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Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

If you're browsing this and say "Great, another developer article shitting on Apple after the Pro release who thinks they have figured out everything about the company", please do read this. I was truly surprised at the depth, fairness, and considerations in this article.

I'm very curious to see how Apple plays out in the next few years and will likely look back at this article to compare, if I remember to.

As a developer, I wonder if making a Mac Developer model could be an interesting path, and if it would make financial sense in any way given the idea of "power users".

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But the Macbook Pro was meant to be for Power Users?

The "Pro" moniker has simply meant "more expensive" for years now.

Pretty sure the Pro stands for Profitable, Problematic or Prohibiting; could be all three

The MacBookPro now seems like a sideline for Apple. They put a lot of design and development into the iPhone because they sell so many of them. It makes sense from a business standpoint, but it's disappointing if you're a developer or power user.

If so, why did they bother designing and engineering in an entirely new touch-based interface in the form of the touch bar, using a watch-OS based subsystem, and update all the integrated apps to support it? That seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a sideline product. If that were the case surely they'd just have upped the specs on the existing designs.

But the Touch Bar feels like a bolt-on "innovation", i.e. something Apple did to prove that they are still innovating and driving sales, rather than refinements to the MBP experience (the "P" in MBP) and more power.

My point is that Apple knows that laptops are a declining market. Still, the professionals who use MBPs drive adoption of other Apple products.

I have no idea what these self-annoited "professionals" do, but it's actually quite difficult to get the MacBook Pro to its limits. Doing webdev or using Xcode it's hard to ever notice any delay.

But maybe I'm just a noob who isn't professional enough to suddenly discover that life just isn't worth it without 32GB of RAM.

Virtual Machines. If you use VM's, 16gb is likely going to be a problem. I, quite easily, hit it all the time. It has nothing to do with being 'professional enough'. The nature of a dev's daily work can vary greatly with what kind of dev they are doing.

Bollocks, I have a 16GB ram MBP from 2014, running a VM all the time and compiling on both the VM and the host OS. No problems there. The 32GB might be more comfortable for some, but I have hard time figuring out how something so exclusive has now become a necessity.

> The nature of a dev's daily work can vary greatly with what kind of dev they are doing.

This was a very important part of your comment. It's good that 16gb isn't an issue for you, but for some of us, it is.

One thing I would like to know is how we got here - that some NEED 32GB of RAM in a laptop. Scouring the web for some time shows me that in 2015 it was quite hard to get a non-gaming laptop with 32GB of ram. Now, there are quite a lot of voices that cry that it is some bare minimum.

To me it seems that more people now prefer laptops to desktops and it is annoying to sacrifice performance for portability. The lack of a truly powerful desktop Mac definitely is not helping in this regard either.

I don't really disagree with you. I'm not a big fan of laptops at all, but they have become necessary in my life. I would prefer a desktop.

That said, I use a 2014 MBP and feel it's already as portable as I need. If the 2016 kept the same thickness but offered 32gb, I would have been happy.

Actually replying to lsadam0 but can't for some reason

> If the 2016 kept the same thickness but offered 32gb, I would have been happy.

That's not possible with the current chip offerings from Intel though. The Intel CPUs that fit the MBP form factor and other features APple needs only go up to 16 GB RAM. If you doubt this is a pain point for Apple, note that Apple standardized on 16GB RAM out of the box. I'm sure thy'd love to be able to offer 32GB as an up-sell.

Sure they could inflate the MBP form factor an re-design around the chipsets that do offer 32GB RAM, but the chipsets that suit the current form factor and support 32 GB are supposedly due out next year.

Thanks, I did not know that.

"That's not possible with the current chip offerings from Intel though. The Intel CPUs that fit the MBP form factor and other features APple needs only go up to 16 GB RAM."

That's entirely reversed. Your statement should read:

"That's entirely possible with the current chip offerings from Intel. However, it's not possible with Apple's requirements for form factor and power."

> One thing I would like to know is how we got here - that some NEED 32GB of RAM in a laptop

Inefficient programs with shiny GUIs.

OSX + GPU + Chrome + Hipchat alone consume over half of the available memory on my machine right now. And that's just the software which supports my development, no editors, compilers or VMs.

Start to throw in modern editors, VMs (software which behaves very poorly when swapped out), compilers that trade memory space to reduce CPU usage, or a JavaScript heavy website, and you're one errant command away from your machine becoming unusable as it starts swapping like mad.

I run a virtual machine (to which I allocate 8GB), Qt Creator, chrome, safari, slack, iTunes, Skype, Sourcetree (all of the apps that are deemed to be memory hogs) and some more support tools, and I still have memory to spare. I have the impression that macOS has got really efficient with memory management. On windows, I never keep so many applications open (mostly due to non-existing window management)

I generally expect to use a Mac for 4-5 years after I've purchased it. I've added memory to every Mac I've owned so far at some point in its lifecycle. I have a hard time believing that in 2021 16GB of RAM will still be sufficient.

That is a valid concern. I'd like to believe that at some point we will shift back to developing for performance. At home I have been using a 2009 mbp with 4GB of ram and only upgraded it to 8 last year. I have still managed to put an app to the store with it (before the upgrade).

Maybe you're simply hitting the limitations of trying to use a laptop for everything? If you're often maxing out 16GB then upgrading to 32GB isn't going to offer you much additional headroom. For laptops 64GB and beyond currently require some pretty major tradeoffs.

You're right. I would prefer to have a desktop, but then I'm paying for two computers.

For me, it is not just what the MacBook Pro can do now, but what it will be able to do in three or four years. When I buy my computers, I am looking for something that will last several years. That means having the memory and storage capacity for the future, not just what I need today. Apple is making these things like iPhones, and probably hoping that we will buy a new one every two years.

I have older MacBook Pros that I upgraded the RAM, and upgraded the storage (both capacity and speed), and they still work strong. When I am done with them, I pass them down to my kids.

As an artist/illustrator, I'm often working with multiple, large (1GB+) files when preparing stuff for print. Photoshop eats up 8GB of ram doing just about nothing, so when you try to bulk apply some rendering action, export files, or hell, even use their brush engine with something besides the default tool presets, the current gen macs don't cut it. And this doesn't into account running a Cintiq and another display, or their awful integrated graphics setup, etc, etc

I'm currently looking at gaming Desktops to replace my current setup because those are the only things with enough horsepower anymore. It sucks because I feel like I'm going to have to divide up a lot of the scripted tasks I have to make my workflow more efficient, given the lack of a real Unix environment on Windows.

It's a non-starter for CUDA development, which is important to anyone doing serious GPU programming.

You got your answer in your question: "webdev". If you use After Effects it's recommended to allow it 8GB of ram so you have 8 left, your browser takes 3 to 5GB, you now have 3 to 5 left but usually you have photoshop that needs to be running too so remove 2GB and now you are really tight on memory.

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