16 GB of ram as the bare minimum for web development...come on now. Is there anything obvious I'm missing? That's even enough to run a couple of VMs with full web stacks and some testbrowsers + git and whatever editor you use
My prediction: In 5 years 16GB will be fine.
Why? Because RAM requirements passed from "We need more, it'll speed things up" to "We've got enough" a while back, and there just isn't much you can do with the extra. Once you're no longer space constrained it just ceases to move the needle.
I'm not defending Apple here, but generally it's hard to think of something that would require 32GB of ram that doesn't better belong on a server. Once you get to that kind of size you'll probably want ECC or stable uptime or other features you'll get on an actual server rather than a machine you turn on and off several times a day.
It's not a question of whether 16GB is sufficient. It's a question of whether 16GB is an reasonable maximum for a "Pro" machine.
OK, forget about expansion and maybe adding 16GB RAM and a few more TB of flash in a couple years. Clearly that ship has sailed.
But 16GB RAM is the absolute minimum I would buy with a new machine today. For that to be the Pro's maximum is wrong.
16G wasn't available and was considered overkill. I remember that quite clearly because it was 2011 and I bought my fully maxed out Macbook Pro from apple with 8G of ram and I was looking at 16G upgrade kits on iFixIt a year later.
So, no, 16G was not "fine", 16G was considered future proof.
I can certainly do that part of my development on some bit of dedicated hardware that sits in the office, but that means I need networking there, which means I can't code on the road etc.
And when that happens, some developers start getting lazy and careless with how they use memory, and we return to the "we need more" part of the cycle.
Unless some radical shift happens then I think 16GB will be completely fine in 5 years.
The only issue I have with the new MacBook Pro, from a personal perspective is the touch bar, it seems pretty useless. Mostly my problem is that I can't opt to not get the touch bar on larger models, so I have no means of indicating to Apple that I don't need it, or want it. Let's say it turns out the the touch bar is just a gimmick, and not of any actual use to anyone. Would Apple ever admit to that? I doubt it, so now we're stuck with it.
Also perhaps price. The MacBook Pro is somewhat overpriced.
I'm not a web dev, I'm a back-end dev and data herder. For me, 16GB is doable, but tighter than I'd like. I prefer new computers to be roomy, because of the way data volumes tend to grow over time.
Considering you can get a ThinkPad with 64GB ram (P50) for a couple of hundred more than Apple'a base price, they seem very overpriced. Apple's laptops were already thin and light enough for me, I don't see the point in paying more to get less anymore.
Overall, I find it sad Apple is ignoring the professional market. Even if it only brings a small portion of their sales, I think it's bad from a strategic point of view. Developers are those who made their ecosystem so nice. Alienating them is not smart.
At the same time, their design decisions have been copied by Lenovo, in a bad way. So ThinkPads are a bit different from what they used to be, and we are left with few good options.
Pretty sure you need that much just to resolve the npm dependency tree for many projects these days.
I guess my viewpoint is skewed as a developer. I spend most of my time making the product I work on use as little RAM and CPU as possible.
RIP js developer's RAM.
Sun tried that. Didn't go well.
You're missing the power price you have to pay for more RAM. This is not an Apple problem. This is a physics problem.
- Chrome alone eats 2-3GB of RAM
- Windows 10 needs at least 6GB allocated in a VM
- Slack, Skype, an editor, Firefox etc. take up another 2GB easily.
That's just 10-11GB for boring stuff. If you have Photoshop open or sites like Zeplin that consume a lot of RAM you can reach 16GBs easily.
No need to be dismissive.