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.

Comments

Bad Reason

[justcauseisjustthat]

Give users the option, 16GB is 2011.... Just like spinning down drives and dimming displays, turn on and off banks of memory or something. I'm passing on this MacBook until they get serious about RAM.

Re:Bad Reason

[robertchin]

Well it's actually Intel's fault for only supporting LPDDR3 instead of LPDDR4 in Skylake. They choose to do this because LPDDR4 memory is more expensive, and from this article, http://www.fool.com/investing/... it says that an increased cost of RAM would result in one of the following:

1. PC vendors will cut corners elsewhere to accommodate the more expensive memory within a fixed price point, potentially hurting the user experience.
2. PC vendors will raise prices, which could lead to lower sales and thus reduced processor sales for Intel.
3. PC vendors' margins will contract.

Which Intel didn't want to do. That combined with the delays for the release of Skylake and its successor Cannonlake (which does support LPDDR4) leave us with the current situation.

Re: Bad Reason

[fubarrr]

No, the reason is simpler. They dont want to feed Samsung as it is the de facto only serious lpddr4 maker now

Just what is the power consumption?

[swb]

What is the consumption of 16 GB, 32 GB and so forth? Is it linear growth or something more extreme?

I can't (with half-serious googling) find actual wattage figures for LPDDR3 RAM,

I'd wager for some reason 32 GB is more than double 16 GB in power consumption, but not like 10x or anything, and I have a hard time believing the consumption would enough to have more than 15 minutes of battery impact over the device's useful battery life.

I'd also expect it be actually offset demands for disk I/O through caching and reduced paging, which would reduce its negative impact, although I think the use PCI-E SSDs really would decrease the user perception of paging delays for all but the most extreme use cases.

Re:Just what is the power consumption?

[bussdriver]

Look at the take apart photos. The circuit board has NO MORE ROOM. Last I looked (not recently) the 32GB modules have more ICs than the 16GB. I wouldn't be surprised if Phil was confused and misinterpreted something and turned a SIZE constraint which took away battery space into a power usage constraint.

It makes far more sense as a SIZE problem than just replacing some ICs with expensive ICs. Now if those ICs existed at the time of development then I'm wrong and Apple has their heads up their asses. They couldn't put in 1 normal USB port.... I'm currently looking at alternatives because of this. I get USB flash sticks all the time without warning and I do not want to carry an adapter around all the time.

The last year GPU is disappointing but the lower heat output would make sense and I can tolerate that... I was thinking of ditching the GPU anyhow because an external GPU on thunderbolt 2 runs about 80%-90% of full speed (easily beating a laptop GPU) so version 3's speed should get close desktop performance.

No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[SuperKendall]

I have a 17" Matte Macbook Pro also, and a late 2013 15" MacBook Pro with an anti-glare screen - it's not quite as good as the matte but very close, in practical use almost never notice glare on the 15". It's not like matte meant no-glare either, just greatly reduced as with anti-glare coatings...

I would have loved to see the 17" form factor revived, who knows perhaps in some future iteration we'll see it again. At least the actual screen resolution of the 15" (old and new) is identical to the 17", I just keep the scaling stuff off and have a bit smaller text sizes.

Also all of the hate over no ESC is totally incorrect. You can get to the traditional FN row (including ESC) at any time just by pressing the FN key in the corner. But the reality is you'd pretty much never need to do that because any key where ESC could be used will leave ESC in the TouchBar.

It is sad to see Magsafe go though, that I will miss. I like the flexibility of being able to charge from any port but I feel like the safety and usability of Magsafe was worth more than the flexibility gained. A great idea for a USB-C charging cable that had a magnetic breakaway connector in the middle...