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Comment by yalooze | Hacker News Reader

Phil Schiller, their marketing chief said:

> To put more than 16GB of fast RAM into a notebook design at this time would require a memory system that consumes much more power and wouldn't be efficient enough for a notebook.

ref: http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13460496/apple-macbook-pr...

Nice to get a reply from the top as I was wondering why it was 16GB max too. I can't comment on the veracity.

I'm a Windows user, if that makes any difference.

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It'll be interesting to see if & when this starts to influence desktop software design. Since the early 90s, it's largely been considered a waste of time to optimize client programs for speed or memory usage, because a new machine will just come out in a couple years with double the memory and double the processing power. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in application-level performance, optimizations that could be done but aren't because the user won't perceive a difference. Now that Moore's Law has largely stalled out, I wonder if we'll start seeing innovation in software platforms (languages, frameworks) to optimize for speed & space instead of ease-of-use, to try and recover that performance that the hardware isn't giving us.

Jumping on the next-big-thing trend, but: Compilers with an AI that give you zero-cost optimisations. Plus IDE plugins for interpreted languages.

Actually, I'd guess someone is already working on it :)

Bill by milliseconds (AWS Lambda and the like) is going to push us into that direction. The 100 ms billing unit could become a benchmark. It will punish languages with a long startup time. Luckily for Java it's introducing ahead of time compilation. Many scripting languages are going to suffer. Too bad because they are usually the ones that make programming easier.

To add to that, the FFA caps the maximum battery size to 100 watt-hours, which is probably the main reason why it's limited to 16GB. I posted it here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841293

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