happen. Even my Corsair K70 keyboard is made of user-unserviceable materials now, I just shipped it (30$ cost) back to Corsair for replacement because a single LED died.
We're into the era of factory-serviceable/debuildable devices. Accept it. It's not like you can have nano-factories in your backyard anyway.
Also, this Mac is an incredible machine. I'm typing this on mine, plugged into a 400$ G-Master GB2888UHSU 28inches monitor which provides me with more USB inputs through an Apple adapter (HDMI/USB-C/USB).
I probably should add that the color faithfulness and ease of use is exactly what you'd expect from a 400$ Iiyama display. If you want the absolute best in class monitor for the MBP2016, Apple sells one at a discount, described at AppleInsider back in December with USB-C and 5K and fantastic design and way too expensive for me
Why are they always so far behind. I've got an iMac with 32GB of RAM and I'm currently building a PC with 64GB of RAM. Would've gone 128GB but can't afford it now. Anyhow, 32 GB is not a lot for a top of the line machine.
Comments
Just kill the Air 13" and reduce the price (and throw in a hub, yeah right).
Desktop RAM in a laptop? Apple? It's surprising enough when they put desktop RAM in their desktops!
I keep seeing articles about a new generation of memory that is somewhere between Flash and conventional RAM. Apple is usually the one to jump into a new and expensive technology far ahead of others. I wonder if there is any possibility we might see this new technology in a similar way the Fusion drive was used for storage in for some Mac models.
Apple has dropped in an announcement or interview somewhere that Logic support is coming early this year.
Garageband offers the basic controls you get via the Simple Controls view — Cutoff, Reverb, whatever is there. One press on the parameter button, and you get a slider for that parameter. Neat.
I really want to be able for MainStage to be able to assign Panic and Tap Tempo to the Touch Bar. Those are my HUGE wishes.
Dual-Core 13" MacBooks have supported 16 GB RAM since at least 2011 (one model in 2010 IIRC).
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5dimal/lpddr3_vs_ddr4_power_usage/
https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/
Apple has a few options here. They already have a hibernate mode on their laptops that dumps the memory to the SSD and can power down the RAM then load it back in. This doesn't help background power saving though because you can't do that process quickly enough or frequently enough but this could be where Intel's XPoint memory helps out. It can manage 6GB/s per channel so they can dump the memory into an XPoint cache. It should also be possible for them to keep most of the RAM powered down until anything above 16GB is needed.
Instead of having 32GB DDR4, maybe a larger XPoint cache coupled with 16GB LPDDR3 would be best so e.g 16GB LPDDR3 + 32GB Xpoint (~$100) and it can stream the memory in and out of the cache. It wouldn't have to switch the memory out all the time and this would be like having 48GB RAM. They'd have multiple chips working in parallel so the XPoint memory should be able to flush the entire 16GB of main memory in less than a second. It should also behave like RAM so that you can access a contiguous 32GB allocation.
Video processing (not editing/cutting) uses a lot of memory as the second link above shows. Cutting video can leave the reference on the drive. Modifying frames with compositing creates a new framebuffer that has to be kept somewhere until it is written to disk. The main memory can process video frames in sequence and gradually buffer the results in the XPoint when the main memory storage is done. If undo caches aren't needed, these can be written out to the SSD.
More RAM can do the same caching as XPoint but XPoint would be cheaper without the power issue and is non-volatile. Hibernating a laptop with 32GB RAM in use will write 32GB to the SSD. If that's already in XPoint, it doesn't have to touch the SSD.
Some software also needs to be written better so that it's not using RAM when it doesn't need it. Virtual machines for example don't need to wire their entire RAM allocation to a VM at boot time. Apple could provide guidelines on how to use RAM for difference applications. They can encourage developers of video processing apps to cache more things to storage instead of filling up RAM and maybe have an API that allows easily referencing SSD cached data as if it was still in RAM so that the developer doesn't have to do this manually. They can create a memory buffer for a video frame that gets marked as being able to be cached to SSD and the system can transparently batch write these to the SSD when they have been inactive for a period of time and bring them back in when requested.
They should also compress memory caches before writing them to disk or storing in XPoint the way they compress memory normally. This will cut down the read/write times and save space.
We're into the era of factory-serviceable/debuildable devices. Accept it. It's not like you can have nano-factories in your backyard anyway.
Also, this Mac is an incredible machine. I'm typing this on mine, plugged into a 400$ G-Master GB2888UHSU 28inches monitor which provides me with more USB inputs through an Apple adapter (HDMI/USB-C/USB).
I probably should add that the color faithfulness and ease of use is exactly what you'd expect from a 400$ Iiyama display. If you want the absolute best in class monitor for the MBP2016, Apple sells one at a discount, described at AppleInsider back in December with USB-C and 5K and fantastic design and way too expensive for me