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.

Comments

battery life a braindead argument

[gravewax]

it boggles the mind that they use battery life as the reason for not making the option available initially, for people that have a legitimate need for more than 16GB of ram battery life is a secondary factor, especially when the lack of that memory will significantly impact your productivity and considering their target market of video and photographic professionals who legitimately have needs for that memory it really was a strange move.

Re:battery life a braindead argument

[peragrin]

exactly for a decade apple was at or near the top with annual updates and feature changes.

since 2012 and the broadwell/skylake fiasco apple basically stopped trying to keep up with laptops and desktops.

I want a new macbook (currently a 2009 macbook)but i want a modern cpu and a sd card slot. things i can't get in current line up. So many macbook owners have been waiting 5-6 years screaming for new tech and apple is failing to deliver.

I won't own a windows 10 machine and linux might be possible if all the hardware worked.

Re:battery life a braindead argument

[Proudrooster]

It is all Johnny Ive's and his bullshit obsession for thin. Make the PhatBookPro! Yes, the MacBookPro can be made 2mm thicker to provide a 24 hour battery life or a realworld professional battery life of 10 hours. Johnny Ive's needs to just stop with thin until battery technology gets better. It seems to me that making the bottom panel modular would solve all the problems. If HP and Lenovo want to keep getting thinner, let them. Their touchpads and keyboards suck compared to the MacBookPro. Oh and bring back the glowing Apple logo on the back of the lid. What a dumb marketing move to ditch that.

Re:battery life a braindead argument

[Anonymous Coward]

ahhh yes apple fanboys answer to everything, carry a sack full of dongles and cables so you can save half a millimetre of width or 10 grams of weight on your laptop. DVD's are very much a legacy thing now, SD cards are NOT, they are the current standard for most current devices.

Re:battery life a braindead argument

[sremick]

SD Cards were a minor standard five years ago.

Falsehood #1. They are still the predominant standard among digital cameras and camcorders.

Any quality digital camera for years now uses wi-fi to transfer files

Falsehood #2. Wifi is still a pretty uncommon feature, and even when present is fairly problematic, finicky, and requires an unreasonable number of steps to initiate.

and who uses low-end digital cameras anymore, when their phone is just as good?

Falsehood #3. Unless you're unfairly comparing across differing generations of technology, a dedicated digital camera is superior to a phone camera by simple virtue of physics: larger sensors. Even a low-end point-and-shoot digital camera has a sensor many times larger than that in a cell phone, allowing in more light, more signal, and a resulting better picture.

When you do this, is having to carry a cheap small dongle really that serious of an issue?

Falsehood #4. Dongles are a PITA and constantly get lost. What's the point of losing a millimeter on the laptop thickness in some artificial inverted penis-size competition where the manufacturer has brainwashed everyone into thinking they need/want "THINNER!" when really they don't, but the trade-off is a pile of dongles that are an even bigger hassle to lug around than +1mm in laptop thickness, meanwhile they get lost all the time so the TCO of the laptop skyrockets.

Anyway, micro-SD is far more popular than SD.

And finally, Falsehood #5. What universe are you from? Have you even shopped for cameras ever? I cannot even fathom where you're pulling all this nonsense from. Nothing you say is true to the point where you're either delusional or trolling.

Re:battery life a braindead argument

[dgatwood]

Falsehood #2. Wifi is still a pretty uncommon feature, and even when present is fairly problematic, finicky, and requires an unreasonable number of steps to initiate.

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....

And finally, Falsehood #5. What universe are you from? Have you even shopped for cameras ever? I cannot even fathom where you're pulling all this nonsense from.

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.

Nothing you say is true to the point where you're either delusional or trolling.

Trolling, I'd imagine. Either that or it's an Apple employee astroturfing. Hard to say which.

Re:battery life a braindead argument

[Bongo]

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.

I dunno if this is a good thing

[93 Escort Wagon]

To squeeze in the extra RAM, they might decide they need to remove the few ports which were left. #courage

Apple must put the user first again, not marketing

[globaljustin]

This is a good step, but there's a greater fallacy at work at Apple here: The triumph of marketing demands over technical needs of the user.

Apple is great...they are better than Microsoft at making both hardware and software (especially software). Apple's OS is basically Unix with a candy coated shell and it is the best for basically anything except gaming (I know broad statement...I'm sure there are other applications that are better on Windoze but I'm speaking broadly...chill).

Apple's mistake, and it's a big one, is letting advertising phrases like "Our thinnest Macbook Pro yet!" override user centered design.

Same goes for their port nonsense...removing the headphone jack was a huge mistake, it's a *data port* that is backwards compatible with 100 year old tech. They wanted to advertise their phones as "waterproof" so instead of making the port waterproof like other companies, they just remove it and let marketing handle it. Disgusting.

Apple can easily regain their footing by putting the users first in their design decisions and stop their design hubris.

Re:a little late, no?

[globaljustin]

they could have chosen the 32 gb option and used a bigger battery, but it "has to be thin" so they went with the lpddr3.

this is indeed what happened...it's designing with marketing first instead of the user...

I'm fine with Apple having cheesey, trendy marketing, but they need to put the user first in their design decisions.

Marketing can figure out something...they pay them enough ffs...but they really need to change how they make design decisions.

One day, maybe far, far in the future, but some day Microsoft might figure out that if they avoid their garbage spyware/adware software they can ruin Apple due to their market penetration from government contracts....if Apple is still letting ad slogans guide design at that point, on that day Microsoft will kill Apple.

Or, you know...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:32gb ram = $300 upgrade vs $200 for it alone

[Mal-2]

All "thin and light" laptops are like this. The RAM is soldered directly to the motherboard and is not upgradable unless you have a reflow oven. Apple is nowhere near alone on this point. I think the last machine I've seen that was field-upgradable in RAM is the Acer C710 or V5 (same time frame, just Chromebook vs. Windows). The next couple generations still had mSATA or M.2 slots, but even those are going away in favor of permanently attached eMMC. I think the upgrade to my C720 will be... a Core i3 motherboard to replace the Celeron that I have now. (They're about $100.) And maybe the touchscreen to convert it into a C720P. But the base unit is one I expect to have for a few years because everything since (save for the C740) has been shittier and non-upgradable.

So don't single out Apple. Everyone is shipping non-serviceable laptops now.

People bitched when Apple dropped floppy drives

[Brannon]

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.

Re:32gb ram = $300 upgrade vs $200 for it alone

[sremick]

So don't single out Apple. Everyone is shipping non-serviceable laptops now.

You couldn't be more wrong. This is absolutely not the case. Hell, even Dell ships pretty much all their laptops with upgradeable memory to some degree, and the Latitudes especially so (the memory is always easy-access, compared to some Inspirons where you might need to take out the motherboard first). I also continue to service many modern non-Dells that the unwashed masses bring to me in my side work, and see SODIMM sockets on pretty much all (although unfortunately sometimes only 1).

I do all the Dell purchasing where I work, and have for years. The only Dells I've gotten in without upgradeable RAM were the tablets, and even those were still crazy serviceable compared to Surface-junk and iPad-crap which are meant to be disposable and tossed if you look at them wrong. Even on the Dell tablets, the SSD storage is standard and removable, which is nice if you just need more space or if butterfingers drops and breaks his tablet but needs his precious data off it that he wasn't storing where he was supposed to.

Or they could just make the memory removable

[sremick]

...like all computers did for decades. Instead, they've managed to brainwash their zealot disciples into believing that thinner is better, disposable is ok, and they need a new computer every 2... no, 1 years!

These laptops aren't thinner than a SODIMM memory module or an M.2 drive. Until they are (and they shouldn't be, because they don't need to be and to do so would mean a battery even more insufficient than they already are), any manufacturer telling you that you can't have removable/expandable memory or SSD storage is feeding you marketing BS to justify their anti-consumer design choices. Just so that you needlessly buy more laptops more often instead of repairing/upgrading the one you already have.

There's nothing "Pro" about the MacBook Pro anymore. A Dell tablet has more ports, expandability and options. Hell, there's nothing "pro" about any Mac anymore. Apple has totally given the finger to the professional and high-end user. Where I work (thousands of employees) I see the pendulum swinging back from Mac to non-Mac again since, after a few years of people flocking to Macbooks because of some misguided fashion fad, they're realizing that Macs simply fall short on too many fronts and flat out cannot offer them a computer with the hardware they need to do their jobs. I can spec out a non-Mac that runs circles around the highest-end MacBook "Pro" and costs less. Don't even get me started on the "Mac Pro"... that thing was an useless abomination the day it was released and has only gotten worse as the hardware innards become more and more outdated over the years. It's a nightmare to service and an unexpandable, optionless junk creation not even worth the now-tainted branding of "Apple" it's so bad, let alone "Pro". It's not even white.

Re:a little late, no?

[Freischutz]

they could have chosen the 32 gb option and used a bigger battery, but it "has to be thin" so they went with the lpddr3.

this is indeed what happened...it's designing with marketing first instead of the user...

I'm fine with Apple having cheesey, trendy marketing, but they need to put the user first in their design decisions.

Marketing can figure out something...they pay them enough ffs...but they really need to change how they make design decisions.

One day, maybe far, far in the future, but some day Microsoft might figure out that if they avoid their garbage spyware/adware software they can ruin Apple due to their market penetration from government contracts....if Apple is still letting ad slogans guide design at that point, on that day Microsoft will kill Apple.

Apple and Microsoft released some laptops/devices with an i5 CPU and 16Gb of RAM and people on Slashdot who would not buy a MacBook or Microsoft device to save their lives screamed bloody murder. Apple and Microsoft then explained they'd done this for battery life reasons and because Intel dragged it's feet with the i7 CPUs. This had no effect other than to cause those same people to keep screaming bloody murder even louder. While it is nice to have an option for a i7 CPU and 32Gb of RAM for the minority of users that actually need that processing power, most people do not need that kind of performance any more than they need a car that is designed with the 24 hours of Le Mans in mind. While I can understand the frustration of people who need an i7 and 32 Gb of RAM I can also understand the decision to release the less powerful version of the MacBook first since it covers the needs of abut 80-90% of their users and follow it up with an i7/32Gb version later.

Re: They said they want us to die...

[pezezin]

Number one reason would be to be able to run several virtual machines, to try different OSes and environments at the same time. Number two would be that some of us code really memory intensive algorithms (robotics and machine vision in my case).