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Comment by creshal | Hacker News Reader

16 GB RAM limit was already annoying on my 2011-era 12" notebook. And that's flagship now? Wow.

That's quite strange limitation. Is there some technical reason for this? Is the memory soldered in to save space? Do they only have one dimm?

The memory is soldered in to save space, yes. That also means it is not aftermarket upgradeable.

But still, they could have soldered 32 gb on.

It's a CPU limitation when used with LPDDR3 modules. See http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/core/7th-g... (See section 2.1.1.3, "LPDDR3 supported memory devices")

Memory is soldered, but they could have had a 32gb option regardless -- they still have the 8gb option after all.

The real limitation IMHO is power: to chase thinness, they reduced the battery volume and went for all the low-power options they could find. 32gb would likely not be low-power.

As far as I know, yes the memory is soldered in.

Why is it annoying? I'm genuinely curious: what are you doing that takes that much RAM?

I routinely run: - a virtual box instance set to 8GB ram to run docker containers that comprise our backend services - a VMWare Fusion instance configured with 4GB ram running Windows to run our client apps - an IntelliJ instance that easily hits 2GB ram usage - a smattering of standalone JVMs and other miscellaneous dev things, plus the regular mac os stuff, browsers, skype, slack, mail, etc etc

I can do that easily on my 24GB imac. If that starts to get cramped, I can upgrade it up to 64GB. But I would be SOL on a 16GB macbook pro

You need a machine designed for professional use not a consumer machine. If you look outside the Apple garden, you can have pretty much whatever you want, even 64GB of RAM.

For most people it's running a lot of virtual machines, or compiling large projects.

VM's, development environments, editing photos/video. There are people who do actual work on computers, and yet Apple seems to not acknowledge the ones filling their App Store.

As I read your comment, I have something like 7 JVM's running (mostly in Docker containers) on an 8GB MBA that's not remotely close to hitting swap. You talk about people that 'do actual work on computers'. I get this, but where I start to wonder is that even 8GB represents a _lot_ of capacity for useful work.

(Some of this probably comes from the fact I cut my teeth on machines with 64K RAM... but once machines got past half a gig, the availability of RAM seems to have outpaced the need, at least for me.)

Compiling WebKit takes more than 8 GiB RAM, and even with modern SSDs, you don't really want to swap out. And I'd like to do other things in the mean time (e.g., run 2-3 VMs with 4+ GiB RAM each – no, I can't move Windows 7 in a docker container, yes, I need to test on it).

Moving things in the cloud isn't an option, thanks to internet being too slow and unreliable, and I don't want to be tied to a desktop.

I'm having a hard time seeing photo editing requiring 16GB of ram. For video editing it seems to me most use cases aren't going to have more than a few GB worth of frames at a time required in memory, but I can see the potential for 16GB being a bottleneck in certain applications.

For "actual [computational] work", use a different computer suited for the purpose, not toys marketed to graphics professionals and hipsters.

Right? That's such crap.

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