Apple Says New Macbook Pro Has Only 16Gb Of Ram To Save Bat

+1 on that. I don't understand it as well. Are they trying to pander to the lowest common denom with this thin stuff? Macbooks have been the goto for a lot of graphics heavy and memory intensive applications in a portable platform. I had one, lasted me four years and it was solid until the final day when the motherboard finally died after surviving through a water spill. I really wonder who is in charge of these "Executive" decisions within apple this year, first the earphone port now this. I mean, apple were a niche market to begin with, but they'll turn exclusively into a hipster market at this rate with no professionals buying their products for enterprise if they keep pandering to the "WE CAN MAKE THIS AS THIN AS PAPER!!!" train.

> if you are actually needing more than 16gb of ram, then a laptop is a weird choice. I tend to agree, but my duties require me to travel and be on-call a lot. I don't want to leave everything sitting on the desktop because VNC/Remote Desktop/NoMachine is just brutal on slow connections, so I want as much power as I can carry with me at the lightest weight and most capability. AND an ass-kicking desktop for bigger jobs. Right now my mobile solution is that's a 2011 Macbook Pro upgraded to 16GB RAM, and an 8-core Xeon back at the office with 128GB RAM :-) Saving money for a newer model Mac model, but kind of hoping by the time I get enough dough the spec-bump model will be out with 32GB RAM...

in defense of the iPad Pro, it has essentially changed my college experience. The Apple Pencil is amazing for writing. I don't use any notebooks anymore. Just the iPad Pro. But it is absolutely not a laptop replacement. Definitely not good for that. But as a notebook replacement its fucking amazing.

The people want thin dammit! I think that's actually part of the reasoning. It seems like people are adverse to carrying around heavy laptops, and they just want thin, portable machines. But then you talk to people like in this thread who just want a computer that does its job really well. It really doesn't make sense for Apple to keep pushing the thin-model with MBP when it limits the capabilities of the machine. But Apple doesn't really seem to be interested in catering to the needs and wants of its professional userbase, but rather the general user, which is really moronic when it comes to the MBP line. The MBP doesn't appeal to the same audience as the MBair or MB,

I thought the Pro line was supposed to appeal to the creative industry like musicians and artists. Where am I supposed to plug in my electric guitar interface? If you think I'm making recordings with all my equipment hooked up to a special lightning "dongle" you're fucking high.

Exactly. They went with LPDDR3 memory (normally used in phones) in this model, and the Intel CPUs only support a maximum of 16GB of that type of memory. Going higher would mean a switch to DDR4, which would require a different design of motherboard to accommodate the different connections -- the two types of memory aren't compatible. So every machine, even those without the extra RAM would pay the power cost. Since this is Apple, thinness wins above everything, so there's a little bit more shaved off the thickness of the machine and some flexibility lost to make that happen.

Those Eugene vectors! I heard those can only be calculated in Oregon! (I like your phone's take on your work.) And to be fair, if we need to fit everything in memory at once, we *can* just switch algorithms. We do work in big data, after all! (I'm going to get downvoted by people who fundamentally don't understand the work we do or the fact that I have dozens of Tb of data running through a typical algorithm for PoC, so it absolutely will not fit in memory.)

For developers, not at all. I've had 16 GB in my work laptop for years, and I consider that the bare minimum for a new machine now. If you're running some VMs for testing or building large projects etc you really need that memory. The problem with new Macbooks is that the memory is not upgradeable, and that you have to pay Apple's premium for extra RAM when you first purchase it. So if you expect your laptop to last for 3 years, and consider the fact that you may need 16 GB RAM in that time (for whatever the next version of OS X needs or whatever) you need to pay for it today. It may be OK in a professional setting, but Apple is not getting my money that way.