New MacBook Pros Max Out at 16GB RAM Due to Battery Life Concerns | Hacker News Reader

New MacBook Pros Max Out at 16GB RAM Due to Battery Life Concerns

macrumors.com

Technically speaking, it's a CPU-imposed 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")

This surprises me, because LPDDR3 looks to operate at the same 1.2V as DDR4. I'm guessing that LPDDR3 has some aggressive power saving functionality not illustrated by operating voltage.

I wonder when Intel will support LPDDR4.

For more than 6 months now... My skull canyon NUC system supports 32g SODIMM DDR4-2133+ @ 1.2v.

DDR4 is not LPDDR4.

Maybe if they optimized for features instead of making it smaller. This is the Pro not the air. People who care about size are going to get the Air. People who get the Pro want Pro features and don't care as much about size and weight.

As someone who lugged 17" lunch trays around for years, I beg to disagree.

I don't know about Apple's market research so have no idea why they think this particular configuration will appeal to the fat part of the pro-buyer bell curve.

I think you are 100% correct for photographers and music(ians/ engineers et al) in that they have big heavy cases of stuff anyway so the weight difference is in the noise.

But as a software developer I decided weight is paramount for me. Disclaimer: my development these days is mostly in the command line, with code running on remote machines, so even speed of compilation isn't as big a deal as it used to be. I had the 17" machines mainly for number of pixels on the screen and secondarily for disk space.

If weight really is the most important aspect of a laptop may I ask why you are even bothering with an MBP? Seems kind of silly.

Even with the relatively large difference in size and weight from my last one (mid 2009, which I think might've been the last year they made 17"), I've never found myself thinkin "man I'm glad I dont have to walk around with that extra 2.5 lbs in my bag anymore". It's definitely alot sexier, but at some point can't they be satisfied with their success in slimming it down, rather than making terrible design decisions to shave off another 0.3 inconsequential pounds?

Personally I long for the keyboard of my '09 mbp and would love for Apple to stop obsessing over making their already thin enough shit thinner. I would gladly accept the formfactor of those older models if it meant I didn't have to deal with the miserable keyboards they're using these days, and had the option to increase my ram sometime down the road. Typing on my 2015 mbp feels like I'm drumming my hands on a countertop.

> If weight really is the most important aspect of a laptop may I ask why you are even bothering with an MBP? Seems kind of silly.

This is a reasonable question. And back when I was buying 17" I didn't pay any attention to weight. But man it was a drag to walk around a conference with that huge thing in my bag, to run to a flight with what felt like a brick in my bag, etc.

In theory I could replace a lot of the casual use of my machine with iOS (mail, rss, web, etc) but all that is so much more effective on a real, responsive machine with a keyboard, multitasking, etc. So in the end the laptop is my primary interface to the nonphysical world and I need to have it continuously on hand.

Isn't a "battery life" discussion really a "battery size/thickness" discussion? Which developer wouldn't accept a 1-2mm thicker laptop in exchange for TB's of RAM?

I'm a developer and I wouldn't pay the price of TB's of RAM in a laptop, no matter if it made the machine thicker or thinner.

Not sure I could really take advantage of TBs of RAM on my local dev machine... 32GB or 64GB, though, would be nice.

1TB of RAM is exactly the kind of visionary move I would have expected Apple to make

edit: words

It takes more courage to only allow 16 GB.

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