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Apple To Offer 32GB of Desktop RAM, Kaby Lake In Top-End 2017 MacBook Pro, Says Analyst (appleinsider.com)
AppleInsider has obtained a note to investors from KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo that says Apple's 2017 laptop line will focus on internal component updates, including the platform-wide adoption of Intel's Kaby Lake architecture. What's more is that Apple is expected to manufacture a 15-inch MacBook Pro with up to 32GB of RAM in the fourth quarter of 2017. AppleInsider reports: Apple took flak in releasing its latest MacBook Pro with Touch Bar models with a hard memory cap of 16GB, an minimal allotment viewed as a negative for imaging and video professionals. Responding to customer criticism, Apple said the move was made in a bid to maximize battery life. Essentially, the Intel Skylake CPUs used in Apple's MacBook Pro only support up to 16GB of LPDDR3 RAM at 2133MHz. Though Intel does make processors capable of addressing more than 16GB of memory, those particular chipsets rely on less efficient DDR4 RAM and are usually deployed in desktops with access to dedicated mains power. In order to achieve high memory allotments and keep unplugged battery life performance on par with existing MacBook Pro models, Apple will need to move to an emerging memory technology like LPDDR4 or DDR4L. Such hardware is on track for release later this year. As for the 12-inch MacBook, Kuo believes next-generation versions of the thin-and-light will enter mass production in the second quarter with the same basic design aesthetic introduced in 2015. New for 2017 is a 16GB memory option that will make an appearance thanks to Intel's new processor class.
You could just put a bigger battery in it.
Instead, all I hear about is how they were working in such tight space constraints (a completely arbitrary constraint made up by their lead designer), and how kneecapping the system was to "maximize battery life"...
I remember my old Powerbook G4. I used to get 6-7 hours of battery life out of that thing. My old Macbook Pro (Core 2 Duo) was around the same. Every single laptop I've owned up until they discontinued the 17" used to last around 6-7 hours on battery. These were, of course, pretty thick and substantial machines, but I didn't care, they generally worked well and got the job done.
I recently bought a 15" MBP Touchbar (totally decked out, because it's not like I had a choice when the RAM and HD are soldered to the motherboard). It was one of the most expensive Apple machines I have ever purchased. I was lucky to get a consistent 3 hours out of it, running the same workloads my 17" unibody can perform for ~6.5. After spending a good week trying to troubleshoot this issue with AppleCare tech support, I eventually came to the conclusion that the machine was in perfect working order and that the battery was simply incapable of powering the machine for how long I needed it to. I later sent the machine back for a refund.
These problems will continue to plague Apple so long as they're obsessed with form over function, and refuse to admit that they were actually wrong for once. I can guarantee you the next machines will be even thinner, contain less ports (likely dropping the headphones port and one or two of the USB-C ports), and have the exact same operational issues due to over aggressive power saving features and an undersized battery.
And SCSI, VGA, DVI, CD, DVD, RS232, Parallel ports, Modem, Ethernet jack, etc., etc.
Maybe the headphone jack will be the final straw. Or maybe you're being hysterical. Let's meet back here in a few years and if Apple is out of business then I owe you a Coke.
I have a 2010-ear Apple that has 16 Mbytes of RAM.
You have an Apple with 2,010 ears?
Actually, I've never found it finicky. The problem is that the actual maximum speed of wireless is GARBAGE for transferring photos, much less video. Wi-Fi is more than an order of magnitude too slow to be practical. Anybody who thinks otherwise has almost certainly never shot photos with anything more capable than a toy iPhone camera.
To give some context, my brand-new, high-end 5D Mark IV shoots photos that can be from 30–70 megabytes each depending on RAW settings. Even though it supports 802.11n, if memory serves, all devices in IBSS mode (without infrastructure Wi-Fi) are limited to 802.11g speeds. So in practice, unless you bring a Wi-Fi router along with you (no camera supports the captive portal Wi-Fi that you'll find in every hotel on the planet), you'll be limited to only 54 megbits per second.
At 54 megabits per second, transferring a typical daily run of 500 photos at 70 megabytes each takes almost an hour and a half, and that's actually slightly optimistic. I do use the wireless functionality to transfer a few pics at a time from my camera to my iPhone while traveling so that I can quickly post pics from my real camera on Facebook. It works well for that, because I'm only grabbing five or six pics at a time, and I'm getting a much smaller JPEG copy instead of a RAW file.
At night, though, the flash card comes out of the camera and goes into the side of my laptop, where I spend only about four or five minutes to import that entire batch of photos. If Apple had bothered to keep their SD card reader hardware up-to-date, it would take under two minutes, but the two minutes saved isn't worth the hassle of trying to dig a flash card reader out of my bag.
With a laptop that lacks a flash reader, however, the entire equation changes. Suddenly, my choices are to either try to dig out an SD card reader (which will always be hard to dig out of a camera bag) or carry a retractable USB 3.0 cable (which turns out to be easier to put in a place where it is accessible, because it is so thin) and use the camera itself as a reader, albeit with the same poor performance as Apple's old SD card reader, and draining the camera battery the whole time. Both choices are approximately equally bad, and the decision to hobble their hardware by removing such a convenient way of importing content makes me seriously question Apple's commitment to the photography market.
Then again, I never used Aperture. If I had, I'd probably have much stronger negative comments....
Pretty much. Apart from cellular phones (where nobody uses the micro-SD slot anyway), pretty much the only cameras that use micro-SD are the little cameras built by GoPro. All pro cameras use either CF or full-size SD, because when the camera isn't a tiny little toy, the size savings of micro-SD aren't enough of a benefit to make up for the smaller contact size and the resulting decrease in reliability and robustness.
Trolling, I'd imagine. Either that or it's an Apple employee astroturfing. Hard to say which.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
And dongles don't constantly lose themselves -- people lose dongles, if not careful. And needing a whole "pile of dongles" just shows that there's always some connection or other which can't be included. I mean, do I really want a laptop which has VGA + HDMI + DVI + DP ports? Well, who wants to carry any dongles, right?!
So I'm looking at a MacBook Pro and how it needs a dock sitting on the desk. But I also see this one tiny USB-C/TB3 cable and it is doing a multitude of things. And then I recall the SCSI cables we used to have to use, just for drives and scanners.
And how this one machine, when plugged into a USB-C cable, becomes a desktop, and when I unplug it, it becomes a laptop. And all my stuff is on it. Simple. Thing I like most about the MBP is that it has *four* TB3 ports. It has more connectivity than the Mac Pro tower it replaced.