Well when compared to Microsoft's Surface line, they also cap out at 16Gb RAM. I agree with many comments here that we'd rather have a heavy-weight (no pun intended) Pro contender with 32Gb RAM, a few more "legacy" ports to a thinner hobbled less-than-pro machine. C'Mon Apple, where's your balls?? Stop making it sexy and make it killer!
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Phil Schiller Says 32GB RAM on New MacBook Pro Would Have Required Battery Compromising Design
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But that limit was already there, right? Apple has never made a laptop with more than 16GB of RAM.
So how has this massive amount of developers been doing their work all this time with only 16GB of RAM?
I'm not defending Apple's decision with the 2016 MBP. I truly wish Apple would have offered 32GB for those who need it. Maybe next year.
(and I wish Phil Schiller would stop commenting about it so we don't have to read threads like this ever again)
All of hear from Apple through both Tim Cook and Phil Schiller these days is "innovation is too hard, compromise is very easy"
Fair enough, I should have said that I rebooted and just launched all my apps again (to clear any lingering leaks - looking at you Firefox...it hits 1.5-2GB all the time).
Kernel + Dock: 3GB
Handbrake: 1GB
Firefox+Safari: 1GB
Mail+Finder: 1GB
Excel, Word: 500 MB
Keynote: 1GB
Pots and Pans: 4.5GB (to reach total of ~12 GB reported in activity monitor)
What I haven't launched yet (depending on my workflow, grouped as what usually comes up together)
Lightroom
Photoshop
Illustrator
InDesign
Powerpoint
Acrobat
or
Cura
123D Design
ZBrush
Meshmixer
Netfabb
and
VMWare Fusion (combined with any of the others - 1-4 VM's at once)
So I can either leave it all up, or I can wait for it to launch and reload. That's not bad when I'm switching between the major groups, but even within a group I regularly push 16GB.
Granted, I'm an exception - don't pretend otherwise. But I suspect there's a lot of power users who have similar batches of stuff. And I do do all those things on the road, so a portable is a must.
No, my MATHS is considering the Apple price and the top model which has the 2TB SSD (the Samsung 960 Pros are £1200 alone) everyone is banging on about $4000 laptop constantly as if that's what this costs, so assume they mean 2TB SSD with 32gb of ram.
Given the price premium, I'd get an external USB-C SSD for a fraction of the price - or even a spinning disk to store non-performance based stuff. Can't do external RAM...yet
.
Riiight. Everything. Except display, disk speed, trackpad, speaker quality, build quality, portability & battery life.
Thanks for the info.
Question though... before you bought your current laptop that only had 16GB of RAM... did you consider another brand/platform that offered more RAM?
Or have you recently run into the 16GB barrier?
I'm just trying to figure out how 16GB can be such a problem... yet Apple has never sold a laptop with more than 16GB in its entire history.
you can get Dell Precision 5515 which is built on the same chassis as the XPS, have the Xeon processor, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, 4k Touch Screen, two SSDs options, all the ports you need and cheaper than the MacBook Pro 15 inch top model.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellst...ision-m5510-workstation&c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04
I started hitting it a couple of years ago. The 3d modeling stuff is new workload. The image and graphics processing has gotten more intense. A whole lot of software bloated bad in the past couple of years - firefox is a true pig these days. Upgrading the VM's from Win7 to Win10 was a major hit: from 1-2GB per, to 2-4 per.
It's been in the past year that I hit it regularly - I actually upgraded from a 2014 to 2015 MBP hoping that the SSD and GPU bumps would help (they didn't).
We have thousands of users in similar situations (mostly VM driven).
I've been running a mac full time since 2006, and have two MBP's, so switching is a big deal. I really don't like Windows (privacy, UI, security). I could have upgraded the second machine this year, but didn't because I want common plugs/adapters/dongles/cables/power supplies, and the primary machine isn't worth upgrading.
Is the friction bad enough to switch? Not yet.
I think that's what Apple's counting on - to ride out the anger until they can have their cake and eat it too with Kaby Lake and LPDDR4. They aren't willing to compromise their march to thin because of Intel's challenges delivering so we got this half-baked update.
If Apple licensed MacOS to someone who made a good machine though, I probably would switch immediate (especially since I'm seeing a lot of quality issues with their hardware these days). Which is why they won't.
Ask me in another year though, especially if there's another unwarranted price increase.
They should rename the new MacBook Pro to MacBook Plus and re-launch a real MacBook Pro in 2017.
Wishful thinking...
No, I am agreeing with you.
Compared to the rest of the Apple execs, Tim Cook has that gentle grandfatherly look to him. The kind of patriarch that the family looks up to. He even kind of sounds like it, and will sound even more like it as his voice changes more over the years ... although he'll probably retire before that point.
To me he often sounds disingenous.
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Cause Ive hasn't done any real work in 3 years or more?This is actually quite sad. Up till this MBP release Phil was still "A link to Apple's True Mission Statement" to me. It pains me to not only listen, but to see the look in his eyes as he tries to defend the undefinable.
Phil does need to retire, for his personal health. At the very least a position where he is not forced to spoon feed disinformation. Phil has always been Phil. IMO, he is a good guy in a bad spot. Others on the Executive Team have no trouble at all lying to your face.
Ever wonder why you don't see Jony in the Product Videos any longer?
I can tell you why they didn't. They were so worried about the weight of the laptop that they had a set weight they wanted it to be under at all costs even if it effected the performance.
The fact that Apple has twice now addressed the memory decision by senior execs shows they are very aware of the heat being generated by this issue.
I'm surprised they have two fans in it. It takes up so much space. I'm surprised they could not find a way to keep it cool with one fan. Even of they had to make that one fan a little bigger. It would have still taken up less space then having two fans.What's with all the empty spaces around the battery?
Can't put in a bigger battery? My ***!
I think you're exactly correct. And I hope they also are taking heed of the complaints on price - a 20% bump (for the "base" model, at least) is ludicrous for a machine that's barely faster than the base 15" from Mid-2014. The best they could come up with in 2.5 years was to take away usability, cripple the non-discrete GPU, maintain the 16 GB ceiling, and add a gimmick? To say that's disappointing is like calling the sun a lightbulb in the sky.
To look at it from the bright side: This should force the software engineers to write their code in an efficient way, so to ensure that 16GB RAM is enough for years to come, prolonging the life of my 15" Pro (2014)
