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

"The new MacBook Pro Fit is truly a game changer. You will literally be able to strap it to your waist and the Pro Fit will be able to track your pulse and count your steps in this all-in-one machine. You can then share your bio stats with your friends as soon as you are near wifi, thus creating a er sense of community, and to a better world. A truly courageous feat in technology."

Even for tech people, it can get annoying. I work for a major tech company and we were all handed fully-supported Red Hat Thinkpads when we started. A lot of people (myself included) bought our own BYOD Macs after a few months of trying to keep the machine working properly. The only stipulation is we're not allowed to use Windows as our base OS, anything else is fair game. We needed a Windows VM to run Office, and we needed Office for basically everything (don't try to write client-facing documentation in LibreOffice...). If we wanted to present on a projector, we had to reboot, turn on the video card in the BIOS, finish our presentation, then reboot and turn the video card off. If we didn't turn it off, it couldn't go to sleep. We needed to be connected to our work VPN to download updates, if we updated from other sources everything broke and we needed a full rebuild. Not to mention the thing weighed 500lbs and we're all traveling consultants who spend all day with our laptops in our backpacks. I have several Linux certifications hanging on the wall right behind me and I won't use it as a desktop OS. It's my bread and butter, I work on million-dollar Linux servers all day, and I'll connect to those servers from anything *but* Linux. **edit - I'm not going to respond to any more "just use PDF" comments.

Modern DDR4 RAM is very energy efficient about 1 watt per stick of RAM when using the low power stuff common in ultrabooks. Compared to DDR3, if they are using low voltage DDR4, they can do a dual channel config within the same power envelope of a single stick of DDR3. They likely went with this design so that could avoid the cost of having to do different PCB layouts, and instead have a single board where they just fully populate it, but differentiate between models by simply using higher or lower capacity packages depending on the RAM selected. It is either that, or to maintain a certain thickness and battery life, they have to make the PCB as small as possible, in order to make the battery wider, instead of slightly thicker and getting the best of both worlds, as this is another trend that we have seen with macbooks. Over the years, they get thinner, and the battery gets wider, while the PCB gets smaller by making sacrifices such as soldering the RAM and SSD directly to the PCB, and reducing the number of packages on the PCB.

Agreed, it's counter to their philosophy. They like standardizing so they can create a seamless ecosystem for all their products and that also means they're going to have a much tighter grip on everything. To my understanding it's also why developing iOS apps is much easier than hoping for universal compatibility on Android.

Screens are getting bigger, meaning there's more content you can put on them. Ads are everywhere on web pages. Security is also becoming more of a concern, which uses up processing power (Chrome uses a separate process for every tab, which eats away time and RAM). I wouldn't say programmers are lazy/inefficient. More likely companies want more for the money, so they're hiring fewer programmers to write ever-more complicated programs. Libraries/APIs/Engines that do things for programmers have a non-zero cost. There's also things like caching done by the OS that takes up RAM, but saves you processing time when you need to look things up. As HDD space grows and gets filled up, so will RAM usage.