Phil Schiller Says 32GB RAM on New MacBook Pro Would Have Required Battery Compromising Design

[ShadovvMoon]

No offence guys, but I trust Apple Engineers more than the random angry mob on MacRumors claiming to know things. The space around the battery is probably there so it doesn't explode. If you are so experienced and know so much, please go and build a better laptop that runs Mac OS X.

Autoreply to the commenter who quotes this with a link to some laptop with 128 GB of RAM, GTX 1080, 2 inches thick and 1 minute of battery life: no.

Autoreply to the snarky comment about being a person who goes on Facebook: I use upwards of 70 GB of RAM on a daily basis. RAM compression in Sierra is amazing (and the SSD is so fast it doesn't matter too much). If I'm doing something that needs more RAM or compute then I'll run it on a server or my desktop.

The new MacBook Pro is a sleek, portable and reasonably capable machine and that's exactly what I wanted in a laptop. Did I want more than 16GB of RAM? Yes... Did I want a lighter machine? Yes... Did I want better graphics? Yes... Did I want better battery? Yes. Unfortunately, I can't have all of those things. Apple made a good tradeoff off these aspects.

Autoreply to random comment about immediately plugging into a power source: It's a frigging laptop. Laptops usually run on battery. Go buy a Mac Min... okay I sympathise with you there a little.

Did I miss anything? Let me know! Thank god for no down voting right?

 

[Trusteft]

A few questions. Don't take them too seriously, this is for a laugh or something.

1. If we get the option to have 1GB of ram, will this mean the laptops will have 2.5 years of standby time? What about 512KB of ram? 45 centuries? What if we never switch on the laptop, how long will the battery last with the 16GB model? Perhaps next upgrade should have no way to switch on the system. Battery life will be AWESOME.
2. Since thinness is the ultimate goal of a good pro computer, why doesn't Tim Cook just release a tablet which can be much thinner, can have lower ram, and just stick the Pro name to it?
3. Since there is obviously room for it, why was the sdcard slot removed? Aesthetics?
4. Finally, if whoever makes the decisions for thinness above all, am I right to assume all personal adult material they might have in their possession is of size 0 models?

I just hope this doesn't mean the death of desktop Macs.

 

[BenTrovato]

Product Roadmap

2016 - Redesign
2017 - 32gb
2018 - 32gb + better battery
2019 - incremental improvement
2020 - redesign

"All in agreement say I". And that's what Tim Cook signed off in 2015. Not that I agree with it, but sitting on a cash happy company, I might have chose the same course.

 

[maratus]

Of course what he meant to say was "we got stuck with a shed load of 4gb memory modules and old 6th gen intel chips..." and "we're gonna use them if it kills us"

Apple was never using LPDDR3 2133 MHz modules AND Apple doesn't even maintain large stocks of parts that are meaningful given the production volume.

There're simply no 7th gen Intel CPUs yet (other than ULV 18W dual-core chips). 15" uses 45W quad-core processors

 

[Michael Scrip]

Or just make the damn thing a bit thicker?

Thickness has never been an issue with my current MBP. It operates on my desk with the top down 90% of the time, and the times I do need it for the road, an extra pound wouldn't kill me.

How about using a bigger box? Have some courage my man.

Exactly.

The last Macbook Pro was 18mm thick.

And no one complained.

But now these new Macbook Pros are 15mm thick... yet no one is celebrating the thinness.

Instead... people are complaining about the compromises because of the thinness.

It's a shame.

 

[twa440]

Ben Slaney wrote an article which highlighted a key reason the new MacBook Pro is limited to 16GB of RAM, a reason most missed.

Here is the article for those that are interested in reading it in it's entirety: https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram

Phil read the article and has clarified a couple points.



https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/#update

Form over function plus greed. Those are the only reasons that come to mind.

 

[arkmannj]

I think Apple should have gone the "Let the customer choose" route.
make the standard model 16GB, then give a customize option for 32GB, give a disclaimer that this could decrease battery life, etc..

Problem solved... Apple gets opportunities for more $$$, customers get opportunity to choose what is more importnat for their own uses. I as a stock holder am happier, and I as a customer am happier. win-win.

 

[ocnitsa]

No offence guys, but I trust Apple Engineers more than the random angry mob on MacRumors claiming to know things. The space around the battery is probably there so it doesn't explode. If you are so experienced and know so much, please go and build a better laptop that runs Mac OS X.

Autoreply to the commenter who quotes this with a link to some laptop with 128 GB of RAM, GTX 1080, 2 inches thick and 1 minute of battery life: no.

Autoreply to the snarky comment about being a person who goes on Facebook: I use upwards of 70 GB of RAM on a daily basis. RAM compression in Sierra is amazing (and the SSD is so fast it doesn't matter too much). If I'm doing something that needs more RAM or compute then I'll run it on a server or my desktop.

The new MacBook Pro is a sleek, portable and reasonably capable machine and that's exactly what I wanted in a laptop. Did I want more than 16GB of RAM? Yes... Did I want a lighter machine? Yes... Did I want better graphics? Yes... Did I want better battery? Yes. Unfortunately, I can't have all of those things. Apple made a good tradeoff off these aspects.

Autoreply to random comment about immediately plugging into a power source: It's a frigging laptop. Laptops usually run on battery. Go buy a Mac Min... okay I sympathise with you there a little.

Did I miss anything? Let me know! Thank god for no down voting right?

It sounds like you need a Macbook. Go buy a Macbook.

 

[thunng8]

Yes, a Pro machine should not even be available with 8GB.
I can see consumers doing fine with 8G and a 256 SSD.

Try "Handbrake" with a 16GB machine and you'll have a lot of fan noise for quite a while and Handbrake isn't even that demanding. Don't know other programs real Pro's use on their older MBPs, but would imagine the same.

What an atrociously crappy example. Shows how 'pro' you really are.

Handbrake barely uses 1gb ram. The fan noise comes on because the CPU is being loaded. Nothing related to ram at all.

 

[Workerbee Redux]

Exponential

Oh wow, I was so rooting for that company back then, I hoped you'd leapfrog the other PPC makers and intel and Apple would invest in the company and build systems around them. It was a sad day when it shut the doors.

 

[Three141]

I'll always bash Apple for this type of choice.

 

[cmaier]

Oh wow, I was so rooting for that company back then, I hoped you'd leapfrog the other PPC makers and intel and Apple would invest in the company and build systems around them. It was a sad day when it shut the doors.

Tell me about it. It put me out of work Our chip even worked. But Jobs put us out of business by killing the clone market.

 

[Jose Fuertes]

Any good black friday deals on a decent laptop to hackintosh?

Laptops don't seem to be great for that, seems to be a load of fiddling. Did have a quick look at XPS hack but some people's idea of working isn't the same as mine.

25 seconds startup time macOS Sierra laptop, 3 seconds Photoshop 2017 startup time, everything working wifi, ethernet, audio.

 

[fourthtunz]

I am glad I am moving away from Apple. The machines don't even use DDR4 RAM. That's like a Ferrari with a Ford engine. Also, don't want to compromise battery, but lets make it thinner. For giggles, lets put another power eating display above the keyboard. This is getting beyond retarded!

"LPDDR4 is not supported by the Intel processors powering the late 2016 models"
[doublepost=1479759998][/doublepost]

I know I don't speak for everyone but 16GB is PLENTY for what I use a laptop for.
I can get by on 8GB, so 16GB is usually my sweet spot.
And battery life and portability is more important for me than having more horsepower. The 12" MacBook has been a great great little machine for me but I am thinking that 13" with 512GB is where I need to go next.

I'm on a 2012 MacBook pro 15" 2.7 quad with 16 gigs of ram and I have some pretty big protools sessions running and according to activity mon I never go over 8 gigs so while more ram is always better..I can wait

 

[MallardDuck]

Here we are back down to money. Apple is not marketing value-for-money. Buy a Dell with 32gb and be happy.
If you would have used the new laptop you might actually find the speed improvements to be quite noticeable. And what exactly do you need 32gb for?
let's say Apple came out with a 32gb laptop that weighed 5 pounds, had every port imaginable, and cost $5 grand, would you be happy? Just asking because it seems a lot of hate against these new laptops is based on price, so if Apple custom made a laptop for the "real pros" that cost $5 grand, how many of those folks would actually buy it?

I run multiple virtual machines for technical sales demonstrations - so do literally thousands of users at my company.

What we're complaining about is the price bump without any significant performance improvement. The CPU has been essentially flat for three years, and while the GPU is better, it's still a far cry from anything resembling a high-end unit.

Stop confusing pro with power user. Two different groups.

It'd only be $5k if apple grossly overprices RAM like they do SSDs.....so yeah, it probably would be.
[doublepost=1479760095][/doublepost]

If you read through the entire article you would have seen that the current Intel notebook chips do not support low power DDR4, which would be needed to get to 32gb. When Intel releases the proper chips (likely in 2017), then you will see an update to 32gb.

If they continue to insist on only using LPDDR instead of DDR.

 

[iShater]

Apple is the best at both solving technology challenges when it suits their purposes and coming up with excuses when it doesn't.

This!

Amazing eh? Magsafe is the best thing since sliced bread. Then dead silent on why it makes sense to remove it.

 

[Ghost31]

exactly, it is apple low end (i am not saying $1500 is low end machine).

After having the reality distortion field around my brain vanish over the last year, I can sympathize with the outrage over pricing from the perspective of a windows user. That pricing in the windows world would get you a higher spec quality laptop AND a 4K external monitor to go with it.

With windows 10 getting better and Microsoft seeming hungry to work harder, I personally can't justify the apple tax this time around. Not begrudging people that still dig apple laptops though. Different strokes

 

[Workerbee Redux]

They could make a slightly thicker one for people who so desperately need 32gb of ram, but that would require an entire new design and lets be honest, it'd be very expensive (probably $5000)

Strangely enough the Dell XPS 15" supports 32GB, is just some 2mm thicker, has a better GPU and is still cheaper. Somewhere, your math has gone sour.

 

[6836838]

I smell BS.

 

[Porco]

I think almost every unfortunate compromise with the new MBPs could be solved by the reintroduction of a 17-inch model. More space for batteries, more ram, more user-servicable parts, more space for a couple of extra ports (HDMI and a USB-A maybe). It's a shame they don't make them anymore.

 

[kcamfork]

Basically they're saying they can't do it.

Steve Jobs would have been like, I don't care what you have to do... JUST DO IT.

Tim Cook is obviously not as product driven.

Steve Jobs would have screamed that while beating one of the engineers over the head with a MacBook Air.

Sigh. I miss Steve.
[doublepost=1479760645][/doublepost]

I think almost every unfortunate compromise with the new MBPs could be solved by the reintroduction of a 17-inch model. More space for batteries, more ram, more user-servicable parts, more space for a couple of extra ports (HDMI and a USB-A maybe). It's a shame they don't make them anymore.

Nah. They'd just make it thin and light and it'd be just as s**** as the 15" model.

 

[DerRolf]

I do have a Windows notebook which also has an sixth generation Intel Core i7 processor and it uses "standard" DDR4 notebook memory and I have noticed nothing negative about it's battery performance. I even left it in standby in my bag when I was on vacation for over 14 days and the battery just dropped by about 10%...

Can't really tell who actually needs the 30 days standby which Apple advertises - I use my notebook on a daily basis so 7 days would be fine for me, too.

However I am still happy with 8 GBs of RAM in my MBPr and 16 GB of DDR4 RAM in my Windows notebook.

 

[Thunderhawks]

What an atrociously crappy example. Shows how 'pro' you really are.
Handbrake barely uses 1gb ram. The fan noise comes on because the CPU is being loaded. Nothing related to ram at all.

What an atrociously crappy answer.

Never said I was a pro and I am not using any of the taxing "pro" programs.
If I did, I would most likely have a Mac Pro.

However, depending on how many apps are open and what I do, I get the spinning beachball a lot both on my 6GB recognized 17" which just freezes when it doesn't know how to handle things and lesser beach balls on my 2014 MBP.

My reason for criticizing and wanting the option of a 32GB is that with everything soldered the only way to somewhat future proof the machine is to buy the highest GB configuration possible.

Be it for tasks I may not know yet, resale value etc.etc.

 

[Workerbee Redux]

When Intel releases the proper chips (likely in 2017),

Nope, 2018 or later. Kaby Lake is still stuck at 16GB.

So the RAM ceiling will have been 16GB for what? 8 years then? What a joke.

 

[NutsNGum]

Seriously, you attended a very poor school probably.

OK, Donald.