Apple Planning MacBook Pro with 32GB of 'desktop-class' RAM: Report | Hacker News Reader

Apple Planning MacBook Pro with 32GB of 'desktop-class' RAM: Report

zdnet.com

34 pointsvelodrome24 comments

And I'm sitting here with my brand new 15" MBP, still within the return period, not overly impressed with this machine relative to the price and relative to my 2012 machine it replaced.. Is he saying it "will be significantly redesigned in 2017" or "has been significantly redesigned" in 2016? Should I send it back and work on my oldie for another 6 months, letting Apple and other users sort through the variety of issues with the 2016 model? (dongle/port/hub situation, abysmal battery life situation, fledgling and relatively unsupported touchbar situation, touchpad palm rejection / unintentional touchpad situation to name a few).

Yes, return it.

No, keep it.

2015 was the absolute pinnacle for Apple devices. The 6S is amazing. Semi water-resistant, headphone jack, fast NVME storage, fast processor, 3D touch, good movement coprocessor..

Likewise the 13" (not sure about the 15") Pro is an absolutely joy. 10-14h battery life, good screen, good keyboard, normal size trackpad, no touchbar, magsafe..

I genuinely like the touchbar, and I can see it being something really useful, but its like any early adopter tech, serves little use outside of Apple's stock apps. The huge force touch trackpad is annoying, I have to move my whole arm to avoid touching my pinky to it when switching between typing and mousing. On the flip side, The new SSD is blazing fast. I can fly on the shallow keyboard. For me, it boils down to this: Is Apple going to solve my top 5 issues via software updates in the upcoming months (which I think they can), or are they going to reverse course in 2017 and make the machine they should have released at last year's reveal. Rumor of "significant redesign" is highly concerning.

I too loved the 6S, but the 7 is really really fast. I really griped about the headphone jack (still do), but I've heard AirPods are excellent (at least according to Marco and crew on ATP) and have a pair on backorder.

So far Apple has never produced any audio listening equipment that I (or any other discerning listener) would rate above 'mediocre' in the sound quality department, which is arguably the most important part.

http://i.imgur.com/JBLmKHQh.jpg

Well that was a useful question to ask.

Return it, vote with your money, and tell Apple they need a rethink.

I dont need or want the touch bar. It felt as a double input UX crash with the touchpad on laptop. What happen to the Apple that only wanted single button mouse.

And I cant justify the price hike just because of the touch bar. Although form factor is also at play here, but i felt i would actually want a thicker Macbook Pro just for the Keyboard.

Having said that, I really want Touch ID. The sense of security. The memory capacity dont bothers me, I am hoping all of these are just setting the Stage for a much better Mac Line up in 2017, All in on USB-C, All Retina, All SSD.

At this point, it is probably worth it for Apple to skip Kaby Lake and go to Coffee Lake/Cannonlake if it supports LPDDR4.

Why not 64GB? Why not 128GB of server class ram and 16TB SSD drives? Why not let us configure whatever insane arrangement we want at this point and make it whatever ungodly price Apple wants? You know we would pay for it...

For the same reason Apple always restricts choice. "There's 128 gigs of ram in this machine but the battery life is pretty bad." People have no idea what they actually want.

This is exactly how I got my 2.5k MBP for 1.5k on CraigsList. I think it's great personally.

Me: "So why are you getting rid of this machine?"

Craig: "Well.. I just wanted it to browse Facebook and my phone does that." (16Gb i7 2015 for a web-browser)

That is exactly what I would say if I had a stolen MBP to sell. Always better to feign stupidity, people will eat it up :)

Hah! Yeah I would think so, but he also transferred the Applecare warranty license to my name through Apple support while we were at the coffee shop.

Top poster noted exactly what many of us want: modularity. Being able to put in your own drive and RAM to whatever capacity is technically feasible is a good start. An innovative battery design might be one where the thickness of the laptop increased when a larger capacity battery (attached to the bottom) is chosen. The forthcoming OWC machined aluminum battery/port case offers relevant insight here, and such a solution devised instead by Apple would be clearly superior.

Those who have been around long enough know no huge company, Apple included, is innocent of releasing sub-optimal products from time to time. I have personally bought and returned two 15" 2016 MBP's (one had an actual keyboard defect whereby one of the keys became temporarily stuck in the down position) and do plan on buying Apple products in the future on the expectation that any current shortcomings will be addressed in reasonable time.

Apple is a solid company and they are not going anywhere. The question is, where will the users head? As an established geezer, I'll probably be using what we know of as 'laptops' for the next 5 years, at least.

If modularity is the main thing your care about, Apple hasn't really catered to that for ages. Changing the SSD and RAM is useful, but most people wouldn't use that. I know I haven't in my last 2 models.

> no huge company, Apple included, is innocent of releasing sub-optimal products

This is usually solved by having competition, but doesn't work if you care about the OS. Same for phones. It's a new-ish problem with no solution so far.

Sure, my response was a bit tongue-in-cheek. However, Apple could conceivably offer a model with a thick and beefy battery. Burly programmers with strong backs, for instance, would find this configuration to be appealing.

Not sure, why you are getting downvoted here. I believe the point you make is valid, Apple configurations have diminished as their product line expands. I would rather the opposite be true.

Because a "more, more, more" attitude without a real use-case is just dreaming. If you don't understand compromise, this isn't a realistic argument - it's making shit up.

What price are we talking about for such a machine? $15,000+? Because it's likely you'd need new tooling for a bigger unibody, and that's just the start.

And it isn't like there's no alternatives, like just using a desktop, or connecting to a more powerful server from a less powerful laptop to do work.

The 13" mid-2012 non-Retina was the last reasonably-upgradable MBP (granted thickness, old CPU and display): 16 GiB RAM (2 x 8 GiB SODIMMs), 2x SSDs (deleting optical drive with 3rd-party tray). It was available until the release of TouchBar-equiped models.

Because building a machine that can support ridiculous options like those increases cost and introduces tradeoffs. Supporting 128GB of RAM would constrain the machine to certain unusual, expensive, power-hungry chipsets, and would require the machine to be physically larger to hold all of that memory.

Trying to build one product that satisfies everyone's needs will inevitably end up with a product that satisfies nobody.

Honest question: what would you use 64GB of RAM for? I rarely use half of the 16GB I have in my MacBook.

Lots of people develop on full-blown VM's, and test on a whole different set of VM's. Especially true in the Windows world, where Docker is still not widely spread. So I might run VS2017 inside VM A and test on VM's B, C, D.

so i can replicate my production environment as much as i can locally.

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