Who's to Blame for the 16 GB RAM Limit on the New MacBook Pros: Apple or Intel? | Hacker News Reader

Who's to Blame for the 16 GB RAM Limit on the New MacBook Pros: Apple or Intel?

daringfireball.net

51 pointsgrzm102 comments

I'm a little bit surprised at this outrage considering there are very few PC laptops that offer 32GB+ DDR4. XPS15 offers 32GB but its battery life is rather poor.

Thinkpad P50 offers 64gb with tested battery life of over 8 hours, but it clocks in at 5.8lbs.

I'm a pretty heavy duty user and I have 3 machines that each has 8GB. (PC, PC, Mac). What the hell are people doing on their 13.3 - 15inch laptop that requires 32GB?

I assume people who have a macbook pro that they dock and connect to a big display, and don't really own a desktop.

You can plow a field with a honda civic, but it's not really the "right" tool for the job. The same applies to insisting on a 64GB laptop as your main workstation.

If you spend all your time docked, why do you care about a 15" screen? I've got a 15" MBP precisely because I do a lot of work out of conference rooms, hotel rooms, etc. Traditional "road warrior" stuff. Battery life is a huge premium there.

I do a lot of work outside of an office too, but I don't care about the battery life advantages.

For my workloads, battery life is already terrible in a modern MBP, because all those great battery gains from the last 10 years are really about idle performance, not flattening the processor. My MBP is rarely quiet: Too often it has to do enough processing to sound like an airplane about to take off. If you actually tax it, it lasts about two hours before it runs out of juice.

I'd much rather have more power and less battery life than to just give up, buy a tablet with a keyboard, since then the computer is nothing more than a modernized VT100 terminal, and do all real computing in the cloud.

I see. I guess time will tell if apple made the right call to sacrifice ports and memory in exchange for thin and light.

I have a feeling that Apple's bigger screw up is the new pricing.

Cost of getting 15" laptop is now $2,400, which is colossally more expensive than before.

Some people just need bigger screen, and not high end specs.

For me the trade-offs don't bother me, aside from the RAM, but that's not a deal breaker. My preference sees to run contrary to the HN crowd, however. Having only USB-C is great; I can't wait to ditch Schrödinger's^WUSB-A soon enough. The butterfly key switch don't bother me, either. I bought a mechanical keyboard a few years ago, which I still use, but it doesn't feel that much better than the "free" bundled keyboards. Guess I'm just not picky. As for the price, yes I wouldn't mind if it were lower, but I do well enough that I can afford it (and I'm far from being a "10x" engineer, at least income wise). Besides, I hang on to them practically forever.

I have both a 15" 2011 MBP and a 2016 12" MB, and prior to acquiring the latter I'd also thought thin & light didn't matter to me. Yet I find myself using the latter more and more, for seemingly trivial reasons like being able to comfortably hold the MB, open or closed, with one hand, freeing my other hand to e.g. open or close doors. Having a free hand means I don't have to carry it with my carrying case--I could just grab & go--so I take it with me more often.

Of course, the MB is significantly slower, so I'm less productive in some cases even when I have it. The lower (logical) screen resolution is quite annoying, too. I occasionally run it in 1:1 mode until my eyes couldn't take it anymore. I'll probably get the new 15", but I'm hoping that the 13" is fast enough for me, because now I don't want to give up the portability.

One example would be people that are doing software development, in particular with multiple virtual machines/containers, compilation, and heavy IDEs.

I work a lot with multiple (vagrant) virtualboxes and intellij idea running along with the browser and a bunch of other utilities. My 13" MacBook Pro at home with 8 GB RAM sometimes hits its limit but my 15" MacBook Pro at work with 16 GB RAM does just fine.

Photoshop.

The standard two slot SO-DIMM laptops can support 32 GB now thanks to 8Gbit DDR4. There was also 8Gbit DDR3 that is less common and more expensive, but is supported by Broadwell for example.

compilation. dont try to write android apps without 16 gb of ram, it will end up quickly.

I have 16GB of RAM in my MBP. As I type this I'm running at 15.25GB used. I'm not running any VMs, nor am I running any Adobe Products. Chrome, Spotify, Slack, Visual Studio Code, HipChat, Keynote, Sketch... this is a typical, yet light application load for me.

Out of curiosity, what's Activity Monitor report each is taking?

Forgive my laziness, but it's a pain for me to answer due to all of the Google Chrome Helper processes that I'd have to sum to supply you with an accurate answer :-)

Understood :) Similarly, I'm amazed at how much CPU some Safari tabs can use. (How do these tabs keep proliferating?)

OS X seizes all available memory for the apps you have open, and aggressively manages it as you open more and more apps. Free memory in Activity Monitor is not a useful measure of how many apps your machine can run with sufficient performance.

>As I type this I'm running at 15.25GB used

Yes, the OS will use as much memory as possible, this doesn't mean you are hitting memory limits or performance bottlenecks.

Except for when macOS tells me that it has run out of RAM and that I need to close some applications...

I think that only happens when your swap file takes up all available space on your drive

Perhaps, but that's not the case here. I have plenty of available disk space.

That used to happen to me weekly or so, but then I switched the majority of my browser workload from Chrome to Safari, and I haven't had that issue in the several months since.

I don't use a lot of tools that embed Chromium, though, so I'm not entirely sure just a browser switch would keep you from hitting memory pressure warnings.

MacOS tends to use all the ram it has available but that doesn't mean it needs it all. Much of it is used for caching and the like. It's a good thing, since if you're going to be powering the RAM you might as well use it all, even for marginal benefit. That means though that if you had 64GB of RAM on your next MBP, you'd be (hopefully) running at 53.4GB used.

- Chrome

- Spotify (Chromium Embedded Framework)

- Slack (MacGap (WebKit))/(Electron (Chromium Embedded Framework))

- Visual Studio Code (Electron (Chromium Embedded Framework))

Notice a pattern? :)

Yes, the pattern is not lost on me :-)

I think you are very representative of the people complaining about the new MacBook Pros not having 32GB+ of RAM.

If you want to play with infra VM, that's at least 4 GB each, slack loves memory, like, seriously, video conf + sharing your desktop needs memory. Now start playing with some data stores on top of that, and 16 GB feels cramp.

I absolutely don't for fancy graphic adapter, but I need all the memory I can get. I want 13 inch so I can use my laptop anywhere, including airplanes, cars, light railway etc...

I am typing this on a 2013 MBP with 16 GB of ram. If I get a new machine today, I'd like to keep it until 2019 or so. The resource that I feel most pinched on with my Macbook is its ram.

I have a mid-2012 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. Today I had open and used the following apps, with lot so windows open at once:

- MS Outlook, Word, Excel

- Safari, Chrome, Firefox

- Slack, Preview, Terminal

- Parallels - Windows 7 VM with 2GB RAM

- Photoshop

It worked great all day, with no beach balls. This is only a bit heavier than my usual usage.

So: I somewhat share the perplexity about why 32GB of RAM is needed by so many people. There are certainly some uses like compiling that I don't know much about, but I can't imagine that is huge segment of the potential audience.

FWIW: that would bring my Mac to a crawl and send my fans into overdrive.

It's not about what people need NOW. It's what people will need by the end of the lifespan of the laptop, since it can't be upgraded down the road.

So... how much RAM do you think you'll need in 2018 or 2020? ;)

People are also upset that ram is no longer modular. You used to be able to buy a laptop and put ram in it, making the "few laptops ship with this configuration" argument irrelevant.

16GB of DDR4 is $99 https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Technology-2400MHz-HX424S14I...

32GB DDR4 is $183 https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Technology-2400MHz-HX424S14I...

A 32GB upgrade will come next year most likely, people who need 32GB can wait a year.

It probably will have to wait for Intel to support LPDDR4, which may be longer then a year.

Are you really going to go with "Because 16GB oughta be enough for anybody"?

After hearing people complain about the new Macbook limit on 16gb RAM, I went to check out what the Surface Book offers -- which is, also, a max of 16gb RAM.

And which nobody even thought of raising as an issue...

Because in the windows market, surface isn't a laptop targeting video editors, game programmers, etc. It's a thin and light entry. Contrast with lenovo portable workstations which got 64gb over a year ago: http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/11/9129681/lenovo-skylake-xeo...

Apple produces every osx compatible device. This means it needs to produce at least one device that can meet the needs of power users.

Have you not watched MIcrosofts "can't do that in a Mac" campaign? 3D modelling, video editing, lots of heavy lift graphics apps...

And yet most video editors I know use Macs, same for "heavy lift graphics apps". Nobody (ie very few) run around with a 8lbs/4hour battery "desktop replacement" PC to do such things on the go.

I don't know about the surface, but I've bee putting off my 6 year old Thinkpad x220 because the current replacement, the x260 has a 16gb limit.

The X series of ThinkPads are designed to be slim and light. If you want 32GB in a ThinkPad, there are other series available with 32GB units.

Unfortunately, if you want a 32GB macOS laptop, you're out of luck with Apple.

The X200 line (and predecessors X30 and X60 lines) are the 12" workhorse line that's more rugged than thin-and-light. The X1 line is the thin-and-light one.

x220 is neither thin nor light! Especially with the extra battery. This is why I buy the x200 Thinkpad because they are small and can be used anywhere, yet thick an heavy because they are, or at least used to be, loaded.

Right. I went X30 -> X40 -> X61s -> Tablet 2 -> Helix 2, the Tablet 2 as an experiment (I love the keyboard that came with it and keep that paired with my Nexus 7 now for emergency ssh-ing) and then I jumped to the Helix 2 rather than another X series because there didn't seem any point.

Somewhere around 2019-2020 when I finish destroying the Helix 2 I'll probably end up back on an X series.

Not to mention the Dell XPS 13 which also uses LPDDR3 and maxes out at 16 GB.

I've been checking his site the last few days just to get the pro Apple spin. This is awesome.

Can Apple ever make a serious mistake in Gruber's eyes?

I think it would be a useful project to compile a list of times Gruber has been critical of Apple. One topic he has called out Apple on been the amount of memory in entry-level iPhones and iPads.

http://daringfireball.net/2014/10/ipad_air_2

I don't know if this meets your criteria for "serious", and it's just a single example. Just a little push-back against "ever" :)

that specific article has a pinch of criticism in a gallon of praise ;-)

That said, I'm fine with Gruber being such a fanboy. He fills a niche, makes a great living, and his readers are happy. All good.

I personally find his writing amusing is all.

"that specific article has a pinch of criticism in a gallon of praise "

No disagreement here :) Like I said, just a little push back :)

That post is as close to a "WTF is going on" as you'll probably get from Gruber. I was pretty surprised to read it.

The flip side to this is all the times people thought Apple was making a huge mistake but it turned out great. The initial Slashdot review of the iPod is a pretty famous example.

CmdTaco was not the segment Apple was aiming for with the iPod.

Nor was Dropbox aiming for Hacker News readers, in case you bring that up.

But HN readers disproportionately use MBPs, I'd bet, so I can understand feeling betrayal in this case.

I think the iPod was aimed at everyone. I mean, CmdrTaco eventually bought an iPod.

Gruber is absolutely unable of even the most modest form of critical thinking as it might be even loosely defined when it comes to Apple. Given that his heavy readership and deeply biased writing gives him lots of access to Apple it's charitable to call him a naked shill and I usually just flag posts to his blog in the same vein as if they're links to Apple advertisements. Outside of the most partisan politics on the planet, you'll not find such an absurd twisting of ideas anywhere. At this point he's just writing really really shitty satire.

Strangely, his public talks are actually quite enjoyable and much more interesting and entertaining.

First gen of Intel Mac's had 2GB limit (even though the chipset could address 3 or 4 GB), this got fixed later. My bet it that revision 2 in 6-12 months with whatever next Intel CPU generation will take 32GB with no issues.

I have a 4gb 2012 MacBook air that works fine. I don't face much performance related issues with it and can compile apps, use VMs(one at a time) fine with it. It can get slightly laggy at times, but most of it isn't noticeable. I usually restart when that starts to happen and it gets fine that way.

I am thinking of saving some money and upgrading to the base 1499 model and donating my air to a friend who really needs it. But it has got only 8GB of RAM. Ideally I would have gone for the 1799 model with 16gb ram which makes it $1999. But don't have that much money right now. However, since even the 4GBs of RAM have seemed satisfactory to me so far, I am thinking of making the jump. Non-apple is anyways not an option as I use sketch and need to compile iOS apps.

With my present air I always regret getting 128GB hard disk as it is too less, and I need to format my laptop every year to get rid of the junk occupying hard disk space. I hope I don't end up regretting the 8GB for the next few years.

I am currently using a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), and am running: a Docker VM, IntelliJ IDEA (two instances, one large and one medium Java project), Slack, Safari, Chrome, iTerm configured with unlimited screen buffer, a VPN, Dropbox, Fantastical, Backblaze, 1Password, and a few other things.

For memory, I've got 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Activity Monitor is happily green, and shows me that 11.57GB of my 16.00 GB of memory is used, with 3.18 GB of cache.

I used to run into trouble with "memory pressure," but switching to Safari instead of Chrome eliminated all of that. I have 21 tabs open in Safari, only Gmail open in Chrome.

I'm sure I could come up with some combination of things that would strain the 16 GB I currently have. I might have to work at it a bit, though, and I think by most of the definitions I've seen in this thread, I should be screaming about the limitation.

If I ever hit the yellow zone with memory again, I'll just quit Chrome.

The i5-7200U and i7-7500U both have DDR4 and a limit of 32GB. What kind of U CPU does the MacBook Pro has?

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro the lowest spec CPU is an i5-6360U which supports DDR4 and 32GB of RAM: http://ark.intel.com/m/products/91156/Intel-Core-i5-6360U-Pr...

And the highest spec is a i7-6920HQ, which supports 64GB DDR4... but Apple declined to use DDR4.

I think the tech bloggers/ industry have had their fill on the latest Apple PC lineup. We need to stop this madness of giving them attention. We are being trolled. My non-scientific estimate is that I've seen ~20 threads in some way related/ essentially having the same discussion in the last 24hrs.

Build your own desktop behemoth that you can use remotely (Xeon+dedicated GPU(s) and all), and buy an Apple laptop or Dell XPS with what you need. Done. If you develop for iOS, the choice is clear.

I have an intel laptop (w520) from 5yrs that can supports more than 16gig of ram and currently has 20gb of ram (16+4). Yes spec says max is 16gb but that's not true. I don't know the max. i7 quad core. 5 years old.

Anyone know why Intel isn't able to support > 16GB of LPDDR4? Is it a limitation of address bus width in the design?

They don't have support for LPDDR4 at all at this point.

> I don't know the max.

Running `dmidecode -t 16` as root on Linux might tell you.

Max there is 32GB if you have a quad core CPU (and you do, because 16 is the max for dual core). I have one with 32, it works.

Seems like apple's just blowing smoke. The entry level macbook pro has a 10% (5kwh) larger battery. Seems rather implausible that an extra 5kwh is not enough to run 16GB ram for 10 hours.

What 13" laptop of this form factor and size has 32gb of ram as an option?

Answer: none

14" but 32gb of memory - thinkpad t460

But 14 inches (too big for me).

What are these, laptops for ants?

Try to use a 14 inch in a packet commuter train or in an airplane. 12.5 are small enough that they can be used anywhere, the whole point of a laptop for me. If I need more screen space when at home I can plug an external monitor.

12.5" is tiny. I would not be able to fit both hands on the keyboard. That's almost at the point of the eeePC I once had that I had to balance on one hand, and type with the other. It worked for screwing around and pecking away a few notes, but I was some glad to pull out my 17" laptop if I had to actually do anything.

The extra 0.7 inches is a deal killer? More important than double the ram?

x200 are 12.5 inches, so that's 1.5 inch difference, yes it makes a big difference in usage.

All of them. It's actually illegal to sell a PC laptop with less than 32GB RAM. That's why people are so mad at Apple. They found a loophole by claiming their laptop doesn't count as a PC.

What? Illegal under which law? Thinkpad x260 can't take more than 16 GB as far as I know!

I'm fairly certain tedunangst was being sarcastic :)

Just bough a 14 inch thinkpad t460p with 32gb of ram for $980. The form factor isn't quite as sexy, but the specs compare favorably to the macbook pro, and the price difference is pretty absurd. It's entirely upgradable to boot.

Where did you get it for 980? I tried configuring one and a base model with 8gb of ram and 256gb ssd turns out to be over $1250. With 32GB ram it goes above $1500.

On the Lenovo site. I found a coupon for 30% just googling around. Unfortunately, I believe it ended 10/30. However, Lenovo often has sales/promotions, esp around the holidays. So I'm sure there will be more sales soon. Another trick is to just get the HDD option and buy an ssd off Amazon.

It was annoying, a few years ago, trying to find a non-Apple laptop with better specifications. Now it's too easy, as a developer, I rarely find CPU limits my speed (typing is a limitation) but ram does limit how much I can do at once, or at least how many vms and containers I can run whilst developing, testing and searching stackoverflow. However, I use Linux laptops, but my graphic designing partner who loves to have lots of elements of work open at once as she works out how to aggregate them, is going to find it harder to cope, especially as graphics resolutions keep getting better and needing more memory.

If I am not mistaken, the chipsets on the Intel NUC models are laptop chipsets. I have the Skylake Core i3 version and that supports up to 32G of LPDDR4 RAM (dual channel). Since the thin laptops typically have only one RAM slot, it makes sense why they are limited to only 16G.

With this in mind, my understanding is that it is perhaps a limitation of the current Intel chips for single RAM slots, combined with the reluctance of the laptop manufacturer to include dual channel memory in their (thin) laptops.

Even the Macbook has dual-channel memory. They don't have RAM slots--they solder memory chips directly to the motherboard.

Having RAM slots that are user serviceable and having them soldered directly into the motherboard is besides the point.

If there is only one RAM slot (whether soldered-on or otherwise), then the total memory that can be supported is at most 16G.

There are no DIMM slots at all on an MB or MBP motherboard. There are bare memory chips soldered in a dual channel configuration.

I would say that, strangely enough, the Federal Aviation Administration is to blame for the 16GB RAM limit. I posted an explanation why here hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841293

If the FFA is to blame, how have windows laptops had 64gb of ram for over a year? http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/11/9129681/lenovo-skylake-xeo...

If you RTA you'll see that it's a forced compromise between battery life and FFA restrictions

I did. The FAA power limit is a red herring. Perhaps an example will help:

High res screens require more power to run, and more power to render for... which means you could also blame the FAA for Apple not using high res screens... except Apple does use high resolution screens.

So the situation is not one of forced compromise so much as Apple having different priorities from its users... which is where we thought we were before you brought up the FAA.

My entire company was waiting on 32G, we run a simulation that chokes on 16G. Now everyone is trying to figure out what is the best non-Mac to do the job.

Why not use a desktop?

I overrammed my previous MacBook. It was a max of 4 or 8 Gb can't remember but I ended up going 8/16. It worked fine until the keyboard failed. I'm going to replace it eventually.

Jobs is not a fan of softkeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL7X3DTyS2Q

This is pretty much directly relevant to the state of apple right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM

It's quite eery.

Battery is a pure smoke screen. They had no qualms cutting battery life to make it that little bit thinner and put in a watch with horizontal striped OLED display.

"They had no qualms cutting battery life"

I haven't seen where Apple cut battery life in the MacBook Pro. Here's what's reported now (granted, it's from Apple's website):

15" MacBook Pro

2015 - Up to 9 hours wireless web http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-2015/

2016 - Up to 10 hours wireless web http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/

If there are other references out there (particularly if they're independent of Apple), please share! Or perhaps you're referring to something besides last week's MacBook Pro updates?

Yep, battery life is improved but hey don't let that get in the way of Apple hate lol.

It sucks they didn't use the opportunity to make battery life better, but at least on the 13" non-touchbar it seems like they didn't make it worse: http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/macbook-pro-13-inch. 12 hours is the same as the 2015 13" rMBP on that test.

And 12 hours are bad how?

It's not bad, but that's a lightly loaded test. Probably won't get through a 10 hour workday with real use. If Apple had maintained the old battery capacity, it would probably get 15-16 of light use.

How does that make it a "smoke screen"? Apple wants both thinner laptops AND good battery life, and they are not going to compromise on either. So until the LP memory they need is out, they are NOT going the machine thicker (not even "as thick as the old model") to compensate just so they can put 32GB which few of their users are gonna buy anyway.

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