Why the MacBook Pro Is Limited to 16GB of RAM
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Find me a single review that laments the thickness and bulkiness of the 2015 model.
This is plain and simple industrial design gone amuck. Apple has beautiful hardware, but day to day use is important too (performance, ram, battery). Shaving millimeters and ounces hits the point of diminishing returns, especially when you focus on it to the exclusion of all else.
But then again, in my opinion laptop keyboards have been crap ever since they decided laptops needed to be usable on a lap and couldn’t be 3 inches thick or weigh 10 pounds, sometime in the early 1990s. ;-)
(The IBM P70 and 5140, the Macintosh Portable, and the NEC Powermate Portable all had amazing keyboards. Toshiba and Zenith luggables of the same era also had nice enough keyboards. Of course, those machines aren’t exactly “laptops” by any reasonable standard.)
I think a stand + split external keyboard at appropriate tent and tilt angles could be designed to clip to a laptop where the laptop is opened to a 135° angle and propped up at the back. Maybe more trouble than it’s worth though. Would take a lot of design effort, and would be a niche product to be sure.
Overall I think you just need to accept some level of compromise when typing on a plane or train. If the new Apple laptop keyboards bother you that much, get something else I guess.. Among people who have tried them opinions overall seem split. I know several people who much prefer the new Macbook Pro keyboards to the old ones. And several others who prefer the old ones. In my opinion (as a very snobby keyboard connoisseur) both are comparable – acceptable but uninspiring; same goes for all laptop keyboards since about 1992, most of which are even crappier than anything Apple has put out.
I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background. I do all this on 8GB ram on a macbook from 2012 and it runs fast and smoothly, even with up to 4 hours of battery life. I can't imagine the new one would be less performant in any way.
It's completely understandable that now they can optimize for other things, since performance is generally a nonissue now.
Apple is not blaming anything. They've designed a computer for a purpose instead of pumping specs and numbers to gratify a bunch of vocal geeks. I'd rather much trust in Apple's design than a collaboratively designed PC by technical dilettantes with maximum performance everything. It's not just a about specs, especially in a laptop. Versatility, weight, battery, ease of use. These all come into play aside from raw technical component power.
Phil Schiller specially blamed RAM battery drain for it being limited to 16GB. http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13460496/apple-macbook-pr...
"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster" -- With's Law.
I just ran some experiments with tcc: it compiled + ran 300KLOC in around 0.158 seconds. My system cc (clang+llvm) took 9.3 seconds, so roughly a factor 60 difference. And clang+llvm is considered fast by today's standards, languages such as Scala or Swift are typically at least an order of magnitude slower than that.
So compile times will improve when we make it a priority.
People also run a lot of code that "compiles" (not strictly converting to binary). Transpiling js, packaging assets, or just running spec suite. Any small performance we can get is much appreciated and over 2-3years will add up to something significant (justifying a large cost, which I never had a problem paying the Apple premium price).
Either you found a marmaid MacBook or your idea of "fast" is different from mine. I had to upgrade my maxed out 2012 rMBP because even when I have only photoshop/sketch and chrome browser open it will struggle. Now I have the 2015 maxed out rMBP and whenever I watch YouTube, use photoshop/sketch, mamp and browser tabs with dev console open it just strugglea...
Chrome 55 (due to be released on 6th December) is meant to use upto 50% less RAM [1].
[1] https://chromeunboxed.com/chrome-update-significantly-reduce...
Safari for basic stuff and Firefox when Safari doesn't cut it.
> I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background.
It's all relative. Please don't judge other people's needs by your needs. I typically have five virtual desktops, each containing a project like yours. Plus five more virtual desktops for other stuff. More than 16 GB ram would be welcome (but thanks to SSD, I can manage with 16 GB pretty well). The article very well explains Apple's rational choice, but it's frustrating (for us, the users) that the industry haven't come up with anything better in half-decade.
I guess the line between ram and storage will blur more in the future thanks to super fast SSD techonology, ram becoming just one more level of cache.
It's still not as nice as doing it locally and thankfully I'm not the one paying for our cloud compute.
Edit: I think you were going for sarcasm.
Really, what Apple is saying with this is that the MBP is much more a Dell Latitude or XPS15 and not a Precision or a Lenovo P50/70.
On the Dell Precision, you can get a few different quad-core xeons, Thunderbolt 3, 64GB ECC DDR4, ISV certified Quadro M5000 GPU w/8GB VRAM, 3x drives (can do 3X 1TB PCIE SSDs), 4K IGZO screen, choice of batteries including 91wh LiPo, smart card reader, and up to 5 years on-site + accidental damage support for what ends up being about 10% more. Base price on the 17" is $1599.
The Lenovo P70 is available in similar configurations. HP has the ZBook series which is also "designed to pass 14 MIL-STD 810G tests" and comes with up to 4TB of storage, and starts at $1429: http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/zbook-17-mo...
That's what a pro laptop looks like, and Apple no longer sells anything close. Lots of professional software is moving away from macOS because of this. Video production / editing is moving away from Mac due to this. It's sad because Apple used to make real tools for professionals, and now tries to sell them thin-and-lights targeted to rich consumers.
Lastly, the keyboard on the newest gen is awful to type on due to having almost zero key travel. It feels like drumming your fingers on a desk. The old 17" had a great keyboard IMO and I'd gladly give up a few more MM of thickness for a better battery and a fantastic keyboard.
In other words fairly light use.
The pro was originally for power users.
If you consider a whole Linux VM, webpack (also an instance of Node in the background), and gulp to be light use, then yes I think you're in the vocal minority of people who have some extreme expectations for a portable computer.
Sometimes, I need to render video. At one point, MBPs were more than sufficient for state-of-the-art video work on the fly. But time has marched on, and Apple has not. That's why people are pissed, and it's a reasonable state of pissedness given that these are professional machines. It's gotten to the point where I have ditched Final Cut entirely for Premiere just so I can run it on Windows on a machine that is adequately specced for professional work. I hate Premiere. Apple does not offer a product that isn't priced dumb-as-dirt that can actually run Final Cut adequately, though, so that's the only choice I have.
But, hell. The current lines of Mac spin up to near-screaming, even despite those special, so-quiet fans, when one watches a video, so I guess asking for performance when you make one is downright unprofessional.
Ugh, no they don't.
Video decoding is CPU intensive in Chrome and VLC. Video decoding in Safari and QuickTime uses negligible CPU resources. This difference is so striking that I abandoned Chrome. I use Safari, which I don't like, but 100% vs. 2% CPU usage it's so worth it.
Mpv has pretty good performance too, sometimes approaching QuickTime.
There was a time when that wasn't the calculus for operating a Mac.
Having to choose between "using a worse experience" and "having my laptop try to self-immolate" is not, historically, a choice Apple foists on its users.
(Yes, Chrome is third-party. Doesn't matter. Linux rightly gets flak when devices don't work because of third-party manufacturers, OS X can get flak when videos make Apple hardware conflagrant.)
And you have extremely low expectations of the latest model since as you already said the old 2012 model performs "well" for your use cases.
What is the purpose for which the "Pro" model is designed, with its limited memory? Other laptops on the market support double the memory, which is useful for numerous applications... video editing, analysis of large datasets, development of applications that require more than just a webserver.
Programmers often do NOT have the highest performance needs (unless you're dealing with native compilations of large projects, literally doing perf-work, etc).
Perhaps you should stop trying to do all your intensive college assignments on a machine optimized for portability and use a proper workstation or desktop. You know, the "old" computers?
Let me go have a look at powerful up to date Mac desktops that I can purchase.
Oh.
---- Apologies for the snark. I think a lot of the backlash towards the new MBP is being caused by the uncertainty Apple has injected into its desktop line. Even if Apple wants to update their desktops, but for various reasons (e.g. Intel) cannot do so until next year, a simple statement saying that Apple will be updating the desktops soon would have quelled a lot of the concerns.
The "surprise" factor worked for Pros when Apple was updating its devices in a consistent and regular manner. Since they haven't been doing the same with their Pro Macs, they are being highly irresponsible by not giving their Pro users more insight into their future roadmaps.
Agreed. The mediocre laptop offerings (nothing exists that surpasses my 2014 rMBP) and the complete jokestore that are the less-than-multiple-thousands desktop lines--which isn't to say that the Mac Pro isn't silly too, it's just so silly I can't imagine ever even considering it--mean that I'm probably moving off of OS X over the next two years.
It would be more cost-effective, at my full billable rate, to get back into the Hackintosh game and spend God-knows-how-long on that than to buy any Mac on the market right now. That's insane.
You somehow seem mistaken about regular pcs running Linux being unable to run the Linux-based toolchains you use on a daily basis.
Buying a PC might just fix that. Go ahead. Give it a spin!
Roughly 700 million desktop PCs have been sold over the past 5 years, and probably a large proportion of those are still in use.
They work faster, they are easier to repair and upgrade, they are cheaper to run, and they are far better ergonomically (1).
Companies like laptops if they can avoid giving users fixed desks. (Hotdesking more staff across fewer desks reduces costs.) If they're using laptops on fixed, personal desks then they are not very smart.
(1) Ergonomic problems with laptops can be reduced by providing risers and external keyboards, and sometimes by adding external monitors. These are extra costs.
I'm not speaking for me, but general consumers who expect to be able to do photo editing, while browsing the web, while listening to music, and in lieu of photo editing, perhaps playing the occasional game. Not being able to service this easily with a top of the line model is frankly an embarrassment.
Building a single config & platform - with no other significant processes running - will cause OOM crashes on 12GB CI boxes with swap files enabled, when 4-5x 4GB linker process spin up in parallel when building my projects. This is my bread and butter, and it's still way too slow for my tastes on a 16GB box that isn't swapping excessively, which is the new MBP's maximum "give Apple all my money" spec.
Your day to day works on it? Great. Mine hasn't for around a year at least, nevermind next year's. I could theoretically use it as a dedicated docs machine, or as a dumb terminal to an actually decent machine... or I could buy a quad-core laptop with twice the RAM - throw in an extra 4K monitor for good measure - and still end up paying less than a MBP configured with half the cores and down 0.6Ghz in speed.
> It's not just a about specs, especially in a laptop. Versatility, weight, battery, ease of use.
MBP's max specs aren't enough to handle my workload. MBP's 8GB models may not even handle Chrome, if the people bellow are to be believed. That's not "versatile". Weight is just another spec - 33% (~1.5lbs) lighter than the laptop I'm comparing against is nice, but not "who cares about any of the other spec" nice. Battery? More specs! Battery wattage just went down, as pointed out in the post you're replying to. Ease of use - finally something squishy and subjective! ...I'll prefer the numpad over the touch bar. Perhaps, on that front, I'm a weirdo.
But hey, if it works for your specific case, and you like 'em, enjoy!
For your use case I recommend buying a spec'd up PC, such as a gaming laptop or desktop replacement laptop.
Apple is forcing a segment of it's customers to abandon it's ecosystem to continue getting their work done . Their lack of reassuring response insinuates that macOS is a non-scalable toy platform.
I have no horses in this race myself, but if I had hundreds+ invested in Mac software and accessories, with no machines available on the market to handle my workload, I would be pretty bent.
Considering how all the tools you mentioned were written for and runs best on Linux, I don't buy your argument.
You'll have to leave a DE behind. Big deal.
i'm pretty sure his problem is only that the new mbp has the specs of a budged laptop, at best. Which is perfectly fine for most usecases, hardware has gotten pretty good over the last few years. still, shouldn't qualify as a 'professional' version.
Dude, are you seriously suggesting a laptop marketed for developers not be used by people writing and compiling code?
Seriously any project of decent size written in a systems language just consumes all the ram you can throw at. If you think this only happens to 1% of the developers, you need to step out of your echo chamber and see what other developers are doing.
I know right - it's like everyone has forgotten that Pro means "for professionals". And also forgot that the booming sales of the iPhone and iPad owe everything to the ecosystem of apps and content created on Macs.
People doing 3D, engineering simulations, computational bio and chem, financial modelling, yadda yadda, there are loads of people who can make use of every byte of RAM and every core for Real Work. So some guy can make websites adequately on a smaller machine - he or she needs to look up and realize that that's a tiny corner of what computing is about...
The number of people on this planet who need to have 16+ cores of CPU power on the tray table of an aeroplane could probably be counted in single digits.
This was on a small - fairly certain <1MLOC - codebase. I'm small fry. The only unusual thing would perhaps be having small enough compilation times (due to e.g. incremental compiles and small changes not rebuilding the world) for linking of multiple projects to overlap. Boost and the Linux Kernel, noodling in at closer to ~20MLOC, or VS2012's ~50MLOC, might spend more time compiling in their typical edit cycles.
> Expecting Apple to completely gimp the macbook for the average pro user (dev, photoshop, video editing)
I suppose I'm having difficulty here seeing how a small weight and size increase for more DDR chips, or a larger battery, is going to "completely gimp" the macbook. Since I already touched on dev - I'll let someone else touch on video editing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJtrQ5CcCN0&feature=youtu.be... . Things will only get worse on that front as 4K becomes popular.
> They can't cover all use cases, but they can cover most.
Agreed. I'm just not sure they have covered most "pro" users.
Xerox PARC had, effectively, a simple version of what we consider "Personal Computing": word-processing, E-Mail, laser printers, software development, proto-Internet. Alan Kay claims it was less than 20KLOC, and that's a plausible figure considering the Alto had 128K RAM and a 2.5MB disk pack.
MS Office alone is >400MLOC. That's 20000x the code, or 20KLOC^2. There is no way it is 20000 times better or more useful. However, let's assume for the sake of argument that it is 100x better/more useful (something I'd consider dubious, but it's a good upper bound). That still leaves a factor 200x unaccounted for. Or 99.5% of the code.
TBL's first web-browser was ~5KLOC, took him a couple of months to write, in his spare time IIRC. It included editing. NCSA Mosaic took a team of five one year to complete, was 100KLOC and did not include editing. The current (last time I checked) version of Firefox is 13MLOC. Is it 2500x better?
And if you think compile-times are the biggest problem with multi-MLOC code-bases, you're not paying attention.
As written, I'm running into issues in <1MLOC codebases, on hardware just a touch more limited than the max spec of Apple's latest line. The 1MLOC equivalent would break on Apple's hardware, I'm sure. So, no - I don't think 20-50MLOC code bases are to blame.
> Xerox PARC had, effectively, a simple version of what we consider "Personal Computing": word-processing, E-Mail, laser printers, software development, proto-Internet. Alan Kay claims it was less than 20KLOC, and that's a plausible figure considering the Alto had 128K RAM and a 2.5MB disk pack.
It's fine and all to pine for the good old days when computers were simpler than the computer within even your lowly modern hard drive - which is itself inside your modern computer - all in the name of the ever increasing performance we today take for granted. But it's sheer fantasy to think we can support the cambrian explosion of hardware options out there since then (all from different vendors with different interests and standards) with the same sized codebases as we had back then. Simply working around the hardware errata will take more code for many individual pieces of hardware - much cheaper and easier to fix things in software than fab a new revision of chips and toss out all the old, after all.
Nobody's claiming linear relationships between source quantity and product quality. Nobody goes to an all you can eat buffet expecting caviar. Hell, most would argue an inverse relationship - the less code you have, the better you can polish it. But can a modern kernel work with thousands of times more unique hardware SKUs? Wouldn't surprise me. And hardware's expensive to design! If the hardware options out there can multiply by such magnitudes, take a fraction of a second to think what must have happened to software options - relatively cheap by comparison.
It's a miracle we're not measuring individual software projects in BLOCs. Yet - give it time. If such compatability, flexibility, choice, and performance concerns don't interest you - well, I'd be quite interested in what you found necessary to get your Alto talking to the HN website!
> And if you think compile-times are the biggest problem with multi-MLOC code-bases, you're not paying attention.
I have mastered the skill of caring about a second problem at a time. I've heard legends of masters who could care about a third problem, but I have no evidence nor belief in such myths. But yes - link-times are worse ;). And refactoring. And testing. Security. And...
Sure, but for most things, even that is somewhat ridiculous, and I mean both: having ~1MLOC code-bases and those being problematic. Elsewhere, I posted some number comparing tcc and Xcode's default cc (clang+llvm).
Tcc was able to compile+run a (synthetic, non-representative) 300KLOC program in 0.168 seconds. I didn't get a memory reading. cc took 9.3 seconds, so a factor 60. Would a 60x faster compiler work for you? The reason we don't have faster compilers is not that it's not possible, but that it's not a priority. And it hasn't been a priority because in the past performance sins were always covered up by hardware getting faster (by itself, without any extra work). This is no longer the case, increases in single core performance are over.
> It's fine and all to pine for the good old days when computers
> were simpler than the computer within even your lowly modern hard drive
I apologise if that was your take-away, because I obviously didn't make my point very well. However...
>all in the name of the ever increasing performance we today take for granted.
...that is not correct. In fact, in the spirit of Hans Bethe: "Ach, that isn't even wrong". Performance has also deteriorated in line with code bulk, and usually for no good reason whatsoever. There are a few good reasons, but they tend to be a small fraction of the whole problem.
To quote Wirth for the n-th time: "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster".
And nowadays, hardware really isn't getting much faster. Meaning we can no longer count on the hardware boys and gals to bail us out for our egregious sins. Software needs to get its act together.
Not if the resulting executable is, say, 10% slower. I could syntax check slightly faster, I suppose, but I already compile individual TUs for that. For testing, I need to test the actual build target. Also, the fastest comparison on http://bellard.org/tcc/ is a mere 9x faster on a real project. I wonder if they're doing better than 30% faster than GCC on the linux kernel since their 2004 numbers.
Also missing: C++ support. I no longer need PPC, fortunately.
And keep in mind: Despite kvetching about build performance, I make it even worse by running static analysis now and then, because that stuff is actually important to me.
> And it hasn't been a priority because in the past performance sins were always covered up by hardware getting faster (by itself, without any extra work). This is no longer the case, increases in single core performance are over.
Still getting wider, and still getting a little faster, but yes. I did get the memo about Moore's law "ending" a decade or so ago.
> Performance has also deteriorated in line with code bulk, [...]
Yes and no. Yes, more programs do more sloppy things that waste hardware performance now for little to no good reason (although I'll argue saving dev time can be worth it.) No, you cannot write a program that will efficiently unfold proteins on an Alto. No, you cannot make general purpose hardware that's as fast as a modern CPU or GPU with the Alto's fundamentally simpler design principles. No, you cannot efficiently and effectively use more complicated modern hardware with a similar line count as compilers and linkers for the Alto. No, really, the little computer in your hard drive really is playing a role in scheduling hardware operations to maximize your I/O throughput.
We're jumping through some really crazy complicated hoops in hardware to try and get more and more performance, and some of it requires hardware and software working in tandem. The minimum SLOC count to achieve our modern, expanded goals - even if you do something crazy like limit those goals to increased performance only - is absolutely rising for very reasonable reasons. Even if we assume most people 'waste' SLOC left and right, it doesn't follow that all codebases do, nor that all 'reasonable' codebases will be small enough to avoid problems.
Look, I get it, lean mean small programs kick some serious ass for a whole slew of reasons. I've sped up linking by a factor of 10x or so on some projects - on par with the 9x tcc factor above! - by switching from BFD to gold, with the latter focusing exclusively on elf binaries, instead of taking on BFD and all it's abstraction layers and non-elf target support. I imagine it's a much smaller program!
But I just told you the tradeoff: Specialization. I wasn't able to do this on all our target platforms, because not all of them even use elf. And, if it weren't for the fact that we were able to ditch BFD entirely, the total SLOC of our build toolchain would have, ironically, gone up from adding another linker into the mix as a result. Fortunately, I don't have to build our build toolchains - just any in-house ones. Our build configs did go up a few more LOC to override the defaults...
Unlike tcc, gold has not specialized itself to the point that it doesn't solve any of my problems, so it gets to join my toolset. I'm sure the reverse has happened to someone else. And plenty more deal with the situation where no specialized tool works for them. To ignore larger codebases requires you to ignore the generalized tools they fall back on.
> [...], and usually for no good reason whatsoever. There are a few good reasons, but they tend to be a small fraction of the whole problem.
An important distinction here: There's a lot of code that's absolutely useless, and has no good reason to exist... for solving your needs. This is very different from code that's absolutely useless, and has no good reason to exist. My pointless misfeature is someone else's core use case. And, it would seem, your pointless misfeature is perhaps my core use case.
And hey, that's cool. If tcc works for you, use it. But when people are using the multi-MLOC LLVM toolchain - it's not because software needs to get it's act together, but because it did get it's act together. I'm absolutely loving some of the tooling they're putting out, and wish I'd had it two decades ago.
And hey, perhaps current hardware performance sins (cough16GB max memory in 2016 for that pricecough) will be covered up by future software optimizations (by themselves, without any extra work on Apple's part) :). I imagine it'll involve more code though.
I'd consider myself one of the main target markets for the MacBook Pro, and have for several years been a faithful consumer of them. I compile multi-gigabyte codebases on a semi-regular basis in addition to database work and number crunching that would put a normal consumer laptop totally out of its depth. Its the combination of the ability to do this easily and with great battery life and general usability that makes my MacBook so nice.
I'm convinced that if you're doing more heavy-hitting work than what I throw at my laptop day in day out then a MacBook or any easily portable device isn't for you, and a 2 inch thick Dell monster with a proper desktop chipset and memory controller is what you're really after, or even a couple of c4.xlarge instances running in AWS with a MacBook as the client. For any load too much for my little notebook its straight into amazon and I go get a coffee.
Razer has made the power machine every is asking for in a Macbook like format. A company that makes less in total yearly INCOME than Apple makes in INTEREST on a monthly basis.
Also, how hung up people are on the word pro. Whether this machine is for you or not, can we all please just agree that pro doesn't mean anything other than the most expensive option? Certainly, noone is saying that Apple aims to serve every single market of people who self identify as pro users. If you think this machine is inadequate to do the kind of work that you do, then maybe, just maybe, it wasn't intended to? It doesn't mean that it's inadequate when it comes to countless other pro tasks.
One final thing: This machine is more powerful than the ones it replaces. Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either. Which must mean that many of the people complaining weren't Mac users to begin with. Hmmm...
But that's not what people are saying: they are saying there is no reason to upgrade and that they will explore alternate solutions.
Your argument is silly anyway, in the 1980s people were using Macs a tiny fraction of the power of today "professionally" for DTP, does it logically follow now that anyone complaining that a modern machine isn't suitable for modern use cases, was never a "real professional"?
That's not what the grandparent was saying. She was saying that the new MacBook was inadequate for her needs.
Your argument is silly anyway
No yours is. Clearly, yesterday's hardware is inadequate for the software of today. But what I am saying is that hardware of today is probably ok for the software of yesterday.
This lack of separation cuts both ways. I read "The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane" as dismissing the latter of: "This machine is a great machine for me." and "This machine is not a great machine for a lot of other people."
> One final thing: This machine is more powerful than the ones it replaces. Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either. Which must mean that many of the people complaining weren't Mac users to begin with. Hmmm...
Ahh, that doesn't quite follow. Aftermarket upgrades have been around to e.g. bring previous gen MBPs up to 16GB for years. Some people have found that their professional needs are expanding faster than the hardware is, and where they were once avid users, they're now being forced to reconsider their options. And then there are those who have been reluctantly limping along with computationally inadequate hardware because they're tied to it for some reason. There's a whole spectrum out there.
I agree. In principle. But I don't think that the two perspectives are equivalent, unless you think the group of people who won't be greatly served by this machine because it strikes the wrong compromises, are somehow equal in numbers or importance to the ones who will, because it does. Which I think is preposterous. But time will tell of course.
Ahh, that doesn't quite follow
Yes, I probably put too fine a point on that. The point a was trying to make was that some people seem to dismiss all the ways in which this machine is better (which is most or all of them), because it is not better enough. Which I think is a strange, entitled way to judge a it.
The iMac is okay, but it's painful to buy a 2015 computer at 2015 prices, and I don't really need a 5K screen.
The issue I have is that people want desktop power in a laptop. Yes, I'd love to have the latest Nvidia chip in my pencil-thin MacBook but there are trade offs.
The 32gb ram issue. Well, they can design for the 99%, or they can design for the 1%. Their choice is pretty clear. The sales numbers are pretty clear. The vast majority of people don't use even 8gb of ram, let alone 16.
I would like to see a 32gb option, but Intel has not released the chip that Apple needs. That's on Intel.
$ java -d64 -Xms12g -Xmx24g BigDataApp
Personally I would have been willing to trade battery life for 32GB of RAM because today I must carry two laptops.
Hardware is not the problem. Software is.
Software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster -- Wirth's Law.
I can almost guarantee Ableton Live and other audio applications will not work well on the new MBP.
Sounds like you do coding that does not really need much RAM. I don't think nearly all developers have your requirements. I was hoping that with new MBP. I could move my MongoDB/MS SQL Server to local virtual enviroment. For that I needed Virtual Windows Server which eats about 12-15 GB ram with Mongo and SQL instances running.
windows vm + browser + a few JVMs + office + analyzing memory dumps... and you want some spare capacity for the disk cache. Some occasional photoshop too. Analyzing memory dumps probably is the most demanding thing I do regularly. But all those pieces add up either way.
Half a TB of RAM, four Titan X, two 24-core Xeons, and a battery that lasts four weeks sounds good to me.
Blind "trust" is a company is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. People are allowed to speak up if something isn't right.
20 tabs in a browser and a VM isn't what I would consider a power user. We have accounting people in our office doing more than that, because of antiquated software requirements.
Apple had design reasons for doing what they did: optimizing battery life at the cost of a feature that I would wager very few people, statistically speaking, would use. It's alright if that means this laptop doesn't meet your needs, because everyone's needs are different, but I would wager that more people would take advantage of longer battery life than would take advantage of 32 GB of RAM.
Like you stated, "everyone's needs are different", and yet, they don't cater to anyone but the lowest common denominator anymore. It started with abandoning their pro apps, then their pro desktops, and now their pro laptops.
There are plenty of reviews that blame Apple for not updating their design and only improving internals, and I don't really see how you can change a perfect (imo) laptop design unless you make it thinner. Nevertheless I agree with your points here, I would want to keep old design for 32gb ram and bigger battery
You mean watt-hours (Wh).
NOW. These two independent creators are also hardcore minimalists and invest heavily into optimizing their iPad-based workflow, so their use cases aren't particularly relevant to the developers on HackerNews. However I do think they are VERY representative of a substantial subset of the Apple user base.
And unlike us, they have podcasts with hundreds of thousands of users to project their influence.
Ultimately, I'm not defending the new MBP direction. I think even to this class of creatives it misses the mark. But size does matter to them all the same.
DDR4 has a bunch of really huge caveats, as outlined in the article. Did you read it?
Does this sound familiar for anyone else?
Give me the 32GB memory and an extra few mm of thickness. I'll just keep it plugged in and not notice the difference.
Portable and powerful is PERFECT for digital nomads and business travellers. A portable powerhouse that can be thrown in a day bag and taken to cafe’s, coworking spaces, lugged through airports and around new cities.
But that’s not the “Pro Market"
Apple should have released this iteration as the new Macbook Air or dropped the Air and called it a “Macbook”. Nobody would have complained.
Then, released a new lineup of Macbook Pros around the same size as the previous generation and dropped quad core processor in the 13” model. Maybe even squeeze in a discrete GPU like the new GTX 1060 or GTX 1080. Nobody would have complained then.
Apple could also have brought out a new expandable, upgradeable cheesegrater tower for the many pros who need real power.
The Mac Pro has proven to be a bit of a disaster, because it hasn't been upgraded for more than three years and users can't usefully upgrade it themselves. A rational Apple would just go back to doing towers. (Even with a tower, you can still handle external as well as internal upgrades.)
You're right that this is hackintosh territory. However, I've seen a lot of people switch to PC towers runing Windows instead. If they spend most of their time in Adobe programs, they are still using Adobe's UI. And users can boot/dual-boot into Linux if that meets their needs.
I can't see many reasons for "creative professionals" to stick with MacOS at the moment, no matter how much they like it. Even Final Cut Pro users recognize that Adobe is the industry standard, and there are several other decent video editors for Windows.
It's absolutely a game of semantics with the current naming scheme, but you are completely right. And releasing an actual full powered thicker and heavier Pro line would keep their brand kudos amongst the vocal developer/media creator crowd.
Every time I come into a thread about the new MacBook Pro, I'm always being told that I'm apparently not a professional. And it kinda hurts a little bit.
Maybe it doesn't meet your particular needs, but insulting everyone who doesn't use 32GB+ of RAM on a day to day basis isn't very nice. Yes, saying "you're not a professional" is an insult to people who are very much professionals.
If you guys want a machine with multiple processors and 128GB of RAM and 5TB disk storage with terribly battery life, you should pressure Apple for a new desktop. The MacBook Pro is not and never has been a mobile workstation. It's a notebook first and foremost.
Second of all, This isn’t about you. nobody is saying you’re not a professional because this new Macbook suits your needs. It’s about the branding.
The whole “Heres our affordable, portable consumer laptops” and “Here’s our more powerful pro laptops” defined the brands. The “macbook/air” and “macbook pro” were branded for two different groups of users.
Now what’s happened is Apple combined them into the one machine and our preconceptions of those brands have been shattered.
Many including myself have been holding out for years for a portable Apple computer (13”) that can be a workhorse (Quad core) and by making the pro thin and light it’s meant that’s no longer possible. It should have just been a Macbook. Hence my previous post about keeping them segregated into two machines.
Let's start with "they've combined them into one machine". Then why do the 12" and the Air exist? Those are the "consumer" devices. If what you're saying is true, the MacBook Pro and the 12" MacBook are the same machine. That's not true at all, there is a substantial difference.
And then let's tackle "the MacBook Pro has always been a mobile workstation". Which again, is completely not true. It's always been exactly the opposite of that. What I have sitting on my desk behind me is a mobile workstation. It's a Thinkpad W530. Go ahead and look up the specs, you'll see what I mean. 32GB of RAM, a quad core i7, a massive screen, and it weighs about three hundred pounds. It also gets 4 hours of battery life, and that's with the extended battery sticking out of the back. A MacBook has never been a mobile workstation. It's always been a notebook that's been as portable and battery-efficient as technology has allowed, while also being able to easily run the tools that most professionals require. Not once has Apple ever said "Pixar ditched their rendering farm for a single 13" MacBook Pro!"
I'm sorry if your preconceptions of the brand have been shattered. I'm also sorry to say that your preconceptions have always been wrong. You're upset because Apple didn't make a device that you were waiting for, but they've never made that device. So maybe instead of complaining that "the new MacBook Pro isn't made for professionals!" you can understand that your definition of professional doesn't necessarily line up with Apple's. It never has.
That said - I would gladly take the 32GB and extra thickness. I'm running off a MBP mid-2012 as it is (bought in 2015), so I'm used to extra thickness & about 2kg weight. And even the 2012 gets a solid 7 hours battery life, whereas reviews say the TouchBar MBP model is struggling to manage 6 hours.
There are now external GPU chassis you can get. What would it take to have an external set of CPUs or massive block of RAM? Make the macbook a reasonably powered thing you can carry about but have a tower you can plug into that extends your processing ability massively.
Or something more radical, make a neat system for moving storage around. Make the vast majority of the hardware entirely interchangeable, so you can move to a new desk, go home, go wherever and just plug in your 10 gram chip. M2 drives are pretty tiny, that seems like a tech that's arrived. Allow me to use a lightweight, low power device while travelling then go and plug myself into a monster of a machine at home.
On the other hand, I also have a 13" 2015 MBP[1]. It is only ever plugged in when it needs charging. I bought it specifically for it's size and battery life, because, as ludicrous as this might sound, I want my laptop to be as portable as possible. I don't _want_ it to be plugged in and I don't want to feel like I've been working out when I've been carrying it.
I know, this is crazy talk, but might I suggest that many of the people complaining are doing so simply because they bought the wrong tool for the job? It sounds to me like an awful lot of the complainers would have been better served by an actual desktop computer.
[1] I had never even used OSX before, and own no other Apple products, but I bought a MBP based entirely on battery life and size, because it was the best option out there.
I would have paid for a 32 or even 64 GB model, but instead I'm going to delay my upgrade for 6-8 months so that I can see if something better than the new MBP comes along.
I am of the opinion that a Pro machine does not need to be the thinnest available model.
Longer battery life, and smaller battery also have benefits. Particularly, a smaller battery can be charged faster. Lower power consumption allows this, and their design decisions such as limiting RAM to 16 was made to achieve this.
I run a linux VM and do dev work and even on 8GB is fine. I'm a programmer, and technical guy, but I understand that Apple can still make better computer building decisions than me, or any other nerds who just like to ramp up spec numbers in their custom build PC.
Considering the number of people who make YouTube videos, memes, SoundCloud tracks, web pages, blog posts, photo uploads and shares, and so on - that's a lot of users. 16GB means they're going to be waiting around the disk to thrash its way through a swap whenever they switch between applications.
My iMac has 32GB, and it's a bare minimum for comfortable thrash-free media creation.
Remember when media and creation was an Apple thing? That.
I could probably go buy a big workstation/gaming style pc laptop, but I'd rather pay more for a lightweight model.
I now do all my work on a beefy box running Ubuntu, as I did prior to my last year's stint in trying Apple hardware full time. I'm transitioning who I can onto similar setups and moving away from the laptop-as-the-main-computer setup. They just aren't good enough for it.
Another way of putting this: modern software is so bloated and poorly designed that it wastes massive amounts of memory and processor resources.
Beefy desktops also have much better ergonomics (unless laptops are used on a riser with an external keyboard etc).
This should mean fewer computer-induced injuries and fewer courses of expensive physiotherapy in the future.
I've needed two courses, after foolishly working full-time on laptops. As a result, I've gone back to desktops. The superior performance, lower prices, and the fact that they last much longer are extra benefits...
For the first time in a decade I went out and built a desktop.
Ok maybe it doesn't have all day battery life - but most people, especially people who want "Pro" hardware, probably only need a few hours max.
I've had an Air for two years, and I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I've used the full battery - all international flights and trains I've been on have had power sockets, so I can charge on the go. Plus thanks to USB-C, you can use a power bank to charge your laptop if you need more power:
http://www.macworld.com/article/3028132/consumer-electronics...
Apple is no longer giving consumers a choice, before there was the MacBook (old one) if you wanted a more-affordable entry level machine, the Air if you needed ok performance but great portability, and the Pro if you wanted performance in a laptop package.
Now everything is lumped together with portability as the #1 priority. If Apple had just launched this as a new version of the Air I don't think anyone would be complaining so much.
Part of the reason why they make bad computers is they cave and make design decisions based on what random users ask. Users who potentially have no knowledge or experience in system design.
As the famous quote goes, if you ask people what they want, they'd tell you a faster horse.
Apple makes kind of above-average computers, and ones that fall down for current-day, up-to-date professional uses. They make a better operating system. The reason people are pissed is because Apple used to do both, and it's rapidly becoming the case that the lousy hardware and high prices aren't balancing out the operating system. If not for already being comfortable, it would probably be more effective for me to switch between Windows and Linux as necessary on PC hardware (both desktop and laptop) than to use OS X anywhere. That's why I'm probably going to have to switch, and that's why I'm kinda mad.
Estimated battery life is quite bad for it. This is I'm assuming the base configuration with 16gb ram, so if you jack that up to 32 or 64, battery probably drops significantly more.
It's these details of actual use that drive me to apple, as I've tried thick, full of ports, jacked up laptops with touch screens and in practice they almost always never work well.
Dell's professional brands are Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision. If you want a power-user workstation, you could have a look at the Precision line.
But, if anything you do could even be mildly improved with GPU support you're better off looking elsewhere. Most of the precision line are on some old Quattro's which are simply annihilated but the new released GTX 10 series GPU's.
Most of the base line CPUs are the lower 6300HQ models too, rather than the 6700HQ you get in others like the XPS 15 line or nearly all of the gaming laptops now released, so you have to bump the price straight away to get comparable baseline performance on many other models.
I'm very much looking around at the moment for a new laptop as a MacBook Pro (2010) refugee and have looked at way too many to list here.
So do consider the Precision line but it's certainly not the 'best' one out there.
Incidentally, one of the best I've seen is actually the new Razer Blade (if you put a skin or cover over that horrible logo) or even the Alienware 13 with the OLED screen.
Whilst these are traditionally 'gaming' setups, the Razer Blade certainly has the style and form factor to mimic the MacBook and the Alienware with it's toned down styling looks far more like the business Dell's of yesteryear. The Alienware also has what almost all reviewers/users state to be an exceptional keyboard (something where the XPS line has not done so well).
As for upcoming models, the Q1 2017 release of the XPS 15 would most likely come with a GTX 1050 (unless they copy Razer and find some Vapour Chamber cooling magic and stick a GTX 1060 in there) and it'll also probably have one of the first of Intel's Kaby Lake quad core mobile series too.
So it may be worth waiting if you can to see what comes in the next few months as there is a MASSIVE amount of change occurring with Nvidia's new GPU and Intel's new CPU offerings.
That would be a reasonable conclusion if I could run macOS on these computers. If I could develop iOS apps on a Razer Blade without running a fragile Hackintosh setup, I would have ordered one already. (Plus a sticker to cover up the gross green logo.)
IMO there is no such thing as a 'Pro' laptop. I've owned MBPs, XPSs, MSI Gaming Laptops, and they all fall short. Especially 6ish months later when I want some extra oomph but NO; Laptop; At best you can maybe upgrade RAM / Disk but thats about it.
For me, 'Pro' is being able to max out anything, swap parts/upgrade when I want or need to. And this is only possible with a tower, hell even a mini atx build can kick anything Apple is selling out of the water. And you will always be able to upgrade at your own pace / price point.
For portable, I like my Chromebooks and do like the Macbook Air. But for the Air you gotta buy it maxed out, and with the Apple extended warranty.
This is a problem with proprietary systems like Apple, where you have no alternative hardware supplier. If Apple doesn't want to make it, you can't have it (unless you can Hackintosh it).
You bought what I would all consider consumer laptops, and thusly feel 'pro' laptops dont exist? What you are describing are business laptops. Thinkpads, Latitudes, Precisions, Zbooks etc. You want a new wireless card, you can swap it in. Different screen model? if you venture outside the consumer market, there are varying levels of upgradability.
But this reminds me of actually the real reasone why laptops will never be pro.
Pro is in the Peripherals!!
My monitors, keyboard, and mice are all things im super picky about. And dont want tied to and priced into the core of my computer. I've used the same mouse for over decade (Microsoft Intellimouse). And keyboards, when I find a good one it will stick with me for a while, but always trying new ones. I have recently upgraded all my monitors to 4ks, but before that I was fine with my few year old proarts.
Apples trackpad is A+, but their keyboard is a F for me. Biggest Grip, the LCTRL key was at the most left key. When I use macs I always have to use the full usb wired keyboard because of LCTRL.
All the other brands trackpads and keyboards are B- at best.
These are things that no single vendor can satisfy for me, and the lockin that's required for laptops just absolutely will never make them first-class/pro machines for me.
Anecdotally, my father used to think I wasted my time 'playing with computers' when I was growing up. He'd tell me stories about how at my age he was building cars from junkyard parts. From a time long ago when you could build a beautiful car in your garage with any number of parts and some hacky engineering. Later in life, I was able to explain how my computers and software and art was very much like him building his hotrods, decorating them with flaming skulls, and I think he finally understood my interest.
If you like laptops for reasons that I dislike them, that's fine.I still wouldn't call them 'Pro' Every part of them deprecates faster than any parts that you used to build a desktop. Any and Every part.
Laptops offer nothing but faster turnovers for the brands that sell them.
It was released in October 2013, so more than 3 years.
As it stands, you can neither recycle it as an external display nor can you run Linux on it at full resolution.
Not really a "pro" complaint - just something to keep in mind if you plan to hand it on.
For some people. But you can also look at a laptop as being the ultimate "all-in-one" PC.
The only cable you need to plug in is the power cable. For a lot of people, that's more convenient than having to deal with a monitor, keyboard, mouse and desktop with the associated mess of cables and added desk space. That a laptop is portable and runs on a battery is gravy.
It's not uber-thin and light, no; this is a literal desktop replacement and weighs twelve pounds. It's not the machine I'd buy, because I don't need a GTX 1080 in a portable machine--but that machine is equivalent to Apple's best, actually-serious desktop while being cheaper and portable! It goes without saying that you can scale down to something that's a little more reasonable for a physical-effort-averse nerdy type and still get something that's very favorable compared to Apple's offerings, both in terms of perf and price.
Apple missed the memo: you really can have both, these days. Maybe they don't care about that audience anymore, and that's their prerogative, but it's why I'm probably bouncing back to Windows/Linux. (Dual-booting. Ew.)
Good, because it isn't: http://apple.com/macbook
the "pro" in pro just means "professional", as in "connected to one's profession". It does not mean "professional computer-user" or "professional computer programmer"; it does not mean "this is the most powerful thing on the market", it means "you can stake your livelihood on the reliability and versatility of this tool".
A lot of professionals use their laptop every single day for work, and they commute with it every single day. Lightening the load in your bag matters to a lot of professionals. Making sure you can get through an entire day of meetings on a single charge matters to a lot of professionals.
Anyway, if this sounds like apple fanboy apologism: I'm not buying a new MBP. I've even gone as far as turning down a free one from my employer. It offers me nothing over my existing MBP, which will in all likelihood be the last Apple laptop I ever buy.
The point is: this computer is not designed for programmers, and that's ok.
It was a game changer. I can get through airports quicker, I can pop my computer in and out of my bag anywhere I want. I can keep it on all day a client sites without having to plug it in. I only need to carry one bag with me when I travel Monday-Thursday. Prior to the MacBook, I was carrying a backpack with my laptop and a suitcase with my clothes, because they wouldn't fit together into a carry-on-sized bag. Now it's just one backpack.
I can't stress enough how much of an improvement that has had on my life. I wouldn't want to sacrifice anything: not a minute of battery life, not a centimeter of thickness, not a gram of weight. Every measurement matters when you're traveling.
Then why all this fuzz? Why did the MacBook become so popular among professionals and programmers?
It's certainly never been the most powerful laptop on the market.
I'm not sure people are willing to admit it, but I think the reason the MacBooks have been so popular, even among programmers, is precisely because they've always pushed the boundary on being thin, sleek and portable.
Maybe you don't think the few mm they shaved off this time matters. But if they didn't have this attitude, they would still be the same size and weight they were 20 years ago.
Did you want the DLX, GS, or GX trim package?
Obvious extreme sarcasm here. But it seems to be the trend.
If they had just called these the Macbook 13” and 15” everybody would have been impressed.
Three laptops - Macbook 12”, Macbook 13” and Macbook 15” feels more Apple to me than this current frankenstein of brand names “Macbook, Macbook Pro, Macbook Pro w/ Touch Bar”
LPDDR4 is not supported by Intel’s CPU, and the DDR4L (another low voltage RAM type) standard is not finished yet. So desktop class memory (plainly spoken DDR4) would be the only option if they wanted to go past 16GB.
I don't follow the argument here. Why not just put another 16GB of LPDDR3E on the board?
My ivy bridge laptop supports 32GB of DDR3, for what it's worth.
I would further guess that 4 DIMMs, more than just memory controller support, might have required too much precious board space - which, when combined with the power requirements and additional feature enhancement requirements for Intel, might have made it a nonstarter.
It would make for a great pro laptop and I'm not joking at all, especially since there's no other way to get ECC support from Intel.
There are issues with that though, at least in Skylake:
* Mobile Xeon now require Xeon-decidated chipsets (C23X) which AFAIK don't exist in mobile form (and thus have a TDP ~double that of the regular mobile skylake chipsets).
* The mobile Xeon range (15X5Mv5) is very limited with just two Iris Pro 580 and two Intel HD parts.
* While the 1575Mv5 is higher-specced than any non-xeon mobile chip (3.0/3.9, graphics 0.35/1.1) it's also twice as expensive as the 6970HQ, which is already a $600 part.
Still, might have been nice on the 15".
http://ark.intel.com/products/91156/Intel-Core-i5-6360U-Proc... http://ark.intel.com/products/91166/Intel-Core-i5-6267U-Proc... http://ark.intel.com/products/91164/Intel-Core-i5-6287U-Proc... http://ark.intel.com/products/88967/Intel-Core-i7-6700HQ-Pro... http://ark.intel.com/products/88972/Intel-Core-i7-6920HQ-Pro...
It's literally hiding right there on every link you provided. Let's just blame everything on Apple, am I right!?! It's not like Intel hasn't hampered previous Apple products with arbitrary limitations... http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/faq/macboo...
If Apple wanted more energy-efficient RAM for their MacBook's, with their volumes, Intel would be happy to help.
>If Apple wanted more energy-efficient RAM for their MacBook's, with their volumes, Intel would be happy to help.
The lack of support for the LPDDR3 greater than 16GB is a problem in the memory controller. Intel would have to respin the silicon to fix this issue for DDR3 when they are moving to DDR4. Intel is not going to fix an silicon issue on a product(Skylake) when they have already released the successor(Kabylake).
Many people claim to need >16GB, but many of those folks really don't. The folks who need to run VMs (the biggest group, IMO) have workarounds.
The folks left are a small number and have alternatives, mostly in the cloud. And they make the Mac Pro to address those folks, although obviously that's a flawed product as well.
No, there are no cloud options for them, they need the RAM for the video. No, the Mac Pro isn't a viable option for them at that price, nor is it portable.
I'm pretty sure they don't give a damn about battery life, either. They do their editing at a desk, and then take the MBP with them.
So, for now, they're stuck with old models until there's a better one, or they spend a fair amount of money building a new pipeline and purchasing new software.
If you're going to compare to desktops, start with the iMac, which is "only" a year old at this point, unlike the Mac Pro which is several :(. The iMac with 5K display starts at $1,800 and is configurable to 32GB RAM, while the MacBook Pro 15" starts at $2,400, and then you probably want an external display too. (That doesn't include the rather high price of actually configuring the iMac for 32GB, but its RAM is [still] user-upgradeable, so better to buy it somewhere else.) Actually, considering that the Mac Pro starts at $3,000, which is not that much more than $2,400, I'm not sure why you think the price puts it out of range...
But I definitely understand why you'd want it in a laptop.
You do not have to do this from scratch each time, just clone the disk, or even better have a script that generates these images modulo some parameters.
My point is that you can get a laptop with 8GB RAM instead of 4GB and should pay for itself within a couple days.
It's still a waste of time if you need to reduce a standard minimal Linux install whatsoever (ISO via Packer, Vagrant, Docker, whatever the case may be)
That way we don't waste time optimizing at deployment time or deploy crap into production.
Our java people need more memory and we addressed it by giving them server VMs and CI tools.
Apple? Focus-grouping?
FWIW, building one is far easier than it used to be. Everything is working great, took me about an afternoon to get it there. Watching Photoshop open as quickly as Sublime text will never get boring.
Edit: This is my build if anyone is interested, http://pcpartpicker.com/list/gwV6qk
The only thing that isn't working is handoff, but you can get a card that enables that.
Now... this is for Windows based machines, and I'm sure the forces are different for Apple, but it would be lovely to read a serious study on this. I suspect there is something along the lines of cost and supply chain factors dominating the "refresh cycle" but this used to be handled by different product lines with wildly different configurations. (it still kinda is... Alienware vs Inspiron vs Yoga vs T vs P series but Apple seems to buck this trend completely) Anyway... I just need the cathartic release of posting (venting) with these laptop articles.
So you had the two markets, business and professional consumers who knew what they were buying, and then regular consumers who mostly cared about price but are also swayed by large numbers (more GB, more HZ, bigger screen, more software a.k.a. malware).
Then I think the tide sort of turned in the past decade where even the common populace had realized Windows consumer laptops were full of crap that caused it to run slow and unexpectedly and people noticed Apple's laptops were more consistent with user experience (which they were), so now Apple has a reputation of being the no nonsense brand (which they deserve). Of course, now Apple can also charge a premium for this so you see people with disposable income sticking to Apple's ecosystem, and then the rest of the OEMs fight for price conscious consumers and getting barely any profit out of it.
Obviously for Apple, keeping things simple keeps their operating costs down, so they don't need to cater to every purchaser, and they probably decided that now they're the default brand to purchase if you have the money, they don't need to waste resources chasing after a small segment of the market looking for extremely high specifications.
1. OSs are generally unaware of the details of memory controller configuration, everything is preconfigured by firmware. Apple's vertical integration could help here, but they would probably need help from Intel and it would work only in OSX.
2. It's not the case that if you install four 8GB sticks they will be mapped at 0-8G, 8-16G, etc. and the OS can simply move data from one area to another. For performance, data are striped RAID0-style across all modules. They would have to disable this.
3. I don't know if OSX supports non-identity VM-mapping of kernel memory pages. Linux for example doesn't afaik. Without this it's impossible to move arbitrary kernel objects because you can't find and update all pointers pointing to them.
> Even if it weighed 10 kilos and cost $10k I would still buy it.
> (To show you exactly what I mean in terms of personal needs, I recently rendered a music video in HD using a neural net called Style app. Due to the 16GB RAM limitation it took several days and wrote 20.44 Terabytes to my drive in swap space (yes, over 20,000 gigabytes). This would have been an order of magnitude faster on a system with 32GB of RAM).
If your rendering video and can afford a $10k computer, then you should be using a Mac Pro. You can get a 2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache and 64GB of memory for around 8.5k.
I rent a 16 core/128GB machine at a cloud provider. I use it for heavy database treatments. And my laptop merely became a tmux terminal ever since.
use proxy videos in your project, transfer the split instructions and composites, and let the server do the rendering
no latency at all
> no latency at all
Um...
But there are a lot of disadvantages. The process only really works for final renders. All the creative work needs to be fast and local, but thumbnail renders don't always give you enough detail to make good decisions.
It doesn't work for audio, because audio isn't great with low-quality previews and often needs hands-on changes.
It doesn't work for many kinds of ML - not unless the render machine has the latest graphics cards.
It doesn't work for renders with huge asset libraries spread around a LAN.
And so on. Basically there is a list of use cases, but it's not even half of all possible use cases.
Meanwhile dual-Xeon servers have really started to kick ass. These are workstation grade machines with high four and low five figure prices. You can have up to 48 independent cores on a dual-CPU board, which is excellent for video rendering.
Or you can get a blade rack. Depending the project, they can be better value than an off-prem cloud account. (Sometimes).
Apple has turned its back on this space. I don't entirely understand why. Xserve had real potential, but they decided to go dumbed-down consumer instead.
Not cheap, but...
I know some of these people switched back to a laptop. And I wonder why they did.
And not just for 32GB, many mobile workstation makers offer up to 64GB. You can also get ECC and mobile Xeons too.
That is the amount the other RAM type would have used... So this was likely more about weight than battery life.
In the pro video camera space the mid range cameras and up are modular, so you have an imaging device which is just a cage with a sensor in it to which you attach storage, lenses, monitors, handles, etc.
There must be similar things in the pro laptop space, but it would have to be a hackentosh.
I realise that I'm probably an outlier though.
And no, an iMac is not easy to carry.
But what would you actually change? I wouldn't want to add any components, and the iMac doesn't seem to have better specs.
The weight of the battery could be removed but it's already light enough for that to not matter.
> And no, an iMac is not easy to carry.
Compared to a laptop of the same screen size, I'd rate an iMac pretty high on carryability. (The sizes sold today are irrelevant to a theoretical 'portable iMac'.)
I would've thought when you're on AC, the power can completely circumvent the battery and put no wear on it. I remember in the age of replaceable laptop batteries, I could replace the battery while connected to AC (or run without a battery) no problems
I'd also like an 18- or 19-inch laptop with an Ultra HD screen. Apple could put in the biggest battery they're allowed to (100W in the US, for flights) and let it have whatever battery life it has. I think of it being portable in the sense of moving it to another room in the house, say to watch a movie in my bedroom, or to get work done in my home office, not that I'll take it with me when I go out.
I've traveled with a similar setup. The Mini has the additional benefit that you can keep it in your hand luggage when flying and governments can't randomly fiddle with hardware in your checked-in luggage. (Look at my shiny tinfoil hat.)
Its cheaper(no slot) and easier(same production line) to manufacture, and as a bonus forces users to upgrade earlier, not to mention planned obsolescence. Same goes for the SSD.
Anybody want to guess how an official Apple data recovery procedure looks like in case of soldered SSD and no cloud backup? I can tell you how - there isnt one, just like with phones.
Why does apple claim 2133Mhz?
If they would choose 2x16 and lower freq, voltage resulting performance would be even better with similar power usage.
Apple prefer to make more money. They use power of brand to sell overpriced products to clueless crowd. Just go apple store to see audience, most people there do not even know what is RAM.
[1] http://nucblog.net/2015/09/dual-channel-vs-single-channel-do...
Apple is not stupid. They know the market. And imho the anger here on HN is mostly HN bias.
Nearly all my friends in that world (me included) use topped out MacBooks for portable stuff and the video folks are using Mac Pros or hackintosh's. They certainly need more RAM, I know at least two guys who would have killed for 64GB RAM in a Macbook for their 4k video work. And I could certainly use it to speed up batch operations of hundreds of images, or even to be able to basically use the laptop when pushing around several 24mp RAW images in photoshop or even use a single RAW edit on a 42mp file from a Sony A7r2 which utterly killed my current MacBook with 8GB RAM.
I see loads of retorts like 'just use a desktop for the heavy lifting stuff' but that's so ignorant of the requirements on some markets. Needing to edit on the go is essential for many creators, especially for location shoots, and not even particularly complex ones, so power in a portable package is absolutely essential to folks well outside the 'developer' or tech world.
No one I know is thinking about getting the new MacBook. Some are hoping for next years update but others who are running older models and need an upgrade now are now casting around for alternatives.
They may know their market, but their market might not be what we think it is. It may be their market is moving to be like their phone market with a significant portion buying the brand jewellery Apple carries.
So I guess I'm saying that there is a large segment of media creators (who are often suckers like me for the styling of the Apple laptops) who are now not seemingly part of Apple target market, and that might be bad for the wider Apple brand.
I'm not particularly beholden to any manufacturer and nor are most of my friends. They go where they need to to get the kit that lets them do their job. There's an elastic period where a few issues can be overlooked but for me and others coming from this creation world the limit has been reached.
I might be totaly wrong, but I think the real pro world doesn't look for a nice looking tool but for one that does the job. That's why I think +16GB users already use other brands.
- I still can't hold my iPhone 6 without it slipping out of my hand (and I even have a case) - My Macbook Pro Unibody is very sleek but it just slides off my lap because the bottom surface is so smooth. - Off-boarding useful connections like USB, HDMI, DisplayPort etc meaning you have to purchase and carry around a bunch of dongles for whatever tiny saving they get from the battery / footprint. - The new Macbooks are, as always choosing sleekness over just making a laptop that is more powerful than they've made over the last 4 years. - People are complaining about the trackpad in the new MBP not having space to rest their wrists.
etc etc
They seem to just be optimizing for design's sake and not really considering the use case of what people use the computers for. It's starting to be a great little sleek computer for an executive to put in their carry-on and less like a strong office computer that can do hard work (for me it's software engineering) and be good enough to USE ALL DAY.
The 10-15% increase in battery consumption could have been easily solved by having a 10-15% bigger battery.
The moment you need to start running Windows VMs on top of OSX along with Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc., that 16GB limit becomes incredibly aggravating.
Battery life is an especially crappy excuse when you consider that most of the time I'm running on outlet power - it's very rare that I don't have access to a power point for 5 - 6 hours at a time.
And lest we forget, this is a machine called the MacBook Pro. Pro, as in, for the use of professionals. And professionals need more system RAM. Hello Apple, are you getting this?
I'd also like an option for a 2TB SSD and more (not less) ports, particularly USB, because I don't want to have to carry around a pile of dongles everywhere with me that all too easily become lost. Remember: the machine is called the MacBook PRO.
I don't think I'll particularly need 32GB of RAM or USB ports on my laptop. Does this mean I'm not a true professional? Real men need 32GB and USB?
That said, I'd probably opt for 32GB and a bit more weight.
There is a 2TB option, by the way.
(Worth knowing about the 2TB option - thanks for the tip. I refreshed last year when 1TB was the top end. Fortunately I think the drive is still user-upgradeable.)
to me, i value battery so much more.
I don't know of a non-trivial Rails app which uses less than a couple hundred MBs of RAM. We have a VM with a minimum RAM requirement of 8 GBs at work which runs a conglomerate of Rails APIs, which makes 16 GB a minimum on my laptop. The only reason the memory bloat/leak of a freelance Rails project I'm working on goes undetected is that Heroku restarts their dynos daily. For comparison, an Elixir/Phoenix app is using < 40 MB right now.
AFAIK base RAM requirements of many Java apps are even worse.
Opening Gmail in Chrome immediately eats 1 GB of RAM, vs. 60 MB for Apple Mail app. Many Electron apps like Slack, Atom and Spotify use hundreds of MBs to GBs of memory, vs. 150 MB for Sublime Text (5 MB for Vim!). And they are sluggish. As much as I love the open web (and I'm mostly a web/backend dev myself), I hate the fact that I often have to prefer native apps.
I'm seriously considering other laptops right now, but can't find a serious alternative, especially considering the fact that there are no Linux-rated laptops close to my location. And shoehorning Linux into Windows machines is pain, I tried that for ~1 years both at work and at home. The best non-Mac laptop candidate I'm considering right now has a long article written by someone describing how to install Linux on it, with some "slight" annoyances like a non-functioning webcam and a problematic wifi in the end. Windows? Nothing there comes even close to iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh combo (and many other tools, workflows etc). And I haven't even touched the subject of design.
None of this is heavy computing. I think we seriously need to consider slowing down this madness and try to improve. I'd normally love the 16 GB limitation so that we'd be somewhat forced to that direction but since there is no "kill the bloat!" initiative or something, we sadly need beefier machines for the short/mid term.
> the difference of power draw between DDR3 and DDR4 is almost negligible.
It's NOT. The article he's citing mentions IDLE standby power consumption. Not the same thing as active power consumption.
- Correction: Power draw of DDR4 and LPDDR3 is very similar under active usage (i.e. not in standby). DDR4 might be possibly slightly lower.
I couldn't find a direct comparison, but according to Samsung:
* LPDDR3 vs DDR3L uses 15% less power in operation [1]
* DDR4 vs DDR3L uses 37% less power [2]
So without LPDDR3, in my opinion, the standby of MBP would be reduced to ~15 days from 30 days (haven't done proper calculations but it's roughly half). But it wouldn't matter in normal usage.
I still believe Apple didn't consider DDR4 due to size concerns as even SODIMM DDR4 on the logic board would larger.
[1]: http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global/file/media/Samsu...
[2]: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/file/me...
[3]: https://www.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/product-fl...
I'd also want it to have an upgradeable memory and storage.
SSDs are still unaffordable — the Macbook Pro with 2TB SSD costs more than $4000! While the aforementioned 4TB hard disc costs only $100.
I mean just use the advantage of new technology to fill up the gained space with batteries. The premise of limiting RAM is also pretty much BS - if I get a device with 16GB RAM I still get the same battery life as now, but if I put more memory inside, I do this willingly to sacrifice battery. NOTHING CHANGES for people with 8/16GB configuration.
Unless they're doing this with the classic Apple smug "we know what's best for you" reason. Oh and to sell more adapters.
That's why Apple's launch compared it with previous MacBooks, not with the rest of the industry.
I think it's going to need a new idea....
Did you not read the article? Everyone would be affected because they would have to use a completely different RAM technology. Even for people with 8/16GB configurations.
Edit: Want to add that I think some people are not happy since they perceive the line between thin (Air/Macbook) and powerful (BMP) is being blurred and MBP is becoming too MacBook-like.
I am currently a 2014 MBP user. I love it, but my next laptop probably won't be a MBP. I don't own a desktop, and I am running out of storage. My next laptop will have upgradable storage that uses a standard part (M.2, etc), and the new MBP doesn't fit my need. I tend to keep my laptop for a few years, and lack of upgradability impacts me significantly.
An advice for the multimedia pros- please stop whining about the RAM limitation of MBP 2016 and get a real workstation. a Mac pro (and some iMac) of any generation available in the market shall deliver several multiple of power that any MBP can do.
How many people work away from power for more than 5 hours at a single stretch?
Most trips in a car are less than 100 miles. Yet nobody wants to purchase a low range EV. Extended battery life is useful on the occasions you need it.
How has it come to this?
It's actually "more efficient resource utilization per instance". Perhaps, with increased capability comes increased utilization. While before one would run only one or two VMs and try to run all their apps within that, now one can run many containers.
----
That, and shareable memory across host and guests.
But I guess that works only if the host and guest run the same kernel. Docker and vagrant on OS X still have to dedicate some RAM to the Linux VM running as docker host, and I don't know how efficient other facets of docker on OS X are; but on Linux, I find containerization's memory usage almost at par with running the apps directly on the host.
For me the issue comes down to lack of choice. Previously lack of choice from Apple was not a concern because the choices I would make were inline with what they are offering. This is no longer the case.
For those that asked, I am replacing 10 years of using MBP's with a System76 laptop. I don't have it yet so I can't comment but I am excited for the change as have been growing more and more frustrated with Apple.
You would also be able to forego the VMs since you can run your containers on the metal.
It's a highly configurable, professional machine.
http://shop.lenovo.com/gb/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p70/
The Dell Precision M6800 (no longer available) supported a 4 drive configuration if one was a Mini Card plugged into a slot on the motherboard, It had three 2.5in drive bays. You could have a look at the current Dell models, or an HP Z Book.
I feel like I'm tired of being on a machine with a centralized system anyway. I want something basic with OSX images - an OS X just for work, and OS X just for finances, and OS X just for music work, etc. As it is I have multiple user accounts for different clients - I get some isolation that way but things still get in the way in a few ways. Strange IntelliJ bugs, occasional homebrew permission conflicts, etc. When I find myself considering buying multiple laptops to be free of all that, it's reached a ridiculous point.
Most likely he's been getting by with workarounds (not running everything simultaneously) and expected the new model to be more capable.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
This whole MbP experience feels rushed; Like a new tech release. You see the possibilities but it just falls short...
As for the "Pro" moniker, the new machines are pretty high performance (especially on the video front). That doesn't preclude Apple making some tradeoff and/or leaving some performance on the table.
Anyone making that flight on a regular basis is going to have access to a power outlet.
Any run-of-the-mill consumer isn't going to be working and will be just fine with a tablet or a book.
Folks will complain no matter what. No version of the Macbook Pro can be everything to everyone.
Having said that, what I find most interesting about these recent debates is the back and forth about how much people actually need. The argument that "well, it's no problem for me, and I do x, y and z!" is not really a good rebuttal, in my opinion.
Everyone is different and everyone has had different experiences.
The people defending the new Macbook Pros need to remember that the complaining isn't coming from outsiders (Windows users) trying to stir the pot -- it's coming from people who love Macs and genuinely want better Macs.
It's important for these people to dissent, because if they don't, Apple will never know if they might have made a decision that negatively affects a significant number of people.
I guess what you're saying is just the fact that there is a limit is an issue?
This reminds me of a question I once read in Maxim magazine, about 10 years ago or so. The reader wrote in asking why speedometer on cars go so high while there are few places in the world you can drive that fast. The answer was that if car manufacturers would limit the speedometer, there would be an outrage from the general populace.
There have to be Mac users who are looking for workstation class laptops and have a legitimate need for more than 16GB RAM.
They may be a tiny population, but making presumptions that their complaints are invalid because you can't create a situation that taxes the Macbook isn't constructive.
People have been going on and on supporting USB-C only as future proofing the Macbook Pro (even though it's not even an ubiquitous standard now, and maybe not even for two years). Given how software is constantly requiring more and more memory, limiting RAM to 16GB is doing the absolute opposite of future proofing.
Totally agree with you, in fact I know of several Mac users who genuinely require a beast of a workstation. These folks (movie production industry) are willing to drop 4-5K on the most powerful machine possible and the 16GB limit is hindereding.
I shared an anecdote that came to mind, with no intention to dismiss your comment or downplay its significance.
As a MacBook Pro+-, the one with 32 gb ram but only 50% battery life? Or just a note on the site that this device only gets up to 5 hrs of battery life? In my eyes, the number of people confused and/or pissed of by that would be far higher, than of those who need 32 gb and would be okay with 50% less battery life.
Really, it feels like a MacBook not a MacBook Pro. Non power users are going to be happy with 16GB of RAM and get a lot more from extra battery life.
PS: And yea, I was one of those people ready to upgrade who kind of scratched their head and decided to skip this release. I was thinking of getting a new Mac Pro, but they did not upgrade that at all even though the current model is over 2 and a half years old.
And something you should never forget. Those 5 hrs are 5 hrs when you buy the device. 1,5 - 2 years later you may end up with 3-3,5 hrs. If those 5 hrs were what you need, you'll already need your first battery replacement.
> Non power users are going to be happy with 16GB of RAM
That hurts btw. :( Let's agree on "non ram power users", because I would probably consider myself a power user but i'm quite fine with the 16 gb of my MBPr 13 from last year.
If Apple doesn't want battery life sacrificed, they don't offer the option to put 32GB of RAM in. Then if the user makes the choice to put in more RAM (because the PowerBook lets you put in more RAM as it does not have it soldered), it's their responsibility that battery life suffered.
A user-serviceable MacBook would be larger, heavier, and have less battery life.
All things I'd be willing to deal with to have a powerful workstation - I'm not saying the current thing and light devices would have to go, after all.
Obviously Apple wouldn't just drop everything to go and make me a Big Fat Laptop, but it doesn't mean I can't be unhappy about Apple's 2016 computers grid looking like [this](https://twitter.com/SilverEzhik/status/800191799566299136/ph...).
I did this by using the extended battery (which stuck out from the back), and by buying two of them. On long trips, I just swapped the batteries.
[1} Ultra-portable model with no floppy drive and no CD-ROM, but a wonderful IBM keyboard.
I've got a MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM sitting here on my desk right now, the same spot it's in 95% of the time. Sitting right next to it is a 3.5 year old ThinkPad with 32 GB of RAM.
As the article is at pains to say, 16 GB of RAM only consumes 1.49 A, while the CPU is 4.61A, and the display is a very big power hog.
I am not in a position to prove it, but I suspect that increasing the RAM from 16 to 32 GB would only cut the battery life by 10%; maybe 15% at the outside.
I'm quite okay with its performance but I routinely have ~4GB of memory swapped out, even though I'm trying hard to keep my browser tab count below 20.
I have 4-5 Clojure/ClojureScript projects open in IntelliJ; that eats ~1-2GB RAM.
For 3-4 of them I'm running a REPL; that's around ~1GB each, which is ~3-4GB in total.
Safari with 10-20 tabs; 1-2GB
Google Chrome Canary 4-5 tabs for the webapp under development (logged in with different type of users into different environments [dev/stg/prod]); ~300MB/tab => ~1-1.5GB total
Everyday utilities also add up to 1.5GB at least:
• Slack 0.4GB
• (sometimes Gitter 0.3GB)
• Spotify 0.3GB
• AirMail 0.3GB
• OneNote 0.2GB
• SublimeText 0.2GB
• iTerm 0.1GB
• 1Password 0.1GB
(and I don't even mention Box Sync or Dropbox or Google Drive or Ethereum or IPFS node because I usually keep them turned off while I'm coding...)
My kernel_task is usually round 1.5GB but sometimes grows up to 2+GB
So that's 2 + 4 + 3 + 1.5 + 1.5 + 1.5 = 13.5GB Then there is only 2.5GB left for disk cache and ~0.2GB memory is compressed at this point.
So that's the minimum memory requirement after a cold boot for work. Anything else I do start to force memory to be compressed then swapped out.
BUT THEN I also have a personal account for non-work related things which obviously forces swapping.
I have to say though I see very little stuttering or beach balling, though typing in IntelliJ can get jittery while it's indexing. I think macOS' memory management is quite good for desktop usage.
I do try Ubuntu/Fedora from time to time on Macs and I do envy how much less RAM they require, BUT everything else is rather clunky on them compared to macOS, IF they even boot.
• TouchPad dynamics are terrible.
• Gestures; forget it.
• WiFi connects a lot slower.
• Skype?... no comment.
• Multiple thunderbolt or HDMI displays with mirroring.
• HiDPI support with lower than physical virtual resolutions.
• Stable Built-in VNC server and client, especially when there are multiple screens?
• Wake up after sleep can still be a problem in 2016 (eg it sets the display brightness to 100%).
and finally why is there no desktop environment which provides macOS' keyboard shortcuts out of the box?
That would really help transitioning from macOS to Linux.
(just to put things into perspective I was an http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ user for a year back in the day...)