djeilers

noraa1138 said:

I'd love to see an 80W charger for my 15" MBP. As far as safety is concerned, theoretically this charger should be safer than a standard charger (should be the optimal word here). The main reason GaN chargers can be so much smaller than a standard charger is because it produces significantly less heat than a silicon based charger. Heat is one of the main culprits in the cause of chargers failing and shorting out (heat causes the various components to expand, which could lead to a short circuit). Plus, RavPower has a pretty good track record. Time will tell however.

I have a Ravpower 45 w GaN power adapter.  It is very small. I also have a 15" MacBook Pro 2016.  To my surprise, it will charge my MBP even while I am using it.  It is a bit slower, but not bad.  I was told by someone at an Apple store that you would likely need the 80 w adapter to charge a 15" MBP because, while the others would charge it, they could not keep up with the power demands and the MBP would slowly discharge if you were using it while you were attempting to charge it with a lesser powered adapter.  This is not the case.  It charges fine even while in use.  I've never tested the exact speed, but when I plug the 45 w adapter into my MBP, it will charge from maybe 30% to 100 % before I'm finished with my work at a coffee shop.  The Ravpower 45 w never seems to be hot or even very warm.

I have iOS 11 beta installed on my iPad.  I tried connecting my AirPods and playing around with these new settings, and they work as advertised.  Even better, once set, they remain set and work with iOS 10.3 etc devices and macOS Sierra.  Now my AirPods right double tap starts and stops, and left double tap invokes Siri on all my devices.

So, I know its not exactly the same, but the days when it was RAM vs hard disk drive access are in the past.  Designing a laptop with long term storage on a HDD meant that having to swap files from a spinning HDD to RAM for use was a much greater bottleneck to speed.  Much faster SSD changes the trade off considerably.  The new MacBooks have much faster SSD, and the trade off is smaller.  For someone trying to edit video or running many virtual machines each performing tasks at the same time,this might be a significant factor.  For many of us, this is not the case.  Sure, all else being equal, I would like to be able to have more RAM.  But all else is not equal, and the trade off of speed and battery life for a lower limit on maximum ram is one of those design decisions that had to be made, and I am glad the new MacBook Pro have at least the battery life that they do have.  Less battery life would have been a much bigger issue for me than the current limit on RAM.  I think a lot us are thinking of the days when it was RAM vs much slower HDD for permanent storage was what computers were designed around, and so having significant RAM was very important.  It is not unimportant today, but much much less so.