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New MacBook Pros Max Out At 16GB RAM Due To Battery Life Concerns (macrumors.com)
The new MacBooks Pros have been improved in nearly every way -- except when it comes to RAM capacity. With faster, more energy efficient Skylake processors, faster SSDs, and better GPUs, one would think the amount of RAM wouldn't be capped off at 16GB. However, that is the case. The reason why the MacBook Pros continue to max out at 16GB RAM is due to battery life concerns, according to marketing chief Phil Schiller. MacRumors reader David emailed Apple to get an explanation: Question from David: "The lack of a 32GB BTO option for the new MBPs raised some eyebrows and caused some concerns (me included). Does ~3GBps bandwidth to the SSD make this a moot issue? I.e. memory paging on a 16GB system is so fast that 32GB is not a significant improvement?" Schiller's answer: "Thank you for the email. It is a good question. To put more than 16GB of fast RAM into a notebook design at this time would require a memory system that consumes much more power and wouldn't be efficient enough for a notebook. I hope you check out this new generation MacBook Pro, it really is an incredible system."
For the 2016 MacBook Pro, Apple was able to reach "all-day battery life," which equates to 10 hours of wireless web use or iTunes movie playback. That's an hour improvement over the previous generation in the 15-inch machine, and a small step back in the 13-inch machine. While none of Apple's portable machines offer more than 16GB RAM, 32GB of RAM is a high-end custom upgrade option in the 27-inch iMac.
For the 2016 MacBook Pro, Apple was able to reach "all-day battery life," which equates to 10 hours of wireless web use or iTunes movie playback. That's an hour improvement over the previous generation in the 15-inch machine, and a small step back in the 13-inch machine. While none of Apple's portable machines offer more than 16GB RAM, 32GB of RAM is a high-end custom upgrade option in the 27-inch iMac.
of Apple ramming their design decisions down our throats.
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Make it one millimeter thicker. Fucking a.
Now ask me how I think iPhone battery life could be improved...
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And this is called "Pro"??
apple needs to have real pro hardware and not this have to make it thinner shit.
SSD speeds (and it is really access time we are talking here, bandwidth is pretty irrelevant for paging) is somewhere between traditional disks and RAM, but closer to disk than RAM. This means paging will be a bit faster, but still dog-slow. For Swapping, it is not much better either. You cannot fake RAM well, although countless bad engineers have tried and countless unscrupulous marketeers have tried to sell the inadequate results as the next revolution.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Half of the people I've seen with a MacBook Pro are people too proud to admit that a MacBook is more than enough for them. My company won't buy Macs for developers, but will for a manager pushing around Office documents all day. That's hardly atypical. Apple is doing to the MacBook Pro roughly what Microsoft did to Windows 8 where they relied on the input of the people who left telemetry on and noticed THOSE users weren't using the start menu anymore.
Ask most technical users of MacBook Pros (including artistic types) and I bet you'd see a strong preference for a thicker, more durable and easily repaired laptop with higher specs than Apple offers.
I am writing this on an early 2009 17 inch matte screen Macbook Pro. DIY upgrades to a 512 SSD and 8GB RAM cost about $500 total. With a refurbished battery it still gets 8 hours of charge.
What has Apple accomplished in eight years? A smaller screen that has distracting glare and reflection, removal of the best feature (Magsafe), no escape key, and a modest boost in performance.
Oh yes, its also thinner because that is the most important feature in a professional tool.
the reason is that someone at Apple honestly thinks that device thickness is the number one concern of consumers and to reverse that trend is to admit they were wrong.
98% of the time people are plugged into wall power. Who cares. Plus, 32 GB isn't always enough. 64 would be awesome.
The problem is the stats for battery life in reviews. Those don't really matter any way. After 1 year, the battery life will drop by 40% because the batteries are shit. After 3 years, it goes to about 20 minutes.
The new MacBooks Pros have been improved in nearly every way
Unless you buy the smaller, cheaper Macbook Pro, (that probably should have been called an "Air Plus" or something), the new Pros have no dedicated function keys. (People are already posting instructions on how to configure a physical Escape key). But you DO get a whiz-bang OLED strip that gives you, (among other things), stuff like emojis and more streamlined online payments. Also, you can't charge an iPhone with the new MacBook Pro, unless you buy a pricey adapter; and then you'll have yet another piece of hardware cruft to be broken, lost, or forgotten. How is this "improved in nearly every way"? For that matter, how does it qualify as "Pro"?
The new MacBook DOES have a stereo headphone jack though. I guess their 'courage' failed them this time. Apple should get rid of their courage altogether - their products would be the better for it. I've never liked Apple, but mostly I at least respected them. With their latest product decisions, even that respect is gone.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
yep all those users that run VM's are just all erection seekers, can't possibly have a justifiable reason for running a local VM like lab work or demos or development all of which many times can't run in the cloud. for such a low UID you act remarkably oblivious to common Tech configurations (typing this on my Lenovo with 32GB of RAM which hopefully I can convince work to upgrade before end of year). 16GB is a consumer limit, many professionals from video, graphic arts, photo editing too IT and development find that way to small.
I do similar, obviously you haven't done much travel or IT work between organisations or government departments otherwise you would realise it is impossible to rely on internet connectivity even in major cities. I have a lot of my lab stuff setup in Azure, but all my critical ones must run on my laptop, you would have to be insane or just plane stupid to rely on internet/cloud connectivity when sales/presentations or critical work is on the line.
If they kept it 3mm thicker they could have put in a battery that would have allowed 64gb ram, socketed ram and socketed M.2 SSD's AND give you 12 hours of battery life.
All for the sake of the biggest stupid in computing.
Thinner and lighter.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.