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

Re:Bad Reason

[PRMan]

Coming out with 16 GB RAM in 2016 is BRAVE!

Re:Bad Reason

[ZipK]

It's not just brave. It takes COURAGE.

Re: Bad Reason

[Luthair]

Given Intel already has a newer CPU available that supports it, the finger would point squarely back at Apple for using a year old CPU.

Re:Bad Reason

[gweihir]

When it is also stupid, other terms are usually applied...

But that seems to be the new Apple strategy: Do utterly stupid things, and then praise them as "brave" and "innovative". I fear that the Apple fanbois will buy these product nonetheless, because they have no actual understanding of technology and hence cannot detect or understand how they are getting ripped off.

Re:Bad Reason

[ebonum]

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.

Re: Bad Reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Samsung only announced the first-ever 8GB LPDDR4 package last Thursday, they probably won't be in volume production for another 6 to 9 months.

https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-rolls-out-industrys-first-8gb-lpddr4-dram-package

Apple only started using LPDDR3 in MacBook Pro on last year's 13" Retina MacBook Pro, which used two 4GB LPDDR3 packages for a total of 8 GB. To get to 16 GB on this week's model, they probably had to put 4 packages onto the board, and to get to 32 GB, they would of had to put down 8 packages.

Schiller probably means if they had to put down 8 packages, it would have eaten up more board area that would take away from space for battery. They've been packing just about every available space in the shell for battery.

I'm going to bet Apple does a late or mid-2017 refresh that uses four 8GB LPDDR4 packages to get to 32GB....

Re:Bad Reason

[ebonum]

How about 3 VMs? Or financial modeling and big databases.

Re:Bad Reason

[rubycodez]

Apple always has been skimpy about RAM for decades, they sell models of computers with half or less minimum amount needed.

Re: Bad Reason

[Uberbah]

Based on what, Apple being a major Samsung customer for many years now? Sounds more like simply facile hatorade, given the AC's response below....

Re:Bad Reason

[Bing Tsher E]

After 1 year, the battery life will drop by 40% because the batteries are shit. After 3 years, it goes to about 20 minutes.

That matters a lot when the battery has been glued into the case.

*ahem*

Re:Bad Reason

[Bing Tsher E]

Don't act retarded. People run VMs inside modern machines. At least they do provided the machine has enough RAM in it to run the VMs.

It has ALWAYS been important to have as much RAM as possible connected to your CPUs. That doesn't change because Apple can't keep up with the latest silicon.

Re:Bad Reason

[Chrontius]

For what it's worth, Apple's 2007-vintage Macs were like that. When I upgraded to a 2009 model, the battery was above 90% health five years on when the CPU shat the bed.

Re:Bad Reason

[bloodhawk]

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.

Re: Bad Reason

[Billly Gates]

Oh your erection is small peasant! I have 128 gigs of ram and my dick is bigger this year for you are weak and I am mighty!

Re:Bad Reason

[andrewa]

For me, VMs. I typically run at least two CentOS VMs, or a Window 2012 Server + CentOS. Currently I've got those as bare bones as possible on my 2014 16GB MBP - easy with a CentOS, not so much with the Windows Server (regardless of whether you have the gui on/off). Each of these VMs is running very active network/disk-based processes, along with some Java-based applications, and on top of this my host system has typically at least two different IDEs going for developing against these systems. With 32GB, I could run more, or more importantly dedicate more resources to my VMs without oversubscribing them.

I realise I'm an edge-case, but I'm also not the only person with a similar requirement.

Why not actually *be* courageous Apple? Sure, release these new laptops and call them "MacBook", and keep the "Pro" label for a machine worthy of the name - jeez, make it a millimeter higher, or a centimeter wider, and use that space for the battery while packing in more resources that are actually useful to power-users.

Re: Bad Reason

[NotAPK]

Even though **you** don't do anything useful or interesting with your laptop doesn't mean the rest of us don't.

With a powerful laptop I can go visit a potential customer and show them the product/service without depending on any external factors. Such an advantage is huge.

With a powerful laptop I can carry around a massive dataset and work on the programming problem while en route to a conference.

With a powerful laptop I can simply sit at home, at my work area, and not care about the local internet going down or the power going out: I can just focus on my work and get it done.

Re: Bad Reason

[thegarbz]

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

Wait who is doing what? You know the decision to support LPDDR3 is Intel's right? Intel doesn't give a crap who manufacture's RAM, and if Apple had the option to go LPDDR4 they'd happily buy it from Samsung, just like they've happily been buying all sorts of Samsung chips for many many years.

Kind of like the iPhone 7 and 7+ which has Samsung's LPDDR4 memory modules in it.

Re:Bad Reason

[Gussington]

It has ALWAYS been important to have as much RAM as possible connected to your CPUs. That doesn't change because Apple can't keep up with the latest silicon.

I've been working with computers for over 20 years and this is news to me. Applications use memory, and as long you have enough memory to run the application, you do not need more than that.
And for at least the last 10 years, if you have resource intensive apps, it is easier to run it on much higher performing servers, and simply send the screen, keyboard and mouse to your local machine.

Re:Bad Reason

[Gussington]

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.

Some cases maybe, but most can.

many professionals from video, graphic arts, photo editing too IT and development find that way to small.

I already made an exception for video cases, but IT dev is just code. Whether you type into terminal into your local machine, or a remote one makes no difference.

Re: Bad Reason

[fubarrr]

you dont get it, it is a strategic competition

Re:Bad Reason

[Gussington]

How about 3 VMs? Or financial modeling and big databases.

Spin them up in your favourite cloud service and SSH or RDP in. Much, much higher performance than any laptop will ever have.

Re: Bad Reason

[Gussington]

With a powerful laptop I can go visit a potential customer and show them the product/service without depending on any external factors. Such an advantage is huge.

And the disadvantage is that if you laptop fails, or goes missing you are screwed. With a remote cloud you could simply use one of their machines if yours fails and carry on.

With a powerful laptop I can carry around a massive dataset and work on the programming problem while en route to a conference.

Not sure where you live, but LTE Cellular is fairly common in most developed parts of the world. And as above a failed HDD isn't a disaster.
Also you can't carry a truly massive dataset, because no laptop in the world is specd high enough to complete with something like an AWS X1 instance which can do really massive datasets.

With a powerful laptop I can simply sit at home, at my work area, and not care about the local internet going down or the power going out: I can just focus on my work and get it done.

Again, I'm not sure where you live, but I live in a developed country, so this risk is much lower than a failed machine.
And the biggest benefit of this model, is that if I need to I can spin up a 128CPU/1952GB RAM VM at will and run anything I like at any time, and I only pay it when I use it. Let me know when your laptop can do that.

Re: Bad Reason

[NotAPK]

"Again, I'm not sure where you live, but I live in a developed country,"

Global. I travel and work anywhere in the world. Your first-world luxuries are not available everywhere.

Re:Bad Reason

[Anonymous Coward]

it isn't "just code", many of us aren't script kiddies writing websites, we need VM's and large chunks of memory for debugging them and no I can't do that remotely on a fucking terminal it would be painfully slow, my work happily pays the premium for desktops and laptops with 32 or 64GB of RAM as unlike you they don't have their heads up their arse and realise time is money and wasting high cost dev cycles is a LOT of money. This really isn't a problem though for Apple as they have declared they make consumer devices now only with the batshit move.

Re:Bad Reason

[bloodhawk]

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.

Re:Bad Reason

[lucm]

Macs have shit specs and always have. This one is no different.

You clearly didn't read the summary. This new Macbook is an incredible machine. This quote comes straight from Apple, and since Apple is the manufacturer of that machine, they're the ones who know it best, so you can rely on their assessment.

Re:Bad Reason

[TheRaven64]

And there's a really simple solution to this for Apple if they actually cared: power down half of the RAM when on battery for extended periods. The VM subsystem can already handle moving all of the physical pages out of the space used. Make sure that the kernel, compressed, and wired memory stay in the low 16GB, and when you're on battery for more than a few minutes you shuffle everything else out to compressed memory or disk and turn off the top 16GB. Hell, XNU already has interfaces for notifying applications that memory is constrained and most OS X apps will free caches and so on when they get this notification - trigger it when you move to battery, throw away unmodified disk cache pages and you'll probably be in under 16GB for most systems without anything clever.

I know at least two people who work for the Core OS team at Apple that could have this working within a few weeks, which means that the real reason that there's no 32GB version is that Schiller is an idiot.

Re: Bad Reason

[thegarbz]

you dont get it

lol

Re:Bad Reason

[andrewa]

Yep, try doing that while traveling at least twice a week, airport and in-flight internet are spotty at best, and very limited bandwidth at worst.

Re: Bad Reason

[fubarrr]

And yes, I didn't mean Apple, I meant Intel

Re: Bad Reason

[cthulhu11]

And according to the web site the thing weighs 7.5 lbs. It's a luggable, a desktop shaped like a laptop. Apples and oranges. And you're stuck with a shitty OS.

Re: Bad Reason

[dgatwood]

That's a really lousy reason. It should be possible to solve that problem by using chips with higher density (e.g. by stacking multiple dies in a single epoxy package).

Schiller is technically correct when he says that it is a battery life issue. What he failed to mention is that the only reason that is a problem is because Apple decided that making a pro laptop even more ridiculously thin was more important than making a product that works well for customers. Instead of putting a 100-watt-hour battery in the new MacBook Pro like all the previous models, they chose to reduce the battery capacity by about 25% in the new model to 76 Wh. Because of that decision, the extra ~5W for 32 GB of RAM makes a much bigger difference.

These days, Apple seems to be completely ignoring its customers' needs. Rather than giving us the additional hours of battery life that we have been demanding for years, Apple continued their mindless pursuit of thinness über alles. The result is yet another laptop with less battery life than the previous generation, at least for pro users (whose software is a lot harder on the battery than folks who just use web browsers).

I just don't get it. I really don't. This laptop is what the MacBook should have been. It is the exact opposite of what pro users need, substituting cute gimmicks like a touchscreen top row in place of actual features that pro users need and use regularly, such as battery life, an SD card slot, an HDMI slot, etc. If this is the best Apple can do, then perhaps Michael Dell was right after all.

Re: Bad Reason

[thoughtlover]

You are ignoring the fact that Kaby lake has limited availability and is not available in low wattage quad core configurations. Microsofts latest also use the Skylake processor.

This.

Why Apple and Microsoft Are Using Last Year's Skylake Processors In Their New Computers

https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

Re: Bad Reason

[TheRaven64]

Most of the logic is there already. They need to be able to relocate physical pages for superpage coalescing. They need to be able to restrict where wired memory is allocated because some devices can only DMA into the low 4GB. Between those two, you have all of the VM mechanism that you need, the rest is policy, plus a little bit of control logic to power down the RAM chips. They actually had most of the code for this working for the XServes when they considered implementing hot-swap RAM, so it's not even an untested use for this (though it probably hasn't been tested for a few years).

Re: Bad Reason

[Gussington]

Global. I travel and work anywhere in the world. Your first-world luxuries are not available everywhere.

Where exactly? And even assuming you're always on the go with your huge VMs in tow, what percentage of users do you think need this?
I've traveled a fair bit for work myself, and most places, even in developing countries, have the Internet. That's generally the reason why you are going there in the first place. They have networks are looking for new apps to put on them.

Re:Bad Reason

[Gussington]

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.

I've had plenty of experience in all of that, and one thing we never do is rely on a single laptop for a critical delivery or presentation. Demos are mostly always screenshots or videos so you don't run the risk of crashes mid-presentation.

Re:Bad Reason

[Agripa]

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/...

The Skylake processors Apple used, the 2.9GHz i5 6267U and 2.6GHz Core i7 6600U, support DDR3LP and DDR4.

Re:Bad Reason

[Agripa]

If you need more than 16GB, then you are using it wrong.

Re:Bad Reason

[syntotic]

I keep telling you... *THEY* want you to stop using computers completely. I __SEE__ primitives in NYC rushing in self conversations with cell phones turned off in their hands over the cheeks, even one pushing buttons on a turned off cell! You can see people who do NOT compute. Africans use computers exactly like TV sets for movies! Any other use exposes them as non savants, and they dislike it. It is NOT Economics nor Market nor managerial strategies nor technical considerations, it is that... they want you to stop using it!! Try using any computer with ONE missing keyboard key and you will see how many hours LESS you will spend in front of it. Same principle, make it harder to use, will be used less and in bad mood. Embargoes like the one announced in this thread are pointless, they WIN! If they later can justify to stop producing because the market did not react well... bingo. I ve never done Mac, since Apple II I found it lower quality compared to PCs and now I am even wishing to stop using Windows! I will try linux shortly because I am finding too many DETAILS as user and programmer that basically I got a viewer, a files warehouse and little else. But they are always technically justified. And obviously primitives dislike the laptops, I have video to prove it and a literal BATTLE EVERY DAY for using it in public.

Re: Bad Reason

[armanox]

At one of my clients (in the Virgin Islands) they only have a shared T1 for internet. And we have some new clients in the western US that have satellite internet. Remote access isn't something that can always be taken for granted. And it isn't uncommon for some of our developers to take their laptop with them when they travel back to India or Nepal to visit their families.

Hell, at a previous job they have an office outside of Pittsburgh that is still using DSL because that is the best service available to them at this time (the West Virginia office has better internet...).

Re:Bad Reason

[MachineShedFred]

You do know that quad-core mobile Kaby Lake CPUs aren't available yet, right?

Probably not. That would actually involve knowing wtf you're talking about, rather than AC shitposting some super clever (read: tired) memes.

Re:Bad Reason

[MachineShedFred]

1. Internet is not always available, so "the cloud" is a bad solution for some problems.
2. There are things that "the cloud" are not ideal for, like optimized I/O to storage sitting right next to you.
3. For various definitions of "pro" there are many different toolsets and workflows. Ever test a python / django app that needs to talk to a massive database in the cloud? Like having reports that run for 25 minutes just to be wrong, and have to tweak your query and run it again for 25 minutes, when it would be done massively faster against a local install of the database, even if that database is running in a container service?

Database engines and container services require what, predominantly? Oh, that's right. RAM.

Re:Bad Reason

[MachineShedFred]

"IT dev is just code"

I guess you don't believe in testing then? With real data? Using an actual database engine?

Hint: databases need memory.

Re:Bad Reason

[MachineShedFred]

There are so many people (read: managers and unexperienced IT drones) that think saving $200 to $500 once on a piece of equipment that can be written off as capital expense and has a useable lifetime of 4+ years is a great idea in comparison to the literally hundreds of hours of operational expense salary wasted looking at an hourglass / spinning wheel by the person using that piece of equipment.

It's shockingly stupid, and it's the same thought pattern being displayed by the GP poster.

In case it wasn't abundantly clear, more RAM today means a computer that can actually reach the end of the proposed service lifetime, as software bloat is a function of time. This is without even considering high memory pressure apps such as VMs, test database engines, container services, large data sets, video workflows, parallel processing operations that require their own memory footprint, etc.

Re: Bad Reason

[MachineShedFred]

Because it's pretty nice for a developer to be able to test code against actual data, without potentially fucking over production databases, or requiring a rebuild of a QA environment?

VM snapshotting is a thing, and has been for years.

Re: Bad Reason

[MachineShedFred]

It's also not a good sign when you are deciding what someone's acumen is based on the brand of tools they choose to use. In fact, it basically marks you as an idiot.

Here's a hint: it doesn't fucking matter as long as the job gets done, and done right.

Re:Bad Reason

[MachineShedFred]

Except for when you need to move 1TB of data into said environment. Goes pretty quick on a laptop via Thunderbolt / USB3. Pretty shitty pushing that over a congested cable modem or DSL via WiFi. Remember, we're talking about a laptop here, so you won't always be sitting on your company's metro ethernet connection to the Internet. And you're totally fucked if you happen to be on an airplane - somewhere that laptops absolutely never get used.

Oh, and if that data holds sensitive information, is your favorite cloud service a good place to be keeping that? How many violations of security policy / PCI audit failures would that entail? Sure, you might be able to scrub it first, but that just adds to the time it takes to get that data there, and you still have to have local assets to do the scrubbing.

Re:Bad Reason

[MachineShedFred]

AWS I/O is garbage for large data moves unless you are using the ephemeral SSD volume which gets wiped when you stop the instance. And, the instant you move the data from that ephemeral disk to an EBS volume, you're back to shared-tenant storage linked through a weak-shit emulated gigabit interface (even with the "enhanced EBS storage" unless you fork over big cash for a huge instance where you don't need all the CPU and RAM, but they are nice enough to give you a 10GB interface).

Sincerely,
someone who routinely is I/O bound on AWS EC2 while moving about databases to software development environments.

If AWS allowed you to a la carte the EBS bandwidth in addition to the provisioning of IOPS, it would be far better than it is today. But I think Amazon likes charging people that provision 20,000 IOPS SSDs, who will never see more than 5,000 IOPS of actual utilization because the EBS bandwidth is maxed out - it probably helps them oversubscribe the shit of our IOPS on their storage arrays without anyone actually noticing unless they look real hard.

Re:Bad Reason

[Gussington]

1. Internet is not always available, so "the cloud" is a bad solution for some problems.

I agree, but it is for most.

2. There are things that "the cloud" are not ideal for, like optimized I/O to storage sitting right next to you.

Server based I/O will always be faster than any laptop. The only exception is video (rendering/editing etc), which I mentioned and is a low use case scenario.

3. For various definitions of "pro" there are many different toolsets and workflows. Ever test a python / django app that needs to talk to a massive database in the cloud? Like having reports that run for 25 minutes just to be wrong, and have to tweak your query and run it again for 25 minutes, when it would be done massively faster against a local install of the database, even if that database is running in a container service?

Database engines and container services require what, predominantly? Oh, that's right. RAM.

Agree. That's why you put your app in the same cloud as your DB. Put everything in the cloud, on high spec hardware, and only send keyboard video and mouse to your terminal. Your app will run much faster, plus you can kick it off and leave it and come back later on a different terminal if required and it's still there running. It's not for everyone sure, but for most people it's a solution that works.

Re:Bad Reason

[Gussington]

"IT dev is just code"

I guess you don't believe in testing then? With real data? Using an actual database engine?

Hint: databases need memory.

AWS currently has instances available with 1952GB RAM. Let me know when you laptop gets close to that.

Re:Bad Reason

[Gussington]

Except for when you need to move 1TB of data into said environment. Goes pretty quick on a laptop via Thunderbolt / USB3. Pretty shitty pushing that over a congested cable modem or DSL via WiFi.

I'm not sure you're getting the concept. The Datacentre has the highest spec of everything, CPU, RAM, IOPS, Network. If your prod, test, and user machines are all in the data centre, then moving shit around is quicker and easier than any possible alternative.

Remember, we're talking about a laptop here, so you won't always be sitting on your company's metro ethernet connection to the Internet. And you're totally fucked if you happen to be on an airplane - somewhere that laptops absolutely never get used.

Not sure why you would want to. This seems more a process issue than a technical one.

Oh, and if that data holds sensitive information, is your favorite cloud service a good place to be keeping that? How many violations of security policy / PCI audit failures would that entail? Sure, you might be able to scrub it first, but that just adds to the time it takes to get that data there, and you still have to have local assets to do the scrubbing.

I've worked in banks and federal government projects with classified information and they are more secure and robust than you carrying sensitive info around on a portable device that could be lost or stolen or dropped.
What do you do when you fly to your destination and your laptop is doesn't power up? That doesn't seem to be a very reliable method of doing business

Re:Bad Reason

[Gussington]

AWS I/O is garbage

That was only an example. There is more than one cloud solution out there, all with different value propositions...

Re:Bad Reason

[MachineShedFred]

I work with software developers and "the cloud" every day - we have around 150 instances in AWS that are both production and development systems. Our developers still work off their local laptops whenever possible, and want to move their primary development environment locally using Vagrant and VMs because you never have connection issues, and you get to use the full bandwidth of the local NVMe SSD in your laptop rather than the slow EBS storage you get with EC2 or RDS. Not to mention that if you should not have an internet connection available (think: airplane), you can still work because your laptop isn't an expensive dumb terminal.

Some of the queries and reports they are running take 20+ minutes in "the cloud" and take far less time running locally. But you're saying that we should just move everything into AWS and the developers should just get over it? Because a laptop manufacturer can't figure out how to wedge a little more RAM into the computer?

Just on a cost perspective: $300 once for more RAM (probably less, but this is Apple we're talking about), or hourly charges forever on a cloud provider, and a developer twiddling their thumbs while waiting for a test to complete on a less efficient system. Let me think that one over real quick...

Re:Bad Reason

[MachineShedFred]

Did I say that I need almost 2TB of RAM? Did anyone say that? And, by the way, the only way you can get one of those X1 class instances right now is by doing a reserved instance, which means you're agreeing to pay $4/hr for the next three years whether you use it or not. That's over $100k. Sounds like a fucking bargain in comparison to just buying several laptops with more RAM in it for $300 more each, especially since for the same cost we could buy 20 developers the top spec'd MacBook Pro every single year and save money compared to that single X1 host, which is still backed by slow EBS storage; any MacBook Pro from the last 3 years has better I/O than you will see from EBS, and probably by an order of magnitude.

Good job knocking the hell out of a straw man though. Here's what my devs want:

4-core laptop, at least 32GB RAM. Why? So they can run an Ubuntu app server VM that mirrors the production stack config, a DB host VM or container, and still have ample room for the IDE, multiple web browsers for testing, bloated Outlook email, etc.

It's no secret that every single database engine runs better with more memory, and is massively I/O bound if you don't have the RAM to cache the whole thing. They can currently do the above with 16GB of RAM but the database runs like crap, because the data set they are working with is ~200GB, and you can't cache very good when you only have somewhere around 8GB to 10GB of RAM to give the whole VM, much less the DB engine.

I work in AWS every day, I know what the instances are capable of, and I know what the shortfalls are. Sometimes there is no substitute for having a self contained development environment that doesn't require network connectivity in order to function.

Re:Bad Reason

[Gussington]

I work in AWS every day, I know what the instances are capable of, and I know what the shortfalls are. Sometimes there is no substitute for having a self contained development environment that doesn't require network connectivity in order to function.

There are benefits and there are also risks, as you are now finding out with Apple's decision to not cater to your needs.

it's OK....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's OK, 32GB of laptop memory is $160., and 64GB is about $360. Since this is a product targeted at professional users, I'm sure I can open the back and swap out the RAM, if I want to give up a few minutes of battery life for it.

Err.... right?

Re:it's OK....

[hcs_$reboot]

Good luck unsoldering / soldering the RAM.

Re:it's OK....

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no need for un-soldering; I understand they will be coming out with a special dongle that will allow you to add more memory.

Re:it's OK....

[hcs_$reboot]

a $25 dongle?

Re:it's OK....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but don't expect to be able to charge your phone at the same time. You'll need the $75 dongle for that. $90 if you want the one that adds a connector for third party escape keys.

Re:it's OK....

[Ambient Sheep]

There's no need for un-soldering; I understand they will be coming out with a special dongle that will allow you to add more memory.

Let's hope their 16GB expansion pack doesn't wobble like the old ZX81 (Timex 1000) 16KB expansion pack did... :-)

Re:it's OK....

[uncqual]

No need for a dongle. I don't recall the link, but search YouTube -- you can already find a video on how to add more memory with just a hammer drill, a 1/4" masonry bit, an impact driver, and a 4" x 7/16" lag bolt. The memory is already in the MacBook, Apple just disables it so you don't even have to buy more memory. Check it out -- I tried it on a pre-production model (which was the last rev so it is identical to the production models) and it really works.

If you can't find the video -- it's pretty simple to do so play around with it a bit. I seem to recall you use the drill to drill/hammer a 1/4" hole 3" deep in the middle of the right edge 1 1/2" from the back and then use the impact driver to drive the lag bolt in to the full depth of the hole. Do be very careful not to drive the lag bolt in more than 3" as that may damage the MacBook. You can then remove the lag bolt (who would be crazy enough to want a bolt head/shaft sticking out of their notebook?). This action will have activated the "enable all memory" switch (it's inside an potted assembly so you can't get to it easily -- hence the lag bolt and drill). You may want to buff out the case where you drilled through it so it looks factory fresh. Really, the only trick is to make sure you drill at right angles to the case.

Re: it's OK....

[Doc Hopper]

Wow. Just... wow. You're taking me back to, what, 1981? My first first computer: a Timex-Sinclair ZX-80. I was 7 or 8, and remember painstakingly entering lines of code copied from a magazine in order to make a sprite be able to race diagonally across the screen. Well done!

Re:it's OK....

[Ingenium13]

While I know you're being funny, it is worth noting that there may be a chipset or UEFI limitation capping it at 16GB as well.

Re: it's OK....

[Bob_Who]

Wow....for a minute there it felt like Jurassic Park in here....

Re: it's OK....

[Doc Hopper]

"It's UNIX! I know this!"

Re: it's OK....

[Black LED]

I did the same, except on a VIC-20. Ahh, magazine games and cassette tape drives...

Re:it's OK....

[Bing Tsher E]

like the old ZX81 (Timex 1000) 16KB expansion pack did... :-)

NOBODY needs that much memory. The 24 pin SRAM chip inside the ZX81 provided 2K of RAM, which is plenty enough for anybody!

(in fact, if you connected the 16K expansion pack, it disabled (pulled the CS pin to disable) the internal SRAM chip and placed the 16K of DRAM onto the address bus in place of it)

Re: it's OK....

[Bing Tsher E]

I have a 3K memory Expansion Board fo the VIC-20 here that was being thrown away at work. It's a commercial third-party expansion board, with six 512 byte chips in sockets.

Re:it's OK....

[Bing Tsher E]

Apple can't keep up with the latest silicon. The 386SX had similar memory limitations to the chips Apple uses. It was a 32 bit processor interally, but for cost reasons it only had a 16 bit external bus.

When your line of PCs is small, and you only put out a few new models each year, it's inevitable that you will fall behind on using the latest silicon.

Re:it's OK....

[uncqual]

No, it really works. Try it. I assure that you will be impressed by the outcome and remember it for a long time.

Re:it's OK....

[uncqual]

I hate to reply to my own posts, but I realize I left out an important pro tip.

There are some reports that people who have done this had some problems.

Fortunately, I did extensive research and experimentation that reveals that a few people have had problems because they were using inferior drill bits. It's really best to use Monster drill bits -- everyone who uses them has been successful. Yes, Monster bits cost more than Harbor Freight "Warrior" bits, but they are well worth the cost as they insure that you won't have single bit errors on your newly exposed memory. It's possible DEWALT bits would work also, but why take the chance just to save few hundred dollars (pounds for you Brexiting Brits) per drill bit?

Re:it's OK....

[AmiMoJo]

Speaking of memory, they removed the SD card slot so you can't just throw in a 256gb one for some extra space now.

Re:it's OK....

[RDW]

Cool kids had the less wobbly Memotech RAM pack!:
http://www.primrosebank.net/im...
http://www.primrosebank.net/co...

Re: it's OK....

[Rockoon]

1 frame per second GUI interfaces ought to be enough for anybody

Re: it's OK....

[Black LED]

I used to have a 16K RAM expansion cartridge for it. I didn't even know they made a 3K expansion.

Re:it's OK....

[MachineShedFred]

extra (low bandwidth) space.

But you are right, this was yet another useful feature that has been mercilessly shitcanned.

Re:it's OK....

[MachineShedFred]

The chipset limitation is that Apple is making excuses in order to justify making an already slim and light notebook into a slightly slimmer and lighter notebook at the cost of additional wanted functionality. The "battery life" excuse can only come from two places:

1. They would have to stack chips in a memory package because there aren't dense enough modules available yet in current large-scale manufacturing, causing (slightly) less volume for battery, and (slightly) more amperage to be used to refresh the DRAM.

2. Phil Schiller's ass.

And I'm typing this on a 2014 MacBook Pro, so no I'm not a 'hater.'

Just another example

[ErikTheRed]

of Apple ramming their design decisions down our throats.

Re:Just another example

[Yvan256]

If you choose to use macOS, you are forced to endure Apple's decisions regarding the hardware.

For everything else, there's Hackintosh.

Re: Just another example

[Entrope]

I don't get it, could you explain the allusion to me?

Re:Just another example

[v1]

Just another example of Apple ramming their design decisions down our throats.

Yeah tell me about it! USB, Wifi, SSD, thunderbolt, multitouch, all crap! We were doing just fine without any of that. And now just look at what they force us to use!

Re:Just another example

[pubwvj]

Oh, so you CHOOSE. Got it. Your choice. Your throat.

Re:Just another example

[MachineShedFred]

It's like they didn't even ask "professionals" what they really wanted. Thinner and only one type of albeit faster port? I highly doubt anybody was asking for that. It probably would have been "Faster, longer battery life, maybe add 1 or 2 USB-C ports, otherwise leave it alone".

The same could have been said about the Mac Pro in 2013. "Faster CPU and RAM, PCI-E 3.0, Throw some USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt on there, and give us a power supply that can fire up 4 GPUs."

Instead we got a little cylinder that left people unimpressed with specs at launch, and is just a sad joke 3 years later after being completely ignored. The thermal engineering of the thing is rather impressive, but it's only required because they seemed to think that size of a workstation is far more important than the performance and expandability of a workstation, which has been patently false since the "workstation" segment was created many years ago.

What Mr Schiller Meant to Say ...

[jasnw]

"Try it, you'll love it, it's YUGE."

Well then...

[sootman]

Make it one millimeter thicker. Fucking a.

Now ask me how I think iPhone battery life could be improved...

Re:Well then...

[ayesnymous]

Yeah, if they love everything small, why'd they get rid of the 11 inch model?

Re:Well then...

[Agripa]

How do you think the iPhone battery life could be improved?

Include more of it.

Given the number of programmers

[rsilvergun]

using Macs this seems ridiculous. I'm a Windows guy myself. It could be better but to be honest Win 10 on an SSD is fine and I haven't had a virus since I stopped hanging around abondonware sites when snesorama closed.

Re:Given the number of programmers

[Rockoon]

and I haven't had a virus since I stopped hanging around abondonware sites when snesorama closed.

The dancing bunnies are a persistent danger. Windows viruses are like alcoholism.

Phil's thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

"I don't know the reason, so I'll just make some daft technical-sounding shit up to placate this one guy."

Form over function again

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is called "Pro"??

Re:Form over function again

[fluffernutter]

Sure.. for people who want to grow up one day and be like mommy and daddy.

Re:Form over function again

[Bing Tsher E]

My father still uses an IBM Thinkpad. One with a Pentium 1 processor that he bought with the employee discount. I remember when it was new, but mom's computer has been upgraded five or six times since then. When he retired, (after 30+ years at IBM starting in the mid 50's) he didn't want to mess with computers much, and for his finances the spreadsheet (Lotus, I believe) on that Thinkpad is perfectly sufficient.

Re:Form over function again

[fluffernutter]

Thinkpads are like those cool trendy thick black plastic glasses frames that hipsters wear.

Re:Form over function again

[bazorg]

Well at least you could read the summary!

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

(Where can I get that job?)

apple needs to have real pro hardware and not this

[Joe_Dragon]

apple needs to have real pro hardware and not this have to make it thinner shit.

Dubious...

[hcs_$reboot]

There seem to be numerous demands for more than 16GB, and I wonder if battery life is the real reason. After all, Apple could sell most of their MBP with 16 GB and answer their more demanding users by selling a few 32 GBs - warning them the battery life is likely to suffer a bit. No, it's likely there are some other technical concerns that will be revealed by iFixit sooner or later, that had Apple take that decision.

Re:Dubious...

[yodleboy]

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.

Re: Dubious...

[Doc Hopper]

Technical concerns? Naw. It's marketing. Apple's feeling Intel's blunder: "Tick Tock... oh, crap. 10nm yield rates suck. Uhh... Tock, again, anyone?" The trickle-down effect of poor yield rates in 10nm is burning everybody in the industry right now, so IMHO they are giving a 16GB option just so they can reveal a "groundbreaking" 32GB upgrade next year. The upgrade gravy train is slowing down as physics reminds the computing industry that she's a harsh mistress. Apple's signaling their intent by leveraging custom chips to drive custom functions in several product lines; Oracle is doing the same by integrating custom programmable functionality into their SPARC line. The long reign of Intel -- while not at an end! -- is fraying at the edges due to the bias of reality against ever-diminishing electron pathways...

Re:Dubious...

[Bing Tsher E]

They eventually stopped refusing to produce only one button mice, so there is hope.

(It probably cost somebody really important inside Apple a lot of pride when they did that.)

Re:Dubious...

[hcs_$reboot]

Or maybe thickness is the only path of improvement they could come with.

Re:Dubious...

[Rockoon]

The reasoning is more sane than you guys think.

The marketers have reliable data that says if its Xmm thinner that they will sell Y additional units, where apparently Y isnt at all a small number.

The engineers chime in saying if its Xmm thinner that it will also save them $Z per unit on materials.

This is a no-brainer.

16GB is pretty good

[somenickname]

I would think the Dell XPS line is probably the nearest competitor to these laptops and the 13 inch comes with 4GB or 8GB of RAM while the 15 inch comes with 8GB or 16GB. So, in this case, I don't really think that Apple has done anything too boneheaded. Though, having said that, my 12.5" ThinkPad from 2011 has had 16GB of RAM since the day it arrived. So, Apple doesn't really deserve any praise for 16GB either.

Re:16GB is pretty good

[cfalcon]

> I would think the Dell XPS line is probably the nearest competitor to these laptops

Ok...

> while the 15 inch comes with 8GB or 16GB.

Here's one with 32 gigs of RAM:

http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop...

Re: 16GB is pretty good

[Entrope]

The 15" XPS models have a 32 GB option.

Re:16GB is pretty good

[caseih]

And how is battery life compared to the new 16 GB MacBook Pro? I will be surprised if it's as good or better.

Re: 16GB is pretty good

[vux984]

On some level... who cares? I can plug in rhe xps if it runs low. I cant add ram to the mac.

Dell precision laptops can run xeons with 64gb ecc if i want. Its nice to have choice so you can get what you need and make your own decisions about weight / battery vs perfomance. Dell has xps and precision so you can get what ylu need.

Apple just has something like xps... and its less capable then the xps. Its a joke next to the precision.

And its not like apple even had to make it thinner. They could have added ram and battery and made it a touch thicker.

Re:16GB is pretty good

[somenickname]

Here's one with 32 gigs of RAM

I'm not sure how I missed that, thanks.

Re:16GB is pretty good

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It compares favorably with the 'nice consumer toy' lines from the various PC OEMs; but the problem is that Apple is selling this as a "Macbook Pro". As in, their punchiest mobile option for those 'creatives' and whatnot who use macs to do work.

There, the comparison is less flattering. By the standards of consumer laptops, it's undeniably gorgeous and likely to be off well above average quality; and it will be thinner and lighter than the mobile workstations of the world; but that doesn't change the fact that 16GB of RAM just isn't enough for some jobs; and (in a market where you can get 64GBs from the PC OEMs) Apple simply doesn't offer anything.

Re:16GB is pretty good

[cfalcon]

Who cares? The point isn't the battery life. The point is that if you are looking at the "nearest competitor", they do, in fact, offer 32 GB of RAM. I'd be surprised if Apple fucked up battery life, or that the interviewee was incorrect about his reasoning. But claiming that Apple's competitors don't go up to 32 GB, which is what the post I replied to was saying, is bullshit.

Re:16GB is pretty good

[Bing Tsher E]

(reality distortion field fading.... fading.... )

HELP ME, JOBS! OH HELP MEEEEEEE!

Re:16GB is pretty good

[bloodhawk]

who gives a shit, you don't buy a professionally specced laptop where your primary concern is battery life.

Re:16GB is pretty good

[Greyfox]

I recently bought one of their Precision laptops with Linux preinstalled. I've been holding some grudges against Dell for a very long time, but I have to hand it to them; they put together a beautiful machine that was exactly what I was looking for. I should be pretty happy with it as long as I never have to talk to their technical support.

Re: 16GB is pretty good

[nojayuk]

Apple just has something like xps... and its less capable then the xps. Its a joke next to the precision.

The new MacBook Pro is slimmer than the Dell XPS. That's what's important. To Apple.

Re: 16GB is pretty good

[vux984]

Nope I'm not. I've consistently said that 2012 MBP I have (with gigabit and a DVDRW) was perfectly fine as a form factor.

In 2016... the same form factor would be awesome, keep the ethernet port, keep the magsave, use all the extra space for more battery... and an extra SSD bay, upgradeable ram sockets.

My 2015 macbook pro... its thinner and faster and has better battery than my 2012 one. But I'd much rather it have been thicker with even MORE battery, upgradeable ram, and an ethernet port.

Good grief!

[Anonymous Coward]

What are people doing that requires so much memory?

Re:Good grief!

[cfalcon]

> What are people doing that requires so much memory?

1- Multitasking
2- Running their own code that requires a lot of memory
3- VMs
4- Any or all of the above

Bonus: Ramdisking!

Re:Good grief!

[hcs_$reboot]

VMs or video editing.

Re:Good grief!

[hcs_$reboot]

> What are people doing that requires so much memory?

MS Paint

Re: Good grief!

[Entrope]

High-end power users expect value for their money. Apple realized there's a big part of the market who care more about glitz than capability, and don't know (or don't care) when they're buying a shiny but overpriced toy.

Re:Good grief!

[gumbi west]

What is everyone running VMs for? When you do cross platform testing, can you possibly get enough VMs on a laptop?

Re:Good grief!

[hcs_$reboot]

Running 2 or 3 VMs, like VirtualBox, happens... Like testing server + 2 different clients simultaneously..

Re: Good grief!

[NotAPK]

For fuck sake. Do NOT tell me what I should or should not be doing with my fucking laptop.

Re:Good grief!

[Catbeller]

Anything we can? That would be a good answer. They keep. Controlling. Everything.

Re:Good grief!

[gumbi west]

Why do you need a VM to act as a client?

Re:Good grief!

[hcs_$reboot]

Because the client and server don't have the same OS.

Re:Good grief!

[gumbi west]

Makes a lot of sense. Thanks.

I know that e.g. Adobe has an automated multi-platform test system. But does that work for your case?

Re:Good grief!

[hcs_$reboot]

Hmm Adobe? Not interested, thanks.

Energy efficient?

[PRMan]

Broadwell 84 TDP

Skylake 99 TDP

Re:Energy efficient?

[AmiMoJo]

That's the limit, the actual maximum depends on the cooling capacity of the machine and if the user selected active or passive cooling mode. That's why it's worth benchmarking laptops with the same CPU.

Re:Energy efficient?

[thegarbz]

Try 7.5W-45W TDP for the Skylake.

Since we don't know anything other than it's an i7 Skylake processor in a mobile platform you can assume both the best and worst case scenario from the MOBILE PLATFORM.

Broadwell by comparison was 7.5W-47W.

Re:Energy efficient?

[NotAPK]

I'm not discrediting the information in your post, but anyone reading it needs to remember that the 7.5W end of the range is when the CPU isn't doing much, while the 45W end is at full throttle.

Alternatively you are indicating the TDP range for the entire processor lineup, which seems pretty meaningless.

Re:Energy efficient?

[thegarbz]

I'm indicating precisely the range of TDP given the information we know, which is that there's a mobile i7 variant. It won't be higher than 45W. It may not be as high as 45W. It won't be lower than 7.5W, it may not get as low as 7.5W.

For the entire range you're looking at 3.5W - 99W, the number the GP posted which I was discrediting given the information we know.

Don't worry.

[Snufu]

Because the Macbook Pro specs are inferior to top end models from other manufacturers, we can expect the Apple laptops to be discounted appropriately.

Re:Don't worry.

[hcs_$reboot]

Funny but what if Apple doesn't sell enough MBP? will they maintain the overprice policy, or "discount appropriately"?

Re:Don't worry.

[Rockoon]

They will at the very least leverage their brand to make lots of money on MBP's irregardless of its quality. They might eventually run their brand into the ground but shitty MBP's wont be the reason. Shitty phones and tablets on the other hand...

No, the SSD cannot fix this

[gweihir]

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.

Re:No, the SSD cannot fix this

[AmiMoJo]

It really depends on how you use your computer. I do a lot of development work and my work PC is limited to 8gb of RAM. However, with an SSD switching apps is only delayed by a few hundred milliseconds rather than about 10 seconds with a HDD.

If your apps constantly churn RAM then swapping will not be a good solution, but if you just want loads of apps open it's about 80-90% as good with an SSD.

Solution!

[e432776]

have a higher capacity battery! Don't mention the physical thickness of the system- previous gen already thin enough. Added benefit: better keyboard also possible.

Re:apple needs to have real pro hardware and not t

[PsychoSlashDot]

apple needs to have real pro hardware and not this have to make it thinner shit.

Exactly. At the root, his answer is "To put more than 16GB of fast RAM into a notebook design at this time would require we make it an angstrom thicker and we'd rather chew off our own testicles than do that so fuck you very much and please keep sending us money."

It's your product lines, not the battery life

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:It's your product lines, not the battery life

[Bing Tsher E]

Maybe Apple will start allowing third party OEMs to sell machines to run their OS. They might have to, because it's the only OS platform that can be used to write the little iOS apps for their money-making gadget line (the phones, music players, set-top-boxes, etc.)

Developers want to do their work on capable machines, after all. Not gimpy consumer boxes you can get at Best Buy.

Re:It's your product lines, not the battery life

[gumbi west]

More durable? have you tried to break a unibody mac?

Re:It's your product lines, not the battery life

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, considering the only 'MacBook' is a 1-2 yo machine with only one usb port and no power port, they should probably be forgiven for getting a pro

Re:It's your product lines, not the battery life

[armanox]

To answer your question, you can create a swapfile on a filesystem and use it. It is slower then a swap partition, but it works. Here is what you need to do (as root):

# Create the file
touch swapfile

# Make it the size you want, where $size is how big you want, with the prefix , such as 8GB
truncate --size=$size swapfile

# Format it for swap
mkswap swapfile

# Turn it on
swapon swapfile

# Add it to /etc/fstab if you want it to be permanent
echo "$('pwd')/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

Re:So what?

[Yvan256]

I have 31.4159 infrachronoflips of memory in my system.

Depressing

[Snufu]

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.

Re:Depressing

[jez9999]

What has Apple accomplished in eight years?

Now it competes with your credit card for thinness.

Re:Depressing

[Blaskowicz]

I've just found on the web an €630 PC laptop that comes with no OS (store brand, so the make and model wouldn't be meaningful, it's as if it'd be a Newegg branded laptop).
Core i3-6100H : same die as in the 13" MacBook Pro, 35 watts version, no turbo clocks. 2.7GHz!
Intel graphics!
17.3" 1600x900, matte panel with anti-glare. TN panel though. I've just checked this before posting!
4GB RAM
2TB 5400 rpm HDD
gigabit RJ45 ethernet
DVD drive! (can be space for HDD or cheap 2.5" SSD)
four USB type A
HDMI and VGA
empty M.2 PCie 2x slot i.e. Mac Book Pro storage class, albeit "only" 1GB/s.
Bluetooth, wifi n not ac.

Weighs 3.1 kg (get rid of HDD and DVD if you want to make it lighter)
Supports not only 32GB of RAM, but many storage options. Up to three SSD or one SSD and two HDD, plus the slot for a huge SD card.

Re:Depressing

[Snufu]

Do you really think Apple designs its products in a vacuum?

The 'Pro' line certainly seems designed in world devoid of professionals.

I'm guessing 90% of their market are not hardcode techies but businesspeople and travelers for whom weight IS a serious concern

Very likely. And Apple dedicates no less than two lines of laptops (Macbook Air, Macbook) for users for whom weight is the primary concern. What is the point of the Macbook Pro? It certainly isn't top end. Nor is it lightweight compared to their other offerings. One gets the impression the Macbook Pro (as well as the Mac Pro) are dead computers cycling.

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.

Re:Just what is the power consumption?

[hcs_$reboot]

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

If the consumption grows according to Apple memory prices, that's exponential.

Re: Oh good more news on the new MBP

[johnsnails]

Everyone had high hopes for a serious upgrade in this MBP. Can you imagine if it had 32GB of ram, gb Ethernet port, usb3 Port/s, bigger battery, kept the magnet charger and they said we made the brave decision of a slightly thicker laptop to accommodate it all. That would be brave and everyone like me who gave up waiting and bought the xps 15 would have laptop envy. Heck I'd consider selling my xps to buy a unit like that from Apple. I'd give them a bravery award for dropping the 15" range and brining back the 17" range in the MBP line.

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...

Re:No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[Cyberax]

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.

I'm using ALL of the functional keys all the time. In particular, F1 is a shortcut to bring up iTerm which I'm using in ALL contexts. So now it'll become impossible.

It's also not clear what "just press FN" means. Does it mean that Esc will become FN+Esc all the time? Cause that's how I read it.

Re:No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[Bing Tsher E]

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.

So you're saying that if I run Linux, or Solaris, NetBSD or (even) Windows in a VM on one of the new Macintosh laptops, it will magically know that I am running the vi editor inside the Xterm and give me an ESC key on the glass touchstrip? Or does this only apply if I am running the latest version of whatever derivative version of vi (does Apple even support such a binary?) Apple bundles with the most recent Mac OS?

Oh, that's right. 16M memory limitation. I probably won't run very many VMs.

Re:No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[friedmud]

> I'm using ALL of the functional keys all the time. In particular, F1 is a shortcut to bring up iTerm which I'm using in ALL contexts. So now it'll become impossible.

No. Now it means you'll be able to put a little "button" called "iTerm" where F1 currently is so that it's even easier to recognize that that's what the button does...

I also use all of my F keys... have each one mapped to a specific task in Emacs. I'm looking forward to making them actually say what they do (and be context sensitive... they may even change depending on _exactly_ what I'm doing in Emacs) in the Touch Bar.

Why is everyone always so damn negative these days?

Re:No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[friedmud]

16 _GB_ is plenty to run VMs. I run Linux and Windows VMs just fine on my 16GB MBP.

You'll be able to to configure the touch bar however you want. There will be _thousands_ of utility apps for changing it to do whatever you want. I guarantee you that you can force it to _always_ display an ESC key if that's what you so desire.

You will definitely be able to tell it to show an ESC key in VMware, X, Termina, etc.

Re: No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[Cyberax]

You don't get it. F1 binding for iTerm is NOT context-sensitive, it works EVERYWHERE overriding the default functionality. It appears to be impossible with the fondlebar.

Re:No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[Jamlad]

In the same way the market has already responded to the iPhone 7's lack of 3.5mm jack by producing cases with implanted jacks (Fuze) there are equivilent USB-C:magsafe adaptors available. I've seen a few people link the Griffin BreakSafe adaptor, which might be a valid replacement. I've not yet seen it in reality. Also still clinging on to my 17" 2011 MBP (8Gb, 256Gb SSD). Although I recently discovered the 17" form factor is too large for comfortable use on trains/planes, so I am considering shifting down to 15" and just using a monitor at home. However, I'm concerned with being shoeboxed into win8/10 with any new laptop (Apple or otherwise) as I'm quite fond of boot(camp)ing with win7.

Re:No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[thegarbz]

Also all of the hate over no ESC is totally incorrect.

Come back to me when you can hit the ESC key without taking your eyes off the screen.

Re:No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[cerberusss]

A great idea for a USB-C charging cable that had a magnetic breakaway connector in the middle

Griffin has something like this:
https://griffintechnology.com/...

However, I'm not sure if it can take the full 90 watt from the Apple USB-C power adapter.

Re: No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[friedmud]

I do get it.

Like I said: I guarantee you there will be a utility for placing a "permanent" button anywhere you want on the touch bar. One that never changes no matter what you're doing. There are going to be hundreds of utilities for controlling this thing (just like there are for everything else in OSX).

And - if that fails - I agree with the Anonymous poster: there will be a way to force the touch bar to always display the F-keys...

It's going to be fine.

Re:No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[armanox]

Wait, you actually look at your keyboard when you are typing?

Re:No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[friedmud]

Not when typing - but when going after an F-key... yeah, most of the time. I have some muscle memory for the F-keys I use most (F8 is a "compile" button for me in Emacs... hit that one a LOT)... but even then I usually glance down to make sure I'm hitting the right one.

You have perfect muscle memory for all of the F-keys?

Re:No (well, almost) Glare on newer MacBook Pro

[armanox]

Well, like you, on the ones that I use (F1, F2, F4, and F5 mostly).

All day?

[Loconut1389]

I have a MBP Retina 15" from 2013. Even on a good day, I never get more than 3 or 4 hours on it.

No Escape

[Roger W Moore]

Huh?! Since when were you forced to buy Apple products?

Well if you buy one of the new MacBooks you'll find that now there is literally no escape so it's best to get out now while you still can.

Why do you need more than 16GB?

[duke_cheetah2003]

As sort of a curiosity, I want to ask you all, what do you need with more than 16GB? Entertain me and others, cite examples of things you do that need more than 16GB memory.

I'm asking as a person who has 16GB in their desktop machine and.. uh.. I've never seen it all get used..ever. I think I'm rather demanding of my PC too, as I run PC games of all manner, Second Life viewer, compilers, Visual Studio, etc. Not a lot of photo processing, but I do do that too, with GIMP, fussing with 6000x4000 jpg's from my DSLR.

It's a serious question though I'd love to see some interesting answers to. What do you need with more than 16GB? Lastly, don't put the obvious one: Virtual Machines. I use those too and I agree it's one case for more than 16GB. But OTHER than Virtual Machines...

Re:Why do you need more than 16GB?

[guruevi]

At this point, not much. Swapping out to PCIe is plenty fast. The main reason would be longevity of the hardware. If you can prop in 32GB now, you don't have to update 5 years from now. I see people with 7-10 year old MacBook Pros upgraded with memory (more than the max specified) and SSD and they still work plenty fast.

Re:Why do you need more than 16GB?

[Iamthecheese]

Keeping 50 browser tabs open while I swap back and forth between my heavily modded TESV installation and my office work, with two small RAMdisks for my VPN and browser. With enough free space to start up a VM if I need it.

Re:Why do you need more than 16GB?

[WaffleMonster]

As sort of a curiosity, I want to ask you all, what do you need with more than 16GB? Entertain me and others, cite examples of things you do that need more than 16GB memory.

Firefox.

Re:Why do you need more than 16GB?

[eagl]

Because I keep my computers longer than one hardware and OS product cycle. I've had to upgrade the RAM on every single computer I've ever owned, long before I retired the computer from use. 16GB was great a couple of years ago, and it may even be "enough" right now. A couple years from now... probably not so much. Macbook pro isn't priced as a disposable or throwaway device. If I want to put up with buying a new computer every year, I'll get a $500 refurb and throw it out / replace it annually, for the same long-term cost of a macbook.

Re:Why do you need more than 16GB?

[hcs_$reboot]

Having more than 2 tabs in Chrome (3 maybe?)

Re: Why do you need more than 16GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari on Mac happily uses circa 12GB on my machine. Running anything in VM is out of the question by that time. The i7 is pegged quite a bit swapping stuff around. Same pages open in IE on my windows 8.1 box use 6gb of memory and the Celeron in it doesn't even have to run at full speed while running a VM at the same time. Comparing machines with 16GB physical ram and SSD drives, the i7 is a 2.7/3.2GHz part running at 2.9-3.1 turboboost most of the time, the celeron is a 1.4Ghz part running at 1.1-1.2 most of the time. I have almost completely stopped using my $1600+ After upgrades Mac and using almost exclusively the $320 after upgrades windows box.

Not to mention that any MacOS after 10.6.8 is bad in quality - kernel memory leaks, UX going down, etc and any macOS after 10.9.5 completely sucks, while on the other hand windows 8.1 is almost perfect with regards to stability and memory management and even UX.

Re:Why do you need more than 16GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Editing very high resolution (RAW) images in photoshop.
Editing/Rendering 4k video.

And keep in mind that it is often not just one program consuming it all. There is often a workflow requiring several programs to be open even if they are not running simultaneously all the time.

Re:Why do you need more than 16GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than VMs (which are incredibly useful) there is CAD programs (Pro-E/CREO, Solidworks), finite element analysis, large datasets in Matlab, processing multi-gigapixel images, google chrome and a reckless disregard for closing tabs, and medical imaging programs. For bonus points try running any of these within a VM to account for needing a different OS.

Re:Why do you need more than 16GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

As sort of a curiosity, I want to ask you all, what do you need with more than 16GB? Entertain me and others, cite examples of things you do that need more than 16GB memory.

I'm asking as a person who has 16GB in their desktop machine and.. uh.. I've never seen it all get used..ever. I think I'm rather demanding of my PC too, as I run PC games of all manner, Second Life viewer, compilers, Visual Studio, etc. Not a lot of photo processing, but I do do that too, with GIMP, fussing with 6000x4000 jpg's from my DSLR.

It's a serious question though I'd love to see some interesting answers to. What do you need with more than 16GB? Lastly, don't put the obvious one: Virtual Machines. I use those too and I agree it's one case for more than 16GB. But OTHER than Virtual Machines...

Another is machine learning and statistical applications. A lot of those software can only do in memory processing. You have to load your entire dataset into memory before you can do anything with it.

Since people have 32GB or more on their desktops, they make their datasets that big. So, if you have 16GB and somebody created a dataset on their 32GB desktop, you can't run the analysis program.

Of course, you can argue you should make small datasets for analysis and have some sort of server doing the heavy lifting. But, these are scientists and not IT people. They'll just say it works on my computer.

And, another reason to have more than 16GB is the bugginess of programs like Visual Studio. I have 4-5 instances of 2013 and 2015s running at the same time and some are always crashing here and there. When it crashes, it leaves behind so much stuff that after a few days all you RAM is gone and you have to restart your computer. This is a super pain because you have to open all your programs/documents etc all over again. Some applications are really bad at serializing their state when quitting and it takes a bit of fiddling to get where you want, especially the professional applications that are used by a few thousand people in the world. There is a documentation viewer program which I have 5-6 documents open in the middle but it has no mechanism to remember the documents it had open and the page it was on. I have to write it all down on paper before restarting the computer.

Re:Why do you need more than 16GB?

[Leslie43]

Like almost every other CAD program, neither of those CAD programs run natively in Mac.
And no, you can't always just run them in a VM, not only is it slower (negating the point of 32gigs), but Solidworks 2016 will throw up an error if you do.

Re:Why do you need more than 16GB?

[Dr. Evil]

If I didn't need virtual machines, I wouldn't have the software I need to use 32G of RAM. E.g., simulating HA clusters, front-ends, backends, different clients etc.

So yes, VMs. Otherwise I would be fine on an 8G Macbook with a 128G SSD. (4G if I wasn't lazy about closing tabs).

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

[eagl]

Because 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Wow, very similar to me.

[aussersterne]

For mobile work I use an early 2011 17" with matte screen. It's now 1TB SSD + 1TB SSHD (removed the optical drive) and 16GB RAM, and I do end up paging rather often. I do marketing work for a dot-com and these days, and in the modern world that involves big data hosted on Amazon, extensive analytics, lots of R programs to cook the data, video production, lots of photoshop work, and many, many browser windows open at the same time.

I use gfxSwitcher to try to exercise some control over the graphics system and SMCFanControl to keep the fans running at 6k RPM because I know this machine's days are numbered due to the infamous AMD GPU mainboard heat issue (all of the 2011 MBPs with integrated AMD chips will eventually die due to a failure of the soldering on the GPU resulting from heat).

I was actually hoping it would die last year because Apple was replacing mainboards on these machines for free (official policy) until the end of February this year due to the problem—but they were just NOS mainboards, no actual fix for the long term issue, so while they might have extended the life, they didn't solve the problem definitively. None of these will be running in another 10 years, zero of them.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do when this machine goes up in smoke. Most of the features I care about are gone:

- More RAM? Nope.
- Integrated ethernet port for gigabit? Nope.
- Ability to install extra storage? Nope.
- 17" display? Nope.

It looks like when this machine goes south, I'll be back to Wintel hardware (running Linux) for my portable computing.

Not a gaming laptop

[bigbang137]

It would seem that users are confusing a Mac with a gaming laptop. It is not. It has now degenerated to be a laptop for the masses - for the common denominator. Only gaming laptops have 32G or 64G RAM. Only they have 2x2T SSD drives, with additional PCIe drives possible. Not to forget dual GPUs. Yes, 17" screens too. Macs are not sexy; they're for ordinary people. Do you like ordinary?

Re:Not a gaming laptop

[bigbang137]

Oh you're right, but they're sold only as gaming laptops, and that's the unfortunate thing. Show me a single 64G RAM laptop that is not branded as a gaming laptop and is not by a company that caters mostly to gamers.

Re:Not a gaming laptop

[nojayuk]

Dell's Precision series laptops configured with a Xeon CPU and 64GB ECC DRAM option are not targetted at gamers, they're portable workstations. Same with HP's ZBooks, up to 64GB RAM and NVidia Quadro graphics cards, not an option a gamer would usually choose.

Re:Not a gaming laptop

[armanox]

Sure - go have a look at the Dell Precision line (sold as a mobile workstation). The Precision 7710 has a 17" screen, choice of i7 or Xeon, Quadro GPU, either FHD or UHD display, standard option of 32GB of RAM (64 if you customize it), up to 3 storage devices (SSD/HDD), RAID (0/1/5), thunderbolt port, and still works with the E-series docking station. Or step down to the 7510 (15"), and have two storage devices and RAID 0/1 instead. And for operating systems you get choice of Windows 7 or 10 (Pro), or Ubuntu Linux.

As Bill Gates Once Said:

[Bing Tsher E]

"16MB is enough RAM for everybody."

Or was that 640K??

Re:As Bill Gates Once Said:

[hcs_$reboot]

640K but to be fair he said that in 1956

Re: Oh good more news on the new MBP

[Bing Tsher E]

Even my weak little Netbook, which is an Acer Aspire One (a $300 system at full retail two years ago), has 8GB of memory. It was sold as a 4GB max system, but you can off-label upgrade it with a 8GB DIMM and it eats it all up and becomes a fairly big (but slow) machine. I run VirtualBox on it and can play with Linux Distros, NetBSD or MINIX, and of course run my old 32 bit XP programs that Windows 7 won't support anymore.

It's a Netbook. With 8GB. Did I mention that?? Fully half as much RAM as the top-end Apple flagship.

I beg to differ

[jenningsthecat]

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.

Re:I beg to differ

[Catbeller]

Ive's design department is controlling their R&D. Not good. And I don't think they care much about their Mac line, no matter what they say.
They've enough money to do ANYTHING, and they just keep hoarding. Their headquarters looks *inward*, and has finite room. They have no imagination. And they're contemptuous of the poor - no other way to say it. It's a world of millionaires that don't want to pay taxes. They don't even care about the stockholders.

I believe Apple is becoming a capital holding company that happens to dabble in computing.

Re:32GB on the base model then.

[Blaskowicz]

The thing is, if this computer uses LPDDR3 then you would need a whole different motherboard to put DDR4 on and thus have higher maximum memory capacity. If Apple had stuck to removable memory on So-DIMM, there would never have been a problem. Intel even has a solution called UniDIMM, not adopted by memory vendors but could have been if Apple laptops were to use it : it's yet another So-DIMM format, but it can takes either low voltage DDR3, DDR4 or LPDDR3. Thus solving that memory dichotomy. It's still-born, thanks to Apple's greed, so the dichotomy is between all-soldered laptops with LPDDR3 / LPDDR4 (i.e. smartphone memory) or laptops with one, two or four slots for "real" DDR3 or DDR4 memory.

16GB is ridiculous

[AbRASiON]

I used to play video games and be a benchmark nerd, I know hardware fairly well and I always figured more than 16GB was a waste of money.
Ever since I STOPPED playing games and did a little graphics work or fired up some VMs I realised you really can require a lot of memory in a system.
I've now got 24GB in my machine, despite an upper mid range 2013 CPU, regular business style desktop model, nothing but onboard, but I do exceed 16GB fairly regularly.

If you want to future proof a machine for developers or graphics people (previously Apples bread and butter!? years ago) then you need to be able to go to 32GB
I must admit I figure exceeding 32GB would be rare but I'm sure some video editing guys could / would need it.

They really are just making devices for the average consumer to feel cool now.

Re:16GB is ridiculous

[Lumpy]

Video editing? Programmers need it. Running your IDE and at least 2 VM's for testing absolutely can consume 32GB in a heartbeat.

Again with the Thinner and lighter crap.

[Lumpy]

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.

Working at a dev house that only uses macs...

[gsilver0]

16GB can be downright painful. 8GB taken up by a work-essential VM, and running lots of memory-intensive programs. Even with the fancy compressed memory algorithms that the system runs, it easily max out physical memory usage, and the system slows to a crawl when it fills up. I'm really disappointed that the 32GB option still isn't available. Oh well. Memory "witch hunts" looking for things that I can close to free up a bit more ram so that my computer stays usable is productive, right?

Ive's thinness obsession crippling Apple hardware

[Catbeller]

Ive's ongoing mania for thinness led to this. There's no room for more battery because he wanted to shave 3 millimeters off the thickness of the laptop. If they added a whole *centimeter* to the case depth, there'd be enough battery for days. Ives is crippling all the devices, and no one can tell him to stop-certainly not the users. Who asked for thinness? Like robot cars and connectivity for my toaster, I don't recall asking for this.

No, it is just as simple

[SuperKendall]

I'm using ALL of the functional keys all the time. In particular, F1 is a shortcut to bring up iTerm which I'm using in ALL contexts.

What part of "FN key brings up traditional FN row" did you not understand? Why not just continue to use F1 as you have been, which is available ALL OF THE TIME when you simply press the FN key.

Re: No, it is just as simple

[Cyberax]

Appear for how long?

Re: No, it is just as simple

[SuperKendall]

For as long as you hold down the FN key. You hold down FN, and while holding FN, you also press the F1 key that is now visible... and add modifier keys or whatever as desired.

But as another poster replied, it's only programs that support custom TouchBars that will not be showing Esc + F1-F12 anyway...

Why would it not know that

[SuperKendall]

So you're saying that if I run Linux, or Solaris, NetBSD or (even) Windows in a VM on one of the new Macintosh laptops, it will magically know that I am running the vi editor inside the Xterm and give me an ESC key on the glass touchstrip?

It wouldn't "magically" do anything except show the normal TouchBar (including ESC) for any app that does not define a custom TouchBar. Why on earth would you expect it to do anything else? What exactly would it do besides show ESC + F1-F12?????

???!?!?!

Oh, that's right. 16M memory limitation. I probably won't run very many VMs.

Ever hear of this thing called swap....

Although I agree with you really that 16GB is a bit light, I would have personally liked 32GB.

Ok I'm back-I type without looking, how do you not

[SuperKendall]

How do you type? I don't even touch type but I can easily hit FN and ESC today without looking, they are at the corners after all - and when I'm typing I'm looking at the screen, not at the keys.

I think it si mind-boggling that people who type without looking are raising the issue that you may need to dupe without looking!!

Perfect!!

[SuperKendall]

Good question about taking the full 90w power for the Pro but even if not i'm sure it will be updated soon - exactly what I was thinking of. I knew something that made so much sense had to exist!

P.S. it was 60 watts limit

[SuperKendall]

Actually that one specifically says in the specs rated at up to 60 watts, so I'll have to wait for an update as noted. Thanks again for showing me someone at least bothered to make one!

Re:Ok I'm back-I type without looking, how do you

[thegarbz]

I don't even touch type

Well I'm glad you took yourself out of the example. Wait but you look at the screen while typing but don't touch type? What do you have some special tongue activated head shakey control that people who don't have finger mobility use to interact with computer? Or are you just magic in that you know where your body is at all times in free space and that you can make movements in the correct direction without any kind of external feedback that the other 7bn people on this planet rely on? (hint that external feedback being touch, and the key part of touch typing when you don't have something like visual feedback).

I'm glad this is a non issue for you, so please take yourself out of the discussion as the rest of the world finds such stupid interfaces are real problem, regardless of how much Apple claims you can write your university thesis on an iPad by paying people to do it and saying "See! in the advertisements. "

Yawn... pro....maybe semi-pro

[PortHaven]

Seriously, I don't think ANY laptop should be called PRO if it only can handle 32gb of RAM. Are the non-pro limited to 16gb?

And the reason why? Seriously....

Re:Ok I'm back-I type without looking, how do you

[SuperKendall]

. Wait but you look at the screen while typing but don't touch type?

Yes, by that I mean I have my own resting position for fingers that is not the home row, that cab change deeding on task. I type where the keys are, and I do that without feeling them first, I just tap. All touch typist do the same thing.

Or are you just magic in that you know where your body is at all times in free space

That's not magic at all it's how touch typing actually works.

Yes your body does subconsciously know where your hands are.

without any kind of external feedback that the other 7bn people on this planet rely on? (

I am doing what ALL of the 7 billion people do, including you.

I'm glad this is a non issue for you

It is for you do; sad you cannot realizing it and are so angry that you don't even understand dhow your own body works.

I'll not respond again as you cannot be helped further. But seriously think as you are typing what you are really doing.