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Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

I thought the RAM thing would decrease battery life, because it requires a different intel chipset — as shown by the contemporary laptops from other manufacturers with the same CPUs and chipset topping out at 16GB as well?

I could be misremembering, and it frustrates me either way, but I was certain that Intel also held some blame for this?

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I think the reason is LPDDR3 which only goes up to 16GB with Intels chipsets, they would need to use Desktop class ram to go above which uses a lot more power.

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

You are correct, I bought an Intel NUC with an i7 in it and that had the 16Gb limit. Furthermore, it only had two cores and hyperthreading whereas I was 'used to' i7 having four proper cores and HT.

I wanted to have a desktop that I could leave on without it taking lots of power (CO2 matters) or needing a wind-tunnel grade fan to keep it cool (noise matters). So it had some variant of what Apple used. In my opinion this CPU was a dud, I had to upgrade the BIOS numerous times and it wasn't any quicker than my elderly i5 powered laptop. Plus it wasn't as silent as hoped:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...

Apple used the same RAM limited CPU in 2015:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G0QP3LL/A/refurbished-133...

The subsequent products with the useless keyboard were to use iterations of this lemon of a CPU.

My Intel NUC is actually in a drawer unused. I had lost a couple of keys on the elderly i5 laptop, I bought a new backlit keyboard for that on ebay, it came from China in an incredible 3 days and cost ~£50 including shipping. This is the keyboard I am using right now. It actually looks super cool as the laptop was originally all in silver, the replacement keyboard and surround is black and the design looks so good because the mousepad is still silver coloured. It looks like a high end German product due to that colourway combo.

I find it hard to believe that any decent chipset made in the last decade at least cannot support 32gb of ram. I had a reasonably cheap samsung laptop from 2012 that already did. If apple is not doing it, it's not by the lack of choices in the market.

Of course, but it's a tradeoff. These low power low profile Intel CPUs can support more memory, but only DDR4 which is desktop class RAM with more than double the power requirements in use, and four to ten times the power usage in sleep mode.

The logic board would also have the redesigned and bigger for the new chipset, putting pressure on battery space. You see Microsoft making the same choice as Apple with the new Surface laptop.

Fortunately Intel are launching new mobile chips with support for fast, low power LPDDR3E memory over 16GB this year.

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

Dell XPS has up to 32GB with the exactly same CPU.

And it won’t be using low power memory modules. That’s the trade off.

Maybe, if their MacBook Pros were just a little bit thicker (say, the thickness of the 2013-2015 models), they'd be able to fit a big enough battery for the extra power draw to not matter too much?

"Considering that a 76 watt-hour battery is used in the 15 inch machines, they could have made the battery 30% bigger to hit the ceiling imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration, and they still wouldn’t have had the same battery life as they do now by using LPDDR memory." [1]

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

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