FreedonNadd

I think it's disingenuous to say that the PC industry is 1 year behind apple on it's adoption of PCIe NVMe SSD's. If you compare PC's in the same price category as MacBook Pros you'll generally see equivalent use of PCIe NVMe SSDs. Nor has Apple financed the SSD's price reduction for the greater industry. While Apple sells a lot of laptops, it's not enough to have the same material impact as the rest of the industry. Apple doesn't give it's developers many portable options other than the MacBook Pro so they're fairly important. Like you said, developers often need to run VMs that can mimic a real world device (which may have 8-16GB of RAM). The cloud isn't always an option for these VMs either. Per the RAM argument... even w/ storing a pagefile on the PCIe NVMe SSD, that performance will pale in comparison to DDR3 in both throughput and latency/seek times. Those NVMe disks are awesome, but they don't replace RAM.