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Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft and Apple don't want to use power hungry regular DDR4 RAM, they use low power DDR RAM. LPDDR4, which supports 32GB, has been repeatedly delayed by Intel. We probably won't see 32GB "thin and light's" until 2019.

https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/

http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/09/20/delays-in-intel-ca...

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As I understand it, and I may be wrong, the power usage of DDR4 compared to LPDDR3 under load is not that much higher, but the standby mode power draw is a lot higher, so the real reason is standby time and thinness.

Anecdata: I have a 32 gb RAM laptop (thinkpad t460p) and battery life is excellent while actively but lightly using it, but I charge it every day so I don’t know what standby time is like. Also, while it is light and compact it is absolutely not thin.

Yeah, according to the article I linked to regular DDR4 RAM uses around 30% more power while in use and totally destroys standby time.

haha, Apple was blasted to pieces by this in the threads, not here though.

Because Apple's laptops are the only macOS machines you can buy, whereas the Surface line is just a small part of the Windows(/Linux?) world.

Yup, it's easy to understand both sides.

Apple don't want to ruin their reputation of having fantastic standby times, which actually is a revelation when you get to experience it (it's fantastic to basically always be able to just grab your laptop and keep going where you left of).

A lot of (real) pros don't care about things like battery life and size, they just want something powerful and semi-portable running macOS they can do resource intensive work on while away from their desktop/something so powerful they don't need desktops.

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