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FireBeyond

16GB max.

No iMac update.

No Mac Pro update.

Buyer's Guide on MacRumors now:

"iMac: Might as well buy. Nothing on the horizon."

"Mac Pro: Buy. If you like paying 2013 prices for 2013 hardware."

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>> 16GB max.

I was going to say you were wrong because it was stated "starts at 16GB" near the end of the event. Checked the store and sure enough, I see no way to increase the RAM.

That's just stupid.

They even left the fact that it is still LPDDR3 out of the keynote. It was the first question I was thinking of. I wonder when Intel will support LPDDR4.

holy hell :|

LPDDR4 is supported by some Intel CPU's but overall memory support across intel CPU's is pretty inconsistent for no apparent reason since they are all based on the same core design. That said you won't see any difference in performance between LPDDR3 @ 2133 mhz and LPDDR4 at 2000-2400mhz.

I was thinking of for example https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-rolls-out-industrys-...

It's likely not even in full production since the roll out was announced a week ago.

Also no where does it says the speed and bandwidth they'll support, overall there isn't much performance difference between LPDDR3 or 4, or between DDR3 and 4 when the frequencies are off by only a few 100's of mhz.

That said I'm actually disappointed that the memory on the MBP especially the 15" is LPDDR, no reason to degrade memory performance on a machine which already has a pretty big battery, DDR4 is pretty darn power efficient as it is.

This to me looks more like another cost cutting decision set by Apple to simplify board design and the supply chain.

No 7th gen CPU's, low power memory for no reason, dumping of ports, and a pretty steep price hike.

I'm glad I bought my mid 2015 pretty fully upgraded MBP 15 with a dedicated GPU for 1480 GBP on sale last holiday season, this one is not even meh, it's a full on pass, the only feature I like is the touch ID, I still don't understand why Apple doesn't allow you to unlock your Mac with your phone, but now I know why.

Low-power memory is kind of a big deal because unlike the CPU, memory doesn't sleep. Even as it is, I expect big battery life regressions relative to the already inadequate 8-9 hours of the 2015 models. Apple cut the 13" model's battery by 1/3 and the 15" model's by 1/4. No reason losing even more battery life by ditching LPDDR3.

As for the 7th gen CPU--there are no available quad cores. I don't think Apple wanted to release redesigned MBPs with the 15" flagship model having a CPU one-generation behind the 13" model.

While memory doesn't sleep, DDR4 supports Deep Power Down and Low Power Auto Refresh even in the non-LP form factor (this is 50-80% power reduction, there are also variable timing modes which can be used to reduce power consumption during normal machine power states).

I am ok with the LPDDR3 being used for the 13" one, but on the 15" they should've went with DDR4 tbh.

As for the chips yes no quad cores for KB yet, but then again I don't understand why they didn't just staggered the release like usual, MBP13 can come out with Kabby Lake Dual Cores and the 15 can come out later when the QC's are out which is December this year.

> starts at 16GB

FWIW it looks like the only available option for 15" rMBP is 16GB. Personally it's more than I need, but it's still interesting that there's no room to adjust.

Looks like they still use LPDDR3, with no 32GB option even in the 15-inch. I wonder if they want to go to LPDDR4 when Intel supports it.

What do you need 32GB for? Not saying you don't, but what's the use case vs. using someone else's cloud machine in a datacenter?

Virtual machines

Edit: for comparison, Lenovo T460p can be configured with quad-core i7, Nvidia GPU, 32GB RAM, 1 SSD + 1 HD/SSD, replaceable battery, 1.9mm key travel, base starts at $800 with many components user-replaceable, http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t460p...

Has much work been done on truly memory-light virtual machines? It seems like a really big opportunity, even if it's really hard.

Yeah if someone worked out how to use less memory in a VM we could use it in normal machines too ;)

Unikernels are one area of research, http://unikernel.org

It's not that it's hard, it's just the logistics of running the virtual machines(s) and the applications they contain. You could use a minimal linux distro like Alpine or Tiny Core, but you still need to run applications on top of that if you're testing or developing.

Spinning up a basic devstack instance (for example) take a minimum of 6GB and that's before you even deploy any test vms inside that infrastructure. Another example, if you're doing config management development you may need several VMs running which in turn may have (say) large java apps with heavy memory requirements even when fairly unladen. So, I guess the answer is, it depends on what you're doing and what the memory requirements of the thing you're running on VMs is.

Hyper-V has dynamic memory, so memory resources can be reallocated as needed, and has driver hooks so that linux vms can be resized too. There's also Intel's clear containers push which virtualizes for linux but shares a lot of kernel structures between the host and the VM.

>It seems like a really big opportunity, even if it's really hard. It's not because it's a problem that is easily solvable by spending a small amount on better hardware. 16GB RAM costs $80 which is cheap if you're only going to use it for VMs.

Hell, my three and a half year old W530 has a quad-core i7, Nvidia GPU (Optimus), 32 GB RAM, and a pair of Samsung PRO 850 SSDs.

My one year old MBP (which is really a "2013 MBP") has half the memory and storage of the ThinkPad. In fact, pretty much the only noticeable difference between it and the "new" one is the touch strip. :/

What kind of battery life do you get on the W530 vs your 2013 MBP?

I have a rMBP, but these T460p's are excellent machines, even can come with a touchscreen. If I had to have only one laptop, and it had to be windows....

For a 512GB SSD, no upgrade option vs 2TB, 14" vs 15" screen, and the crappiest NVidia graphics option even at the high end $1500 model.. What a joke, those are MBP 2013 specs.

The point was that even the low-end Lenovo has 32GB RAM, the topic of this subthread. If you want the latest hardware features, there's a 15" Xeon P50 model with USB-C, etc, http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p50/

Different use cases. Any laptop that offers 32GB is going to need a more powerful chipset, which affects heat, battery life, and portability.

I'm a programmer with 64GB machine and I'm running out of RAM daily. Can't wait until IT upgrades our machines to 192GB some time next year.

I don't think I've ever used more than a gigabyte of RAM programming. I could even do it on a Raspberry Pi. What exactly in your workflow uses 64GB of RAM?

C++ games programming. Build process uses several gigabytes, but running the game in debug configuration takes 50-55GB because we store every allocation at the moment. If I need to run my own servers or bake data I go over that easily.

Makes sense. Thank you!

When you say "store every allocation" do you mean you never release anything, or do you just mean you store info about every allocation? If it's the former, that sounds kind of crazy, is it common for game developers to do that? If it's the latter, you could always write it to disk (which is what malloc stack logging does).

We had a random memory corruption problem recently, so we started storing every allocation without releasing, to verify periodically. We do free up old memory, but only every 10 million allocations or so.

Maybe it's not super common for games programming, but it's definitely common to not use ref counted pointers or anything that could help you here.

I remember upgrading my notebook from 1 to 2 GB of RAM (back in 2009) to speed up Git. It really benefits from additional filesystem cache.

16g ram: perhaps 13g available to the user. If you run chrome/spotify/slack/an editor you're often left with only 8g useable.

ml work commonly uses data that is 8g+ -- and regularly 32g+ -- just for the data itself. Yes you can work on remote servers but it's convenient to be able to work and develop locally.

machine learning stuff - whilst training datasets are usually cloud-deployed, dev data alone can use up a lot of RAM. I've recently started dumping my matrices to disk for dev work now. Or turn off Chrome and Firefox which turns out to be the largest memory sucks in my ubuntu machine

you are the entirely predictable, and, sorry, but very irritating, "who needs more RAM than I have ever needed" stereotype of every comment board ever. 16GB is peanuts for anybody doing anything serious in graphics, video, machine learning, statistics, or finance, or ....[put your professional subject here].

Not everybody wants to have the weight on their back of a clock-ticking cost of doing their R&D online in the cloud. Many of us, including me, want a highly capable machine with an upfront, quantifiable cost, but that is professionally credible.

Hear hear. The anecdata being thrown around in these comments is ridiculous. Like the above, and also the people saying "everyone i know has a desktop". So what? I need a powerful laptop, and i don't need to justify it to you. End of story. Apple's insistence on limitations are ridiculous and just as offensive as Bill Gates'.

It's not someone else's cloud.

That's the beauty of Capitalism. It doesn't matter if someone, no matter the position in society, doesn't understand why someone would need 32GB. As long as there's sufficient demand, it'll be produced by some business.

4 tabs.

I wish this was a joke

Seriously?

Somebody reply with a link so I can be more upset, please.

It's not hard to bump into the 16 GB limit when doing video editing, photo editing, software development with virtual machines, etc. All of those tasks are commonly done by freelancers on-the-go, which necessitates a pro-level laptop. Instead we got a gimmicky touch bar and lost compatibility with decades of peripherals.

This.

Not to mention the perfectly reasonable expectation to leave a few hundred tabs open, each with a window for their own project.

Well, this fact coupled with os x being absolutely SHITTY at managing and task-switching when you're doing this, and you've got a good argument for abandoning the platform.

Used windows for 15 years, osx for the last 10, haven't found a panacea between the OS, applications I need to run, and my essential human right to run 100+ tabs. Maybe 32 GB of RAM will do it.

This is highly subjective and anecdotal, but I find OSX to use a lot of RAM.

The in-OS memory compression helps, but when I still had a 16GB Macbook Pro, the system always found a way to use up all of the RAM to the point that the compression would kick in to handle the overage over my physical memory.

My habits aren't any different in terms of extraneous windows/apps open on Windows, and I rarely hit 100% RAM utilization on my 16GB Windows machine.

The system should use all the RAM. You paid for RAM, why have it sit there unused? As long as the next user process gets the RAM it asks for, I want the system to use all my RAM to cache everything.

Edit: even to the point of compressing pages, since it's faster to uncompress them than fetch from disk.

If your 16 GB machine is sitting around with 8 GB free, it's not doing you any good. It's much better for the OS to be actively using it.

A lot of major projects recommend 32 GB RAM to compile including Android and Chrome.

Modeling, like COMSOL. Runs very much faster when RAM is enough to keep it from accessing disk, even when disk is an SSD.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Rubbish, I've got 1280k EMS for borland C++

http://mos6581.com/pictures/5170-canvas/DCSF0009.jpg

This is why: https://twitter.com/NickPoorman/status/737647940026634240

No that's not why. If you have any application that sucks memory without releasing it, adding more memory just delay the inevitable.

As for the RAM in the rMBP. I'm only half disappointed compared to what I would have been 1 year ago. My workflow is pushing more and more stuff in the cloud, so instead of running a bunch of small VM locally I can have VM sized properly to the task at hand rather than limited to my laptop configuration.

What do you need "a brighter display" for? Or "2.5x more bass in the speakers"?

I run VMWare Fusion on my 2012 Macbook Pro; call it a travel/demo computer. 16GB allows only a couple of minimally configured VMs to run at once.

No 32gb? Is this true? Someone please tell me that's not true.

I was (against all odds), hoping for 64! If this is true, consider me disgusted. I had 16GB in my (long lost, loved) 17-inch Macbook Pro, in 2009! I really cannot fathom what this company is thinking. I'm bewildered, disappointed, angry, in equal measure. I've been waiting for a killer Macbook Pro for literally 18 months! Sorry. I'm going Lenovo/Dell or why not, Surface Studio. For the first time in 20 years. I'm going Windows. I will not support a company which insults me with this. If this is Jony Ive's work, if they are so self-confident in their "design" that they cannot put a decent hardware spec together, then these people need to be retired.

Or maybe I just haven't cottoned on? They just don't care about high end users? Or are they completely out of touch? I don't understand.

Yep that's the one thing that pisses me off to no end.

I just don't understand. The chips have been available for 12 months. It's almost like they're doing it on purpose.

Hence why I mention that they are still using LPDDR3, which they even left out of the keynote. The major alternative would be using DDR4 I think.

It's basically an insult.

Given that 99% of users don't require more than 8GB in a MacLaptop, it's hard to justify increasing the maximum ram beyond 16 GB for that fraction of 1% of users who do. Not impossible, mind you - because there is always value in chasing after the 1%, but to some degree, Apple's efficiency at running their operating system and applications on small memory footprints makes it less valuable to increase their maximum ram footprint.

That 1%, though, are

1. probably more likely to be in Apple's target demographic, 2. buy the machines with the highest margins.

That is PC thinking.

Macbook PROs are for PROfessionals. Multiple VMs. Big fast SSDs. Many cores. Better displays.

> Macbook PROs are for PROfessionals

Haha, not anymore. For some time now, the PRO in Apple products is for PROsumers, or its possibly just a meaningless vestigial acronym now. See also: Final Cut X "Pro" which was obviously not targeted at professionals.

Where does 99% come from?

My girlfriend is a nursing student, not a programmer and has 8 gigs of ram on her laptop. She's constantly asking me to look at her laptop when it beachballs and slows to a crawl when she's doing homework and her memory is maxed. She only has chrome, Word, Excel and some online courses open.

I don't buy that figure one bit.

Replace Chrome with Safari.

Unfortunately Chrome is absolutely terrible not just for power usage but also for RAM usage. For some reason Chrome loves memory, it gobbles it up. Safari is much better about it.

I switched from Chrome back to Safari recently and while it took some time adjusting, I have been seeing almost 2 - 3 hours longer battery life, and I have had way less issues with "beachballing".

"Doctor, it hurts when I do this!"

"Don't do it then."

I can't believe I have to repeat this, in 2016: software workload naturally expands to use all available resources. Period. Nobody likes doing "memory optimization" work when developing.

I regularly have 50 tabs open on Chrome. Switched to Safari a month ago hoping it would leave me more memory. Turns out my machine suddenly started beachballing, swapping like mad (battery usage up) and crashing. Switching back to Chrome completely fixed that problem.

You must be joking.

Safari is leaking memory. Unless you reboot your machine daily, Safari is terrible option.

I use both constantly. Chrome crashes are non-existant, where Safari crashes at least weekly.

Try using Safari instead of Chrome? (I am actually being serious here, not trying to be facetious)

But! What if I fucking loathe safari?

There are more than two to choices available.

I'm a power user. I currently have 43 applications open simultaneously on my i5 MBAir with 8 GB Ram. I have VMware fusion running Windows 7 (With Visio running inside that), and virtualBox running 4 OpenBSD images, Google Earth, the entire Office Suite (PPT/Excel/Word), Safari with 12-15 Tabs, etc, etc..

Of the approximately 100 million or so Macintosh Laptop users, it's entirely possible that a million of them are High End video editing or Developers/3D modeling and require more than 8GB, but I"m pretty confident that the vast majority of Macintosh Laptop Users will require less out of their system than I do - and, for better or worse, a lot of the high end scientific workstation/CAD-CAM/Servers/etc... have departed from the Macintosh Laptop Platform, and are now running on the MacPro, or, or, more likely, Linux/Windows.

And yes, I realize I've just argued myself into a corner, that those people have had to leave the Macintosh Laptop world because they need the horsepower/memory that they can only get on other platforms - but that's who is left on the MacLaptop community, and that's who Apple is targeting.

Except that the 1% that develop the things that the other 99% use is the lifeblood of their ecosystem.

This seems very shortsighted. It is not like they are strapped for cash, and the prices still went up a few hundred dollars.

are we talking about "Pro" or just Macbook?

I'm including all the people who are currently using Macintosh Laptops - not including people on MacPros. Lots of Macbook Air users out there.

My instinct is that they are going to flood the early adopters market with low RAM laptops. Then silently introduce upgrade options something like a few months down the line. This serves the dual benefit of being able to pump them out faster and giving people a reason to buy more of them.

It just seems like something Apple would do.

This is another great reason for serious power users to never buy the first generation of Apple equipment. Historically a quick refresh comes out, and it sometimes takes two gens to get it right.

Glad right now I timed my last Macbook pro purchase to have a year of applecare left on it, and it could easily last me another 2 years thanks to being maxed out when I bought it.

Apple is a company looking to maximize it profit as well as build good products. A lot of laptop manufacturers are starting to catch up on the hardware side (the new Zenbook).. it's just the MacOS experience that someone has left to create an equivalent to.

"Starting"? Competitors have caught up. The current Dell XPS 15'' blows the just announced MBP out of the water: same cpu, 32gb ram, equivalent GPU, more ports (including TB3), similar weight and dimensions -- at 50% of the price! The Razer Blade is "only" 20% cheaper, but has a smoking GPU. The HP ZBook Ultrabook is again 20% cheaper, 32gb, etc etc etc.

Apple dropped the ball, big time. I'll ride out my 2012 MBPr (which still works great), but at these conditions, my next laptop will not be from Cupertino.

Have used windows primary for 15 years, and mac for the last 10.. I've seen the new windows laptops walk right past apple past few months, my rMBP is about 2 years old so I'm not feeling the pinch so much in buying outdated equipment...

Even the new Lenovo T460p's are sliding by. Asus Zenbook is slick too.

I am more of a 13" guy, although i've used the 15" MBP and windows laptop at one time.

I'm hoping by the time my applecare is up they will throw a massive parade for doing the obvious hardware upgrades.

One possible reason they haven't is getting performance and heat managed in the new slim form factor.

Had a few macbooks that ran hot in the past, so I hope it's just that and not much else. It sucked having 15" macbook pros that had faulty video cards due to poor heat management and died prematurely.

No, it doesn't, and there is no precedent for Apple doing this.

http://betanews.com/2011/10/24/sssh-apple-silently-upgrades-...

The first example I came across, they did it after 8 months in 2011. Maybe you're right, maybe the Macbook Pro is just a beefier Macbook now. They didn't even splurge on the most up to date Intel chips, but the price went up?

This is so disappointing, after a long wait too.

I don't think there very small bumps to CPU clock speed in your example are in anyway comparable to the suggestion that they will introduce 32GB as an option or the default in a few months. So I don't think this is an example of what is being discussed.

MacBook Pros have stopped being for Professionals, and started being for Wealthy Consumers. Perhaps they should be called MacBook WCs?

Or for people who work for tech companies. I myself have never purchased a MBP. Every single one I've had was a company expense.

You're god damn right it's insulting. Same boat as you. It's really annoying. I'm trying to work here. It's not like software's getting any less bloated.

And a big price rise too.

Now that ssds in macbooks are not user replaceable -- you have to buy as much disk as you want for 3 years all up front -- it's nearly $3k for the cheapest 15 inch macbook not even including applecare for 3 years. Ouch.

The SSDs are replaceable.

You'll go Lenovo/Dell until you have to use their trackpads for any amount of time. I know; my wife has one. My 5-year old son can tell there's no comparison between a Lenovo trackpad and the Apple version.

Amongst all the terrible touch bar nonsense, I was at least relieved that the trackpad size was doubled. It really is the killer feature of MacBooks.

> Mac Pro: Buy. If you like paying 2013 prices for 2013 hardware.

It's even worse than that, if you're in the UK: the price of the 2013 Mac Pro has gone up by £500. Yes yes, Brexit and currency adjustment, and if it were new hardware I'd clench my teeth and bear it. But a £500 increase for hardware that's almost three years old is highway robbery.

The hardware is technically 7-9 years old since the Mac Pro was outdated when it came out.

The newest Mac Pro used a Bloomfield CPU (2008) or a Westmere one (2010) and a circa 2009 GPU.

One word- hackintosh.

How well does that work in practice? I've heard so-so things.

I was looking into it, and the answer seems to be fine if you (1) don't reuse hardware -- just buy exactly the components on tonymacx86; (2) don't install OS updates on release but wait until people have figured out how well they work and tweaked the hackintosh software; (3) are willing to suffer some pain around making imessage work.

edit: the key to a good experience seemed to be finding a working configuration then leaving it alone. If you want to update the OS regularly, you'll probably be unhappy.

Turned my gaming PC into a Hackintosh because games became boring. I'm amazed at how easy that went down.

Installing OS X took only a little longer than on my native Macs. I just had to tick a few checkmarks in the Hackintosh post-install software to customize for my setup.

OS X 10.11 updates I could install as soon as they were available from Apple. No problems at all. (I of course checked the appropriate forums for compatibility notes but there never were any problems reported). Haven't installed 10.12 yet (as I'm not too thrilled by the OS on my MBP anyways) but I heard it works just fine on Hackintoshes.

Now the caveats: I disabled the onboard audio and attached external USB speakers instead. Because onboard audio seems to be more broken than not and USB audio "just works". I'm also connecting the machine via ethernet and don't have a WiFi adapter attached. Oh, and I got lucky in the first place by choosing OS X compatible hardware (Intel CPU, ASRock mainboard, AMD GPU).

Things that doen't work: Browser DRM with Safari. I can't watch Netflix on the machine. iMessage support is cumbersome. And I can't submit binaries to the app store from the machine.

But otherwise for work it's a beast (compile times are great compared to my MBP) :)

As long as you use Intel CPU/AMD GPU you're golden. Intel's HD GPUs work, too. Nvidia GPUs need 3rd party drivers from Nvidia.

> Yes yes, Brexit and currency adjustment

It's entirely Brexit.

This day last year, £1 was worth $1.527.

Today, £1 is worth $1.223.

(1.223-1.527)/1.527 = -20% almost exactly, and the Mac Pro has increased in price by 20%.

Since GBP is fluctuating a lot, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's prices include some extra leeway in case of further swings.

(And aren't I glad I emigrated from the UK last year...)

What I absolutely do not comprehend: is it so difficult to upgrade the Mac Pro's? Isn't it a matter of just adding more powerful hardware to it?

Like I did myself back in the days, when I built my own PCs. But then in mass production?

It just feels lazy from Apple.

The answer in one word: margins.

Adding expensive hardware (or as you call it, more powerful hardware) to your BOM will cut into your margins.

> 16GB max

You can have 16 GB ram on a 2011 ThinkPad X220.

Just saying.

I think a W500 could already handle 16GB.

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