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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

This is just a bit mysterifying as there review of the MacBook pro sans touch said it was perfectly capable for final cut pro, Photoshop, etc. They used the CPUs in the correct thermal envelope for the laptop, except maybe the sans touch model which they said was an air replacement.

The real use case for 16 GB + of ram is video editing or tons of memory hungry VMs. Edge cases. Not only that but people begrudge them for not waiting for Canonlake* with LPDDR4, but they'd miss the holidays and have to launch in the middle of the year! Intel is continually dropping the ball with deadlines. Is it that hard to wait for a refresh which will likely have 32 GB ram next year?

These laptops seem more than capable for most professionals, The Verge just seems to be giving in to the perennial fanboy hate whenever Apple does something new...

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> The real use case for 16 GB + of ram is video editing or tons of memory hungry VMs.

Or you know... running modern Electron apps. New Slack update burns over 1GB of RAM regularly and it's not the only thing running on the machine. 16GB might have been enough for year, but with current crazy wasting of memory for simple apps it's not that spacious anymore.

> Slack update burns over 1GB of RAM regularly

Is this right? This is a glorified chat client! Why so much?

Because it sits on top of a web browser, and keeps all chats, images, gifs etc in memory across all channels instead of just loading those for the current channel.

The "native" app is a Chromium wrapper of essentially the webapp, so it shouldn't be surprising that the performance profile is similar to that of running another web browser. Cost-effective for the developers, less than efficient for end-users. This is the same tradeoff we've collectively chosen for many things in the "rich webapp" space.

The Giphy plugin comes to mind.

Then the problem isn't really the lack of memory: it's crappy apps that use way more RAM than they really need.

But when you're stuck with a few apps that behave this way, the only recourse is to add more RAM.

"The Verge just seems to be giving in to the perennial fanboy hate whenever Apple does something new."

Contemplate the alternative: new MBPs aren't announced until Kaby Lake is ready. Analysts fill the internetz with "OMG APPLE HATES PROS, NOT INNOVATING ANYMOREZ"

In 2012, Apple announced the new rMB with new intel CPUs which weren't released yet for PC. Now, 1/10 of PCs has Kaby Lake and Apple introduce new MacBooks with previous generation. I don't see how this is not fail compared to 2012.

But the Kaby Lake processors that Apple wants to use (with a good integrated GPU) are not shipping yet. Also, there will not be a version of this processor with support for 32G ram until Coffee Lake apparently. Apple has decided to use this one line of processors and Intel failed to deliver a suitable one in time. Of course since this is the only new machine people naturally think that this is their only option. Hopefully Apple will release new desktop computers soon.

I think the lack of any news on other products accounts for at least 50% of the backlash. As Apple's product line stands the only products looking forward to a USB/TB3 future are laptops. Evaluated in this vacuum, the new MacBook Pro doesn't deliver. If they had showed us new iMacs and and updated Mac Pro there would be more options and more insight into what Apple's vision of that future looks like.

I don't fully get why I am being downvoted. The first rMB was released with third generation Intel CPUs in mid-2012. The corresponding third generation Intel CPUs were released to the public market only in 2013:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Third_generation_.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Bridge_(microarchitecture)

"Is it that hard to wait for a refresh which will likely have 32 GB ram next year"

The annoying part is, you don't really know if 32GB model is coming out next year or not. This of course applies to most other vendors as well.

Just wait another 3 years, by then we'll all be talking about having 64gb as the default when debuts 16gb as the standard.

What mobile processor will address 64GB 3 years from now?

When was a notebook ever the choice for running multiple VM's or heavy editing of video?

This is what I don't understand about the current criticism.

I bought my current mac 7 years ago, and though it has dedicated 3D hardware, it was never meant for heavy gaming or rendering 3D movies, and everybody loved it. It also came with very little RAM, even for the time.

But today it is apparently a travesty that MacBook Pro doesn't offer tons of memory and high-end 3D graphics. When did they ever do that? The hall mark of the pro has always been the form factor, battery life, screen, mousepad.

>When was a notebook ever the choice for running multiple VM's or heavy editing of video?

There has been a category of laptops that are classified as mobile workstations for quite some time now, including IBM/Lenovo's retired W5xx series and current Pxx series and Dell's Precision laptops. The MacBook Pro is (or was) considered to be Apple's equivalent.

And just for comparison, a 2010 Lenovo W510 already supported 32 GB. The Pxx series currently can do 64.

(But they are heavier, power-hungry and more complicated than the MacBook Pro, which IMHO isn't really in the "mobile workstation" class, but . But in comparable form factor you get 32 GB right now in various ThinkPads. Some new models only offer 16 as well, maybe for similar CPU availability reasons. But you have the choice if you need it.)

> The hall mark of the pro has always been the form factor, battery life, screen, mousepad.

Form factor was always a secondary factor. First and foremost was high specs in CPU, memory, storage, connectors and screen. i.e. for a Pro-fessional user (photographer, graphics designer, film).

I think you're getting confused with the non-Pro macbooks and 'air' line.

I'm wondering what you've been using your mac for if performance isn't a concern... I'd be concerned that you might have been paying over the odds ...

A few months after the mid-2009 MacBook Pro release there was a MacBook release with identical specs.

In 2009 the difference between a professional and an amateur MacBook was literally screen, keyboard mousepad and aluminium vs. plastic.

> I think you're getting confused with the non-Pro macbooks and 'air' line.

The air was more expensive than a pro in the early days.

> I'm wondering what you've been using your mac for if > performance isn't a concern

Writing, researching and programming. I payed for high-quality components and a great form factor, and that has payed off well. It has always had good performance, but for the same price, I could have gotten much faster PC laptops.

> in the early days

> high-quality components and a great form factor

Yep you could have made do with a cheaper mac.

> When was a notebook ever the choice for running multiple VM's or heavy editing of video?

When they became powerful enough to do it, and so more cost effective for companies to just buy laptops for everyone, rather than provide desktop computers as well as laptops for those that need to travel. Alternatively, when open plan offices and hotdesking became popular.

Everywhere I've worked for the last 5 years I've been given laptops as my main/only development device. Admittedly I'm not generally running multiple VMs, but 8GB isn't enough for my workload, 16GB would be, but I could easily see others wanting more for a future proof work laptop.

As for graphics and gaming, a few years ago they did have models with Nvidia graphics, and that doesn't seem to be the case now. That said, they were usually mid range GPUs, and Intel graphics have come a long way in that time, so there's probably not a huge difference in relative performance for modern games.

No, they're not "perennial fanboys". They're just copywriters copying the same ravings about "whatever lake", "only 16 Gb", "why no touchscreen", "Surface Studio is better" from other adblock-blocking popup-opening video-autoplaying gadget-review press.

You've been able to have a Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM since 2011.

And what laptop in the Apple ecosystem are those who are running VMs and doing video editing meant to use? A Macbook Pro-Pro?

> "Edge cases"

Those aren't edge cases in the "Pro" market, those are common professional use cases.

16 GB of RAM may not be enough for some classes of professionals - beyond video editing - in the future. Considering these laptops are not upgradable, I think it's legitimate to complain about a 16 GB cap.

Using adobe apps confirms the theory that 16gb is not enough. Maybe those who think otherwise still think a 16gb iphone is adequate these days. Memory is cheap, apple is purposely building in disposability.

What I'm curious of is the impact of NVMe SSD on swap performance. In the case you saturate the 16GB, the time to swap some on disk might be so small it could be an acceptable performance hit.

AFAIK, those are still much slower than RAM.

Sure, but I remember how swapping became livable when I had my first SATA SSD, and it wasn't a high perf one (200MB/s instead of the 500MB/s you'd see maxing out SATA today). I've read latest MBP SSDs were around 2GB/s. Naively you can free 1/8 of your ram in a second. I'm no heavy user these days but it seems it can make pro users life good enough.

That said Apple memory limits are stil love for a pro line where people expect to be able to have as much as their budget can afford.

ps: maybe the iPhone mindset got to the MBP designers, iPhone are regularly behind in terms of ram specs, which somehow doesn't equate to low perf for users.

These are Intel's limits. AFAIK, the mobile parts that support more than 16 GB are not available have lower performance than the parts currently going into this machine. It'd be odd to have a new Pro lineup update with slower machines.

Sad that Intel didn't allow support for more.

ps: got me thinking, maybe MBP refresh forced Apple to accept already on shelf intel model (compromising memory limits); so maybe next year new Intel chips => new MBP. Or ... maybe Apple will double down on their own CPU IP to ensure more options.

It could be a process/tooling/manufacturing thing, something Apple could no longer stop at the point it was, that would cause the current lineup capacity to be reduced and a new lineup to be introed regardless of what was soldered on the PCB.

Running a database locally. It makes a huge difference when your DB fits into RAM.

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