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Comment by Jdam | Hacker News Reader

So I'm sitting here, just unlocked my Mac through putting my finger on the touchbar and reading your post, wondering who that "pro" is that I keep on hearing in conjunction with Apple during the last 6 months. I'm a dev, doing the Kool Aid for a 100bn$+ company, together with designers in my team. I always thought devs and designers would be that pro usergroup people are referring to. I've read all the complaints in the last time of "Apple is abandoning the pros" but funny thing, I only heard that on the internet and in hypothetical perspectives, nobody actually complained about the lack of Kaby Lake irl. I'm very fine with the current lineup and I'm wondering if that "pro" you're referring to is actually just an extremely narrow niche.

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This is a misguided rebuttal. Fixated against the a sub-set of users that are clearly and unanimously voice a complaint, when the problems here is apple.

PROs can work with anything, not matter how bad, and get results done.

However, that not mean we are so STUPID to not know when a tool is made for us or not.

Is about a specific spec? NO!.

Is about the trend that Apple have in the whole ecosystem.

Just now, after years waiting for a refresh, what is given is a stronger confirmation that the trend not only is unstoppable but the trade-off is not good enough.

> PROs can work with anything, not matter how bad, and get results done.

I picture this being written on a Commodore 64.

My 2013 MBP is great, I can see it lasting a few more years even. It was that forward looking.

A 2016 MBP... I can't see it holding up. The cap on RAM I'm already butting up against it...

Photoshop, VMs, site crawls, loading large spreadsheets and trying to crunch the numbers... 16 GB taxes my current system.

I've sort of just given up, I have a gaming desktop I built myself a year or so back with 64 GB of RAM. I just use that when I want to do "work" now... everything loads faster. Freakin' hate that I can't just buy a new MBP for that stuff, but... it's not top of the line, isn't built to last like previous generations were.

I'll keep my 2013 MBP until it gives out on me I guess... running out of Apple Care on it and the battery cycles are high... also not wild about trusting work to a 3-year-old SSD... but cross my fingers I guess.

My sister still uses my old MBP from 2008 or so -- it holds up for most of her needs after a replacement battery and SSD, it's still a solid computer. I don't see these new MBPs holding up like that at all.

Not going to say the new MBPs are shit, but they aren't built to be light-years ahead like they once were. That's what I think everyone is upset about.

I think what's most upsetting to me is that not only are they not built to be light-years ahead, but the fact that they aren't is explicitly due to self-imposed constraints by Apple. And then because of this, they now sell a machine that's effectively the same as the one they sold 3 years ago, but now at a higher price.

This is virtually unprecedented in the history of computing, and the last time these kinds of shenanigans happened was at the tail end of the 8-bit era, and all of those companies, even ones who had a virtual monopoly on the market, don't exist anymore.

Think it's an intentional move to have a shorter product lifespan to sell more computers? I go to thinking about that more... seems like they benefit form making less-great computers than they used to.

I guess the "pro" is anyone who wants more than 16GB RAM ?

those "pros" complaining about the 16gb limit, I wonder how they've been getting any work done up until now?

Because they bought their computers 3 years ago when you asked why anybody would ever need more than 8gb.

For comparison, the minimum amount of RAM required by the precursor of Mac OS, NeXT, - 32MB (that's megabytes) - seemed insane. But then again, 90% of the computer science - including experiments in AI - had been done (at least, up until mid-80s) on computers that had less than 1 megabyte of RAM. (IIRC, the first version of UNIX was designed to run on a computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM.)

It really depends on what you are doing; I spend a lot of my time doing dev on a 512mb system and my main system where I do 80% of my work on has 4gb (with ssd though!). For the work I do: JS dev, Android dev, most image recog, C/C++ dev, Python dev and just playing around with esoteric langs that works fine. I do not use heavy window managers (I prefer Ratpoison or i3; both are incredibly light) and when I need graphical software that is not being devved by me at the moment itself, I start it, bundle my tasks and close it again. It works well for both battery life (15-17 hours on 2011 tech) and for me it is perfect. I was an avid Mac user before that but I like Linux more for some reason; matter of taste.

It seems however though, and this is an assumption I can only base on personal experience of what I see, that people like all the 'stuff' during their work that eats battery and memory and cycles.

All the animations and things that go on in the popular wms and OSs and browsers that deliver no 'direct value' to me (like said; this is I personal thing I believe) seem a must for most people even though they are devving.

Why would one use the incredibly heavy and animated WMs over something fast and simple which even works faster (for me!). When I use Unity (latest) my laptop has 5 hrs battery; switch to i3 and plop 10+ hours more.

Do people like that so much or am I just completely wrong?

(one other reason I see with colleagues is very heavy IDEs but let us not go onto that)

I think you're confusing cause and effect. Heavy WMs are only possible because there is so much RAM to spare on the average machine. The RAM is originally needed for applications.

For example, I'm working on a Macbook, but inside a Linux VM. It was running at 3-4 GB RAM for a long time, but I had to bump it up to 6 GB when I was working on an interconnected set of Rails applications. (Ruby and Rails are notoriously memory-inefficient.)

Another example: In 2010, I had to upgrade my notebook from 1 GB to 2 GB of RAM, not because of KDE 4 (which was considered absurdly resource-intensive at the time), but because of Git. (Git is designed to use the filesystem cache extensively, and will become absurdly slow when the cache is too small.)

>I think you're confusing cause and effect

I was responding to many people who 'cannot work' because they have less than 16gb, the latest discrete gpu and cpu. Which is where all the mb pro whining now revolves around. You are playing to 'if you have more you spend more?' human condition right? If you have more money, memory, speed whatever, you will find some way to use it fully; that is true. But you do not /need it/. I was the same a few years ago until I dropped Mac OS in favor of Debian and bought a stack of old (2011) laptops. After tweaking everything but the stuff I do not need on it, it works as well /for te dev I need it for/ as the last (2015) MB pro I touched for a fraction of the price and i3 does make me more productive.

Anyway; I am not trying to convince or sway anyone, just saying that, imho, it is nonsense that most (by very far margins) really need that kind of metal. But sure, if you can get them, then get them. In my slightly older age I try to get back to simpler and more optimal. The cyclewaste/bitwaste is getting annoying to me (IF it is waste; I do deep learning and play/fiddle with games on heavy metal).

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

The lack of capacities > 16GB has been covered to death ... if Apple put non low-power RAM in their machines they would be crucified for the drop in battery life. Until Intel actually makes a release date (increasingly unlikely) there's not a lot they can do before the next refresh.

Apple could have kept the extra millimeters in thickness for a larger battery. High-power >16GB RAM plus long battery life would be "pro". Nobody would be crucifying if MBP was same thickness as before.

It would be nice yeah but I doubt the niche is big enough to justify the R&D + logistical burden when those limitations are resolved by Intel in next year's chipset.

It sucks but IMO the memory line of argument is probably the weakest in this whole discussion.

Apple created its own dilemma of having to choose between RAM or battery life when it decided to reduce the battery capacity.

Even if they had a bigger battery, doing so would have required them to do develop and maintain another board/chipset which is nontrivial.

More than 16 GB RAM or CUDA or a multiplatform graphics API that wasn't 6 years out of date...

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