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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

On the last point: storage sizes on laptops have plateaued. I've got a 256gb SSD in my three year old rMBP, and can't see any reason why I'd want more in my new one.

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Video. Particularly if you do any HD editing, let alone 4K, you can burn through 100s of gigabytes very quickly.

And games. Just my 280GiB Windows partition on my laptop is hovering around 90% full constantly.

Unless you only use the computer for editing text then storage requirements are growing quicker than ever.

Or Photography. My Lightroom catalogue alone is 60GB. My photos several hundred GB.

I'm shopping for a rMBP and the 256GB flash thing is a big problem. I need OSX + Xcode for the occasional iOS app development, but mostly use Windows. OSX + Xcode and a few iOS emulator images is easily 100GB, so that leaves me with only 156GB on the Windows partition.

I don't mind paying for the higher end 512GB rMBP, but the discreet graphics is a deal-breaker for me. Thus I'm left with configuring the baseline integrated graphics rMBP with 512GB flash.

How come the discrete graphics is a deal-breaker if not for the price? Battery life?

battery life is one, but personally I would prefer an otherwise max-spec RMBP with integrated graphics only, especially with the Skylake refresh - historically the swap between the two has been less than reliable, and the modern integrated options are adequate for non-game purposes.

In the order importance:

1. Driver issues on Linux

2. Discrete graphics failing and taking the whole logic board with it. Most of my laptops have died this way.

3. Battery life

4. Heat

I want SSDs to replace my hard drive storage and store my entire photo collection of 1TB. I want it on SSD because the performance in photo library management apps is a lot better on local SSDs. And I want it on a laptop. So a 2TB SSD being standard would of been very helpful for me.

For the virtual machines there is never enough disk space.

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