Come on, are we really blaming the RAM for battery life? Apple chose to put a much smaller battery in this model (75 watt) compared to last year (100 watt) for the purpose of thinness.
Find me a single review that laments the thickness and bulkiness of the 2015 model.
This is plain and simple industrial design gone amuck. Apple has beautiful hardware, but day to day use is important too (performance, ram, battery). Shaving millimeters and ounces hits the point of diminishing returns, especially when you focus on it to the exclusion of all else.
The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane.
I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background. I do all this on 8GB ram on a macbook from 2012 and it runs fast and smoothly, even with up to 4 hours of battery life. I can't imagine the new one would be less performant in any way.
It's completely understandable that now they can optimize for other things, since performance is generally a nonissue now.
Apple is not blaming anything. They've designed a computer for a purpose instead of pumping specs and numbers to gratify a bunch of vocal geeks. I'd rather much trust in Apple's design than a collaboratively designed PC by technical dilettantes with maximum performance everything. It's not just a about specs, especially in a laptop. Versatility, weight, battery, ease of use. These all come into play aside from raw technical component power.
> The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane.
> I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background.
It's all relative. Please don't judge other people's needs by your needs. I typically have five virtual desktops, each containing a project like yours. Plus five more virtual desktops for other stuff. More than 16 GB ram would be welcome (but thanks to SSD, I can manage with 16 GB pretty well). The article very well explains Apple's rational choice, but it's frustrating (for us, the users) that the industry haven't come up with anything better in half-decade.
I guess the line between ram and storage will blur more in the future thanks to super fast SSD techonology, ram becoming just one more level of cache.
I almost always here some version of this from the crowd that is really unhappy with the 16GB limit. They seem to be running a lot of VMs. Out of curiosity, what is is you do that necessitates the creation of so many virtual machines?
I don't actually run many virtual machines. But if you divide 16 gigs for ten desktops => 1.6 GB per project, minus "all desktops" apps, not too much. Modern applications (esp. web apps) tend to be memory hogs. For example, Facebook alone run on Fluid.app easily eats a quarter gig of real mem.
...or you can buy a high-powered desktop, and remote into it from your expensive, super-convenient luxury laptop that has long battery life and doesn't overheat, which you were going to buy as a fashion statement anyway.
So now we need 2 computers, a high-speed network which won't work when on the go, and a complex remote configuration to do what another brand's pro laptop could on one machine.
Really, what Apple is saying with this is that the MBP is much more a Dell Latitude or XPS15 and not a Precision or a Lenovo P50/70.
On the Dell Precision, you can get a few different quad-core xeons, Thunderbolt 3, 64GB ECC DDR4, ISV certified Quadro M5000 GPU w/8GB VRAM, 3x drives (can do 3X 1TB PCIE SSDs), 4K IGZO screen, choice of batteries including 91wh LiPo, smart card reader, and up to 5 years on-site + accidental damage support for what ends up being about 10% more. Base price on the 17" is $1599.
The Lenovo P70 is available in similar configurations. HP has the ZBook series which is also "designed to pass 14 MIL-STD 810G tests" and comes with up to 4TB of storage, and starts at $1429: http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/zbook-17-mo...
That's what a pro laptop looks like, and Apple no longer sells anything close. Lots of professional software is moving away from macOS because of this. Video production / editing is moving away from Mac due to this. It's sad because Apple used to make real tools for professionals, and now tries to sell them thin-and-lights targeted to rich consumers.
Lastly, the keyboard on the newest gen is awful to type on due to having almost zero key travel. It feels like drumming your fingers on a desk. The old 17" had a great keyboard IMO and I'd gladly give up a few more MM of thickness for a better battery and a fantastic keyboard.
Justifying Apple's decision because YOU don't need it, doesn't mean it's all of a sudden OK. I've had 16GB or greater in all of my machines for at least the last six years. Apple is notorious for underspec hardware. It's just that in the last couple of years, it's really starting to piss people off, because the commodity stuff is so cheap at this point. 16GB base iphone6s , MacBook Pro 16GB RAM. I can't think of anyone who says gee, I wish the next iPhone was EVEN THINNER. And yet they focus on shaving off .00011mm each iteration, reducing battery life, and allowing less space for necessary components. You think it's coincidence they didn't offer a 32GB version last year? 16 base, 64 at a $100 more. Jack up the camera, to create larger and large image/video sizes, forcing people to spend the extra $100 to get more storage space. It's a racket.
Blind "trust" is a company is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. People are allowed to speak up if something isn't right.
20 tabs in a browser and a VM isn't what I would consider a power user. We have accounting people in our office doing more than that, because of antiquated software requirements.
Condemning Apple's decision because YOU don't like it similarly does not mean it was a bad one. Apple makes laptops for its target market; if your needs aren't met, there are other laptops out there.
Apple had design reasons for doing what they did: optimizing battery life at the cost of a feature that I would wager very few people, statistically speaking, would use. It's alright if that means this laptop doesn't meet your needs, because everyone's needs are different, but I would wager that more people would take advantage of longer battery life than would take advantage of 32 GB of RAM.
No, that's the problem. There aren't other laptops out there. If I want to use MacOS, I have zero choice, but to go along with watered down "PRO" version, that is being catered to grandma. Defending Apple from not even offering 32GB as an OPTION doesn't even make any sense. Please don't give me that silly RAM/battery debate. If someone wants more battery life, then stick with the 16GB. I'll take that imaginary risk, and order the 32GB upgrade.
Like you stated, "everyone's needs are different", and yet, they don't cater to anyone but the lowest common denominator anymore. It started with abandoning their pro apps, then their pro desktops, and now their pro laptops.
> The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane.
> I run a browser [...]
Building a single config & platform - with no other significant processes running - will cause OOM crashes on 12GB CI boxes with swap files enabled, when 4-5x 4GB linker process spin up in parallel when building my projects. This is my bread and butter, and it's still way too slow for my tastes on a 16GB box that isn't swapping excessively, which is the new MBP's maximum "give Apple all my money" spec.
Your day to day works on it? Great. Mine hasn't for around a year at least, nevermind next year's. I could theoretically use it as a dedicated docs machine, or as a dumb terminal to an actually decent machine... or I could buy a quad-core laptop with twice the RAM - throw in an extra 4K monitor for good measure - and still end up paying less than a MBP configured with half the cores and down 0.6Ghz in speed.
> It's not just a about specs, especially in a laptop. Versatility, weight, battery, ease of use.
MBP's max specs aren't enough to handle my workload. MBP's 8GB models may not even handle Chrome, if the people bellow are to be believed. That's not "versatile". Weight is just another spec - 33% (~1.5lbs) lighter than the laptop I'm comparing against is nice, but not "who cares about any of the other spec" nice. Battery? More specs! Battery wattage just went down, as pointed out in the post you're replying to. Ease of use - finally something squishy and subjective! ...I'll prefer the numpad over the touch bar. Perhaps, on that front, I'm a weirdo.
But hey, if it works for your specific case, and you like 'em, enjoy!
Hate to throw in yet another counter-argument, but here goes:
I'd consider myself one of the main target markets for the MacBook Pro, and have for several years been a faithful consumer of them. I compile multi-gigabyte codebases on a semi-regular basis in addition to database work and number crunching that would put a normal consumer laptop totally out of its depth. Its the combination of the ability to do this easily and with great battery life and general usability that makes my MacBook so nice.
I'm convinced that if you're doing more heavy-hitting work than what I throw at my laptop day in day out then a MacBook or any easily portable device isn't for you, and a 2 inch thick Dell monster with a proper desktop chipset and memory controller is what you're really after, or even a couple of c4.xlarge instances running in AWS with a MacBook as the client. For any load too much for my little notebook its straight into amazon and I go get a coffee.
No offense, but everytime I hear a response like this, I can't help but think the person typing it is so engrossed with the Mac world, or so desperate to defend Apple, that they haven't spent 30 seconds look for alternatives.
Razer has made the power machine every is asking for in a Macbook like format. A company that makes less in total yearly INCOME than Apple makes in INTEREST on a monthly basis.
Yeah, the blade pro is pretty cool, but it's still consumer kit. No pro GPU, no ECC RAM, no xeon, no smartcard reader (non-starter for tons of people working with classified stuff / government contractors). Looks like a great gaming / development machine though, esp if you're doing AI/ML stuff that can take advantage of that awesome GPU. Keyboard looks nice to use as well. For the price, I agree that it makes the MBP look like a joke. The touchpad on the MBP has been the best you could get for about a decade though, and I still haven't used any laptop where the trackpad is even close to as good.
What I find so frustrating about this discussion is the inability so many seem to have to take themselves out of the argument and separate the two notions that 1) this machine does not fit their needs in particular and 2) this is a great machine for a lot of other people.
Also, how hung up people are on the word pro. Whether this machine is for you or not, can we all please just agree that pro doesn't mean anything other than the most expensive option? Certainly, noone is saying that Apple aims to serve every single market of people who self identify as pro users. If you think this machine is inadequate to do the kind of work that you do, then maybe, just maybe, it wasn't intended to? It doesn't mean that it's inadequate when it comes to countless other pro tasks.
One final thing: This machine is more powerful than the ones it replaces. Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either. Which must mean that many of the people complaining weren't Mac users to begin with. Hmmm...
Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either.
But that's not what people are saying: they are saying there is no reason to upgrade and that they will explore alternate solutions.
Your argument is silly anyway, in the 1980s people were using Macs a tiny fraction of the power of today "professionally" for DTP, does it logically follow now that anyone complaining that a modern machine isn't suitable for modern use cases, was never a "real professional"?
But that's not what people are saying: they are saying there is no reason to upgrade.
That's not what the grandparent was saying. She was saying that the new MacBook was inadequate for her needs.
Your argument is silly anyway
No yours is. Clearly, yesterday's hardware is inadequate for the software of today. But what I am saying is that hardware of today is probably ok for the software of yesterday.
> What I find so frustrating about this discussion is the inability so many seem to have to take themselves out of the argument and separate the two notions that 1) this machine does not fit their needs in particular and 2) this is a great machine for a lot of other people.
This lack of separation cuts both ways. I read "The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane" as dismissing the latter of: "This machine is a great machine for me." and "This machine is not a great machine for a lot of other people."
> One final thing: This machine is more powerful than the ones it replaces. Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either. Which must mean that many of the people complaining weren't Mac users to begin with. Hmmm...
Ahh, that doesn't quite follow. Aftermarket upgrades have been around to e.g. bring previous gen MBPs up to 16GB for years. Some people have found that their professional needs are expanding faster than the hardware is, and where they were once avid users, they're now being forced to reconsider their options. And then there are those who have been reluctantly limping along with computationally inadequate hardware because they're tied to it for some reason. There's a whole spectrum out there.
I agree. In principle. But I don't think that the two perspectives are equivalent, unless you think the group of people who won't be greatly served by this machine because it strikes the wrong compromises, are somehow equal in numbers or importance to the ones who will, because it does. Which I think is preposterous. But time will tell of course.
Ahh, that doesn't quite follow
Yes, I probably put too fine a point on that. The point a was trying to make was that some people seem to dismiss all the ways in which this machine is better (which is most or all of them), because it is not better enough. Which I think is a strange, entitled way to judge a it.
Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1%. Expecting Apple to completely gimp the macbook for the average pro user (dev, photoshop, video editing) to satisfy your computing needs is unreasonable. They can't cover all use cases, but they can cover most.
For your use case I recommend buying a spec'd up PC, such as a gaming laptop or desktop replacement laptop.
Except no one's asking them to "gimp" the available models. People are asking for more options in the high performance space. If Apple doesn't make it, you can't simply go to HP and get it there. You have no choice. It's either run out of memory, or abandon your whole OS and software stack.
Apple is forcing a segment of it's customers to abandon it's ecosystem to continue getting their work done
. Their lack of reassuring response insinuates that macOS is a non-scalable toy platform.
I have no horses in this race myself, but if I had hundreds+ invested in Mac software and accessories, with no machines available on the market to handle my workload, I would be pretty bent.
What's your setup for doing native iOS builds, code signing, and debugging (including shaders, opengl context setup, etc.) from Linux? I'd love to have a viable alternative to XCode.
> Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1%
Dude, are you seriously suggesting a laptop marketed for developers not be used by people writing and compiling code?
Seriously any project of decent size written in a systems language just consumes all the ram you can throw at. If you think this only happens to 1% of the developers, you need to step out of your echo chamber and see what other developers are doing.
Dude, are you seriously suggesting a laptop marketed for developers not be used by people writing and compiling code?
I know right - it's like everyone has forgotten that Pro means "for professionals". And also forgot that the booming sales of the iPhone and iPad owe everything to the ecosystem of apps and content created on Macs.
People doing 3D, engineering simulations, computational bio and chem, financial modelling, yadda yadda, there are loads of people who can make use of every byte of RAM and every core for Real Work. So some guy can make websites adequately on a smaller machine - he or she needs to look up and realize that that's a tiny corner of what computing is about...
Nobody for whom absolute CPU power is paramount is crunching on a laptop anyway. The sorts of examples you cite are better off implemented on a grunty workstation or even cloud computing. If portable access is needed, remoting in is the answer.
For many people these days their laptop is their only computer and they value the ability to work without cheap, fast connectivity, while traveling say. You know, the entire use case for portable computers existing at all.
You don't need to "own" a workstation to take advantage of cloud processing. It's the cloud. You rent the CPU cycles when you need them. And they can even be crunching away on your most difficult engineering simulations while you're mid-flight.
The number of people on this planet who need to have 16+ cores of CPU power on the tray table of an aeroplane could probably be counted in single digits.
urm, isnt the hole point of having a 'pro' version of your product that it can handle workloads the previous poster mentioned?
i'm pretty sure his problem is only that the new mbp has the specs of a budged laptop, at best. Which is perfectly fine for most usecases, hardware has gotten pretty good over the last few years. still, shouldn't qualify as a 'professional' version.
"Pro" is not some standard measurement. In fact, it's marketing above all else. They could call it Plus or Extra or Super. It's not required to fit your notion of what a professional does. For example, I'm both a professional developer and a professional lawyer. The new MBP meets both of my pro requirement sets.
> Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1%.
This was on a small - fairly certain <1MLOC - codebase. I'm small fry. The only unusual thing would perhaps be having small enough compilation times (due to e.g. incremental compiles and small changes not rebuilding the world) for linking of multiple projects to overlap. Boost and the Linux Kernel, noodling in at closer to ~20MLOC, or VS2012's ~50MLOC, might spend more time compiling in their typical edit cycles.
> Expecting Apple to completely gimp the macbook for the average pro user (dev, photoshop, video editing)
I suppose I'm having difficulty here seeing how a small weight and size increase for more DDR chips, or a larger battery, is going to "completely gimp" the macbook. Since I already touched on dev - I'll let someone else touch on video editing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJtrQ5CcCN0&feature=youtu.be... . Things will only get worse on that front as 4K becomes popular.
> They can't cover all use cases, but they can cover most.
Agreed. I'm just not sure they have covered most "pro" users.
Maybe the problem isn't Apple's hardware, but 20-50MLOC code bases?
Xerox PARC had, effectively, a simple version of what we consider "Personal Computing": word-processing, E-Mail, laser printers, software development, proto-Internet. Alan Kay claims it was less than 20KLOC, and that's a plausible figure considering the Alto had 128K RAM and a 2.5MB disk pack.
MS Office alone is >400MLOC. That's 20000x the code, or 20KLOC^2. There is no way it is 20000 times better or more useful. However, let's assume for the sake of argument that it is 100x better/more useful (something I'd consider dubious, but it's a good upper bound). That still leaves a factor 200x unaccounted for. Or 99.5% of the code.
TBL's first web-browser was ~5KLOC, took him a couple of months to write, in his spare time IIRC. It included editing. NCSA Mosaic took a team of five one year to complete, was 100KLOC and did not include editing. The current (last time I checked) version of Firefox is 13MLOC. Is it 2500x better?
And if you think compile-times are the biggest problem with multi-MLOC code-bases, you're not paying attention.
> Maybe the problem isn't Apple's hardware, but 20-50MLOC code bases?
As written, I'm running into issues in <1MLOC codebases, on hardware just a touch more limited than the max spec of Apple's latest line. The 1MLOC equivalent would break on Apple's hardware, I'm sure. So, no - I don't think 20-50MLOC code bases are to blame.
> Xerox PARC had, effectively, a simple version of what we consider "Personal Computing": word-processing, E-Mail, laser printers, software development, proto-Internet. Alan Kay claims it was less than 20KLOC, and that's a plausible figure considering the Alto had 128K RAM and a 2.5MB disk pack.
It's fine and all to pine for the good old days when computers were simpler than the computer within even your lowly modern hard drive - which is itself inside your modern computer - all in the name of the ever increasing performance we today take for granted. But it's sheer fantasy to think we can support the cambrian explosion of hardware options out there since then (all from different vendors with different interests and standards) with the same sized codebases as we had back then. Simply working around the hardware errata will take more code for many individual pieces of hardware - much cheaper and easier to fix things in software than fab a new revision of chips and toss out all the old, after all.
Nobody's claiming linear relationships between source quantity and product quality. Nobody goes to an all you can eat buffet expecting caviar. Hell, most would argue an inverse relationship - the less code you have, the better you can polish it. But can a modern kernel work with thousands of times more unique hardware SKUs? Wouldn't surprise me. And hardware's expensive to design! If the hardware options out there can multiply by such magnitudes, take a fraction of a second to think what must have happened to software options - relatively cheap by comparison.
It's a miracle we're not measuring individual software projects in BLOCs. Yet - give it time. If such compatability, flexibility, choice, and performance concerns don't interest you - well, I'd be quite interested in what you found necessary to get your Alto talking to the HN website!
> And if you think compile-times are the biggest problem with multi-MLOC code-bases, you're not paying attention.
I have mastered the skill of caring about a second problem at a time. I've heard legends of masters who could care about a third problem, but I have no evidence nor belief in such myths. But yes - link-times are worse ;). And refactoring. And testing. Security. And...
>As written, I'm running into issues in <1MLOC codebases
Sure, but for most things, even that is somewhat ridiculous, and I mean both: having ~1MLOC code-bases and those being problematic. Elsewhere, I posted some number comparing tcc and Xcode's default cc (clang+llvm).
Tcc was able to compile+run a (synthetic, non-representative) 300KLOC program in 0.168 seconds. I didn't get a memory reading. cc took 9.3 seconds, so a factor 60. Would a 60x faster compiler work for you? The reason we don't have faster compilers is not that it's not possible, but that it's not a priority. And it hasn't been a priority because in the past performance sins were always covered up by hardware getting faster (by itself, without any extra work). This is no longer the case, increases in single core performance are over.
> It's fine and all to pine for the good old days when computers
> were simpler than the computer within even your lowly modern hard drive
I apologise if that was your take-away, because I obviously didn't make my point very well. However...
>all in the name of the ever increasing performance we today take for granted.
...that is not correct. In fact, in the spirit of Hans Bethe: "Ach, that isn't even wrong". Performance has also deteriorated in line with code bulk, and usually for no good reason whatsoever. There are a few good reasons, but they tend to be a small fraction of the whole problem.
To quote Wirth for the n-th time: "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster".
And nowadays, hardware really isn't getting much faster. Meaning we can no longer count on the hardware boys and gals to bail us out for our egregious sins. Software needs to get its act together.
Not if the resulting executable is, say, 10% slower. I could syntax check slightly faster, I suppose, but I already compile individual TUs for that. For testing, I need to test the actual build target. Also, the fastest comparison on http://bellard.org/tcc/ is a mere 9x faster on a real project. I wonder if they're doing better than 30% faster than GCC on the linux kernel since their 2004 numbers.
Also missing: C++ support. I no longer need PPC, fortunately.
And keep in mind: Despite kvetching about build performance, I make it even worse by running static analysis now and then, because that stuff is actually important to me.
> And it hasn't been a priority because in the past performance sins were always covered up by hardware getting faster (by itself, without any extra work). This is no longer the case, increases in single core performance are over.
Still getting wider, and still getting a little faster, but yes. I did get the memo about Moore's law "ending" a decade or so ago.
> Performance has also deteriorated in line with code bulk, [...]
Yes and no. Yes, more programs do more sloppy things that waste hardware performance now for little to no good reason (although I'll argue saving dev time can be worth it.) No, you cannot write a program that will efficiently unfold proteins on an Alto. No, you cannot make general purpose hardware that's as fast as a modern CPU or GPU with the Alto's fundamentally simpler design principles. No, you cannot efficiently and effectively use more complicated modern hardware with a similar line count as compilers and linkers for the Alto. No, really, the little computer in your hard drive really is playing a role in scheduling hardware operations to maximize your I/O throughput.
We're jumping through some really crazy complicated hoops in hardware to try and get more and more performance, and some of it requires hardware and software working in tandem. The minimum SLOC count to achieve our modern, expanded goals - even if you do something crazy like limit those goals to increased performance only - is absolutely rising for very reasonable reasons. Even if we assume most people 'waste' SLOC left and right, it doesn't follow that all codebases do, nor that all 'reasonable' codebases will be small enough to avoid problems.
Look, I get it, lean mean small programs kick some serious ass for a whole slew of reasons. I've sped up linking by a factor of 10x or so on some projects - on par with the 9x tcc factor above! - by switching from BFD to gold, with the latter focusing exclusively on elf binaries, instead of taking on BFD and all it's abstraction layers and non-elf target support. I imagine it's a much smaller program!
But I just told you the tradeoff: Specialization. I wasn't able to do this on all our target platforms, because not all of them even use elf. And, if it weren't for the fact that we were able to ditch BFD entirely, the total SLOC of our build toolchain would have, ironically, gone up from adding another linker into the mix as a result. Fortunately, I don't have to build our build toolchains - just any in-house ones. Our build configs did go up a few more LOC to override the defaults...
Unlike tcc, gold has not specialized itself to the point that it doesn't solve any of my problems, so it gets to join my toolset. I'm sure the reverse has happened to someone else. And plenty more deal with the situation where no specialized tool works for them. To ignore larger codebases requires you to ignore the generalized tools they fall back on.
> [...], and usually for no good reason whatsoever. There are a few good reasons, but they tend to be a small fraction of the whole problem.
An important distinction here: There's a lot of code that's absolutely useless, and has no good reason to exist... for solving your needs. This is very different from code that's absolutely useless, and has no good reason to exist. My pointless misfeature is someone else's core use case. And, it would seem, your pointless misfeature is perhaps my core use case.
And hey, that's cool. If tcc works for you, use it. But when people are using the multi-MLOC LLVM toolchain - it's not because software needs to get it's act together, but because it did get it's act together. I'm absolutely loving some of the tooling they're putting out, and wish I'd had it two decades ago.
And hey, perhaps current hardware performance sins (cough16GB max memory in 2016 for that pricecough) will be covered up by future software optimizations (by themselves, without any extra work on Apple's part) :). I imagine it'll involve more code though.
The issue I have is that people want desktop power in a laptop. Yes, I'd love to have the latest Nvidia chip in my pencil-thin MacBook but there are trade offs.
The 32gb ram issue. Well, they can design for the 99%, or they can design for the 1%. Their choice is pretty clear. The sales numbers are pretty clear. The vast majority of people don't use even 8gb of ram, let alone 16.
I would like to see a 32gb option, but Intel has not released the chip that Apple needs. That's on Intel.
I just ran some experiments with tcc: it compiled + ran 300KLOC in around 0.158 seconds. My system cc (clang+llvm) took 9.3 seconds, so roughly a factor 60 difference. And clang+llvm is considered fast by today's standards, languages such as Scala or Swift are typically at least an order of magnitude slower than that.
So compile times will improve when we make it a priority.
I agree. The age of hardware performance gains papering over software optimizations is definitely over. The developer world has to get used to it.
People also run a lot of code that "compiles" (not strictly converting to binary). Transpiling js, packaging assets, or just running spec suite. Any small performance we can get is much appreciated and over 2-3years will add up to something significant (justifying a large cost, which I never had a problem paying the Apple premium price).
Yea and then you open photoshop and try to do something non-trivial and 8gb vanishes and you start swapping like crazy.
Programmers often do NOT have the highest performance needs (unless you're dealing with native compilations of large projects, literally doing perf-work, etc).
> try to do something non-trivial and 8gb vanishes and you start swapping like crazy.
Perhaps you should stop trying to do all your intensive college assignments on a machine optimized for portability and use a proper workstation or desktop. You know, the "old" computers?
Let me go have a look at powerful up to date Mac desktops that I can purchase.
Oh.
----
Apologies for the snark. I think a lot of the backlash towards the new MBP is being caused by the uncertainty Apple has injected into its desktop line. Even if Apple wants to update their desktops, but for various reasons (e.g. Intel) cannot do so until next year, a simple statement saying that Apple will be updating the desktops soon would have quelled a lot of the concerns.
The "surprise" factor worked for Pros when Apple was updating its devices in a consistent and regular manner. Since they haven't been doing the same with their Pro Macs, they are being highly irresponsible by not giving their Pro users more insight into their future roadmaps.
> I think a lot of the backlash towards the new MBP is being caused by the uncertainty Apple has injected into its desktop line.
Agreed. The mediocre laptop offerings (nothing exists that surpasses my 2014 rMBP) and the complete jokestore that are the less-than-multiple-thousands desktop lines--which isn't to say that the Mac Pro isn't silly too, it's just so silly I can't imagine ever even considering it--mean that I'm probably moving off of OS X over the next two years.
It would be more cost-effective, at my full billable rate, to get back into the Hackintosh game and spend God-knows-how-long on that than to buy any Mac on the market right now. That's insane.
I mean as a graphics programmer I enjoy an i7, multiple graphics cards and 32 gb of ram and i still max out everything doing various tests while having an IDE open (chrome alone right now is consuming multiple gigabytes).
I'm not speaking for me, but general consumers who expect to be able to do photo editing, while browsing the web, while listening to music, and in lieu of photo editing, perhaps playing the occasional game. Not being able to service this easily with a top of the line model is frankly an embarrassment.
I finished college a long time ago and I worked for quite a few companies - not many of them with budget problems - and most of them gave employees laptops. Also I know of only a handful of people having desktops at home and the vast majority have them for gaming cause desktops can fit & power "real" graphics cards.
Laptops outsell desktops by roughly 1.5 to 1. Although sales are still in decline, around 113 million desktop PCs were sold in 2015. Most of those probably went into businesses.
Roughly 700 million desktop PCs have been sold over the past 5 years, and probably a large proportion of those are still in use.
They work faster, they are easier to repair and upgrade, they are cheaper to run, and they are far better ergonomically (1).
Companies like laptops if they can avoid giving users fixed desks. (Hotdesking more staff across fewer desks reduces costs.) If they're using laptops on fixed, personal desks then they are not very smart.
(1) Ergonomic problems with laptops can be reduced by providing risers and external keyboards, and sometimes by adding external monitors. These are extra costs.
I run my neural networks in EC2, or on my desktop at home that has a GTX 1080.
If you consider a whole Linux VM, webpack (also an instance of Node in the background), and gulp to be light use, then yes I think you're in the vocal minority of people who have some extreme expectations for a portable computer.
As with most programmers so isolated in the web bubble, you have no idea that you're describing light use. Yes, your usually-fully-idle virtual machine is light use. Yes, your marginal text processing is light use.
Sometimes, I need to render video. At one point, MBPs were more than sufficient for state-of-the-art video work on the fly. But time has marched on, and Apple has not. That's why people are pissed, and it's a reasonable state of pissedness given that these are professional machines. It's gotten to the point where I have ditched Final Cut entirely for Premiere just so I can run it on Windows on a machine that is adequately specced for professional work. I hate Premiere. Apple does not offer a product that isn't priced dumb-as-dirt that can actually run Final Cut adequately, though, so that's the only choice I have.
But, hell. The current lines of Mac spin up to near-screaming, even despite those special, so-quiet fans, when one watches a video, so I guess asking for performance when you make one is downright unprofessional.
I have seen a lot of creatives switch to Premiere from Final Cut Pro for reasons other than platform support, many still use a Mac. But they claim it is a more powerful video editing system. What is it about Premiere that you don't like? I'm curious because I'm considering both platforms.
I just really don't like Adobe's UI conventions across the board. They don't feel natural on either Windows or OS X and often stuff like dragging and dropping between applications doesn't do what I expect for completely random reasons. It's powerful stuff, but I wish it wasn't so obtuse.
> The current lines of Mac spin up to near-screaming, even despite those special, so-quiet fans, when one watches a video
Ugh, no they don't.
Video decoding is CPU intensive in Chrome and VLC. Video decoding in Safari and QuickTime uses negligible CPU resources. This difference is so striking that I abandoned Chrome. I use Safari, which I don't like, but 100% vs. 2% CPU usage it's so worth it.
Mpv has pretty good performance too, sometimes approaching QuickTime.
You yourself say that Safari is a worse experience.
Having to choose between "using a worse experience" and "having my laptop try to self-immolate" is not, historically, a choice Apple foists on its users.
(Yes, Chrome is third-party. Doesn't matter. Linux rightly gets flak when devices don't work because of third-party manufacturers, OS X can get flak when videos make Apple hardware conflagrant.)
Yeah, it's a strange situation. No idea why you're downmodded, but indeed YouTube serves nice content to Safari that can be decoded efficiently (hardware accelerated).
> "I do all this on 8GB ram on a macbook from 2012 and it runs fast and smoothl"
Either you found a marmaid MacBook or your idea of "fast" is different from mine. I had to upgrade my maxed out 2012 rMBP because even when I have only photoshop/sketch and chrome browser open it will struggle. Now I have the 2015 maxed out rMBP and whenever I watch YouTube, use photoshop/sketch, mamp and browser tabs with dev console open it just strugglea...
Well I don't like safari for web debugging and their dev console to edit elements is just much more cumbersome than one in Chrome, I've tried many times to go back to Safari but it was not as good for me as chrome
Yeah I agree, I do find Safari is MUCH faster than Chrome, even with things like Google's of Google Maps. I've also tried Safari's dev tools, and like you, I much prefer Google Chrome's dev tools. Also Google seems to be much more active in the web space then Safari.
Yeah definitely don't forget to add 8GB of RAM and an extra battery pack if you want to use Chrome. It consumes more than most operating systems just to show a few pages of information. Since I've banished it off my computer everything works a lot smoother and battery life is improved drastically.
Safari for basic stuff and Firefox when Safari doesn't cut it.
My 2012 thinkpad w530 already had 32GB. And it's usually fairly full.
windows vm + browser + a few JVMs + office + analyzing memory dumps... and you want some spare capacity for the disk cache. Some occasional photoshop too. Analyzing memory dumps probably is the most demanding thing I do regularly. But all those pieces add up either way.
A single VM, sure. I get by with 8GB RAM (not a Mac) and can easily handle that. For more complex architectures I use cloud instances. It would be nice to run as many VMs as necessary locally.
What is the purpose for which the "Pro" model is designed, with its limited memory? Other laptops on the market support double the memory, which is useful for numerous applications... video editing, analysis of large datasets, development of applications that require more than just a webserver.
I think they are falling in the "pumping specs" too, just not the same specs the vocal geeks want: they are pumping "thinner", "lighter" for no other reason than vanity?
Get back to me when you have to work on a Java/Oracle project. Oracle XE idling uses 1GB of RAM. The average Java process uses around 1GB (Eclipse, Tomcat, Gradle). Add a browser and a VM and I have to start stopping processes whenever I need to do something else otherwise I start swapping.
I was doing exact same type of work on macbook air for a few months. It was slow but it worked. Now I do it without issues on mbp 13. On 15 inch it would fly.
> I run a browser with 20 tabs, linux VM in the background, and webpack and gulp in the background.
Sounds like you do coding that does not really need much RAM. I don't think nearly all developers have your requirements. I was hoping that with new MBP. I could move my MongoDB/MS SQL Server to local virtual enviroment. For that I needed Virtual Windows Server which eats about 12-15 GB ram with Mongo and SQL instances running.
I have a 17" MacBook Pro from 2010 8gb ram. I boot in Windows 7, with 15 tabs open in FF and 3 instances of Visual Studio 2012 open as well as multiple Notepad++, Excel and runs smoothly. I really love the 17" screen.
> "Find me a single review that laments the thickness and bulkiness of the 2015 model."
There are plenty of reviews that blame Apple for not updating their design and only improving internals, and I don't really see how you can change a perfect (imo) laptop design unless you make it thinner. Nevertheless I agree with your points here, I would want to keep old design for 32gb ram and bigger battery
I can't share a link because it's on a podcast, but when the retina Macbook came out in 2015 both co-hosts of the show Cortex (https://www.relay.fm/cortex) talked about how after traveling with it for one trip, going back to the MacBook Pro was like putting a brick in your backpack.
NOW. These two independent creators are also hardcore minimalists and invest heavily into optimizing their iPad-based workflow, so their use cases aren't particularly relevant to the developers on HackerNews. However I do think they are VERY representative of a substantial subset of the Apple user base.
And unlike us, they have podcasts with hundreds of thousands of users to project their influence.
Ultimately, I'm not defending the new MBP direction. I think even to this class of creatives it misses the mark. But size does matter to them all the same.
It really makes you wonder how the MBP would have been received if it was called the MacBook Air Retina, or just MacBook 13"/15". Traveling with a laptop sounds like the scenario the MBA is perfect for, and I think there are actually many people on HN who do just that.
They should release a MacBook Fat, without the thin mindset, even with a bit of Panasonic rugged line influence. The Titanium industrial design added to the pro feel.
I've been using the new 13" for the last few days, and I'm surprised at how much I like the keyboard. I despised the one on the MacBook and figured I'd feel the same about this one, but the keys are much more responsive, tactile, and clicky. I don't feel like I'm tapping on a piece of metal with this one.
With the size/weight you saved, you can now carry a much nicer external keyboard if you really care. Personally I think the new keyboard is marginally nicer than the old one: more snap, but less travel. In that case, I’d rather have the thinner one.
But then again, in my opinion laptop keyboards have been crap ever since they decided laptops needed to be usable on a lap and couldn’t be 3 inches thick or weigh 10 pounds, sometime in the early 1990s. ;-)
(The IBM P70 and 5140, the Macintosh Portable, and the NEC Powermate Portable all had amazing keyboards. Toshiba and Zenith luggables of the same era also had nice enough keyboards. Of course, those machines aren’t exactly “laptops” by any reasonable standard.)
"carry another keyboard" is a bullshit excuse with a laptop. There is no way to feasibly use an external keyboard while on the train/plane or in many other situations where you actually rely on the portability of a laptop.
Laptops suck on modern no-legroom planes. Total ergonomic nightmare. An external keyboard on your lap hooked up to a smartphone or something is a much nicer way to handle any significant amount of typing.
I think a stand + split external keyboard at appropriate tent and tilt angles could be designed to clip to a laptop where the laptop is opened to a 135° angle and propped up at the back. Maybe more trouble than it’s worth though. Would take a lot of design effort, and would be a niche product to be sure.
Overall I think you just need to accept some level of compromise when typing on a plane or train. If the new Apple laptop keyboards bother you that much, get something else I guess.. Among people who have tried them opinions overall seem split. I know several people who much prefer the new Macbook Pro keyboards to the old ones. And several others who prefer the old ones. In my opinion (as a very snobby keyboard connoisseur) both are comparable – acceptable but uninspiring; same goes for all laptop keyboards since about 1992, most of which are even crappier than anything Apple has put out.
Have you tried the new MBP keyboard? It’s substantially different than the one from the 12" Macbook. (You still might not like it; it’s not my favorite either, but it’s definitely an improvement. Hopefully they’ll put the new keyboards on the next iteration of the 12" Macbook.)
Alright, it's time to make a confession: my "laptop" is actually just a desktop. It's plugged in 90% of the time and the other 10% is composed of 9% of time spent under 2 hours away from the plug and the last 1% is sitting in an airplane pretending I can get work done.
Does this sound familiar for anyone else?
Give me the 32GB memory and an extra few mm of thickness. I'll just keep it plugged in and not notice the difference.
Portable and powerful is PERFECT for digital nomads and business travellers. A portable powerhouse that can be thrown in a day bag and taken to cafe’s, coworking spaces, lugged through airports and around new cities.
But that’s not the “Pro Market"
Apple should have released this iteration as the new Macbook Air or dropped the Air and called it a “Macbook”. Nobody would have complained.
Then, released a new lineup of Macbook Pros around the same size as the previous generation and dropped quad core processor in the 13” model. Maybe even squeeze in a discrete GPU like the new GTX 1060 or GTX 1080. Nobody would have complained then.
This is probably the most sensible thing I've seen someone write on this topic.
It's absolutely a game of semantics with the current naming scheme, but you are completely right. And releasing an actual full powered thicker and heavier Pro line would keep their brand kudos amongst the vocal developer/media creator crowd.
Every time I come into a thread about the new MacBook Pro, I'm always being told that I'm apparently not a professional. And it kinda hurts a little bit.
Maybe it doesn't meet your particular needs, but insulting everyone who doesn't use 32GB+ of RAM on a day to day basis isn't very nice. Yes, saying "you're not a professional" is an insult to people who are very much professionals.
If you guys want a machine with multiple processors and 128GB of RAM and 5TB disk storage with terribly battery life, you should pressure Apple for a new desktop. The MacBook Pro is not and never has been a mobile workstation. It's a notebook first and foremost.
First of all, i’m pretty sure the Macbook Pro has always been a mobile workstation (and their only computer) for 10s of millions of people since it was released.
Second of all, This isn’t about you. nobody is saying you’re not a professional because this new Macbook suits your needs. It’s about the branding.
The whole “Heres our affordable, portable consumer laptops” and “Here’s our more powerful pro laptops” defined the brands. The “macbook/air” and “macbook pro” were branded for two different groups of users.
Now what’s happened is Apple combined them into the one machine and our preconceptions of those brands have been shattered.
Many including myself have been holding out for years for a portable Apple computer (13”) that can be a workhorse (Quad core) and by making the pro thin and light it’s meant that’s no longer possible. It should have just been a Macbook. Hence my previous post about keeping them segregated into two machines.
But that's wrong. All of that is wrong. Literally throughout Apple's entire history, everything you just said has been completely false.
Let's start with "they've combined them into one machine". Then why do the 12" and the Air exist? Those are the "consumer" devices. If what you're saying is true, the MacBook Pro and the 12" MacBook are the same machine. That's not true at all, there is a substantial difference.
And then let's tackle "the MacBook Pro has always been a mobile workstation". Which again, is completely not true. It's always been exactly the opposite of that. What I have sitting on my desk behind me is a mobile workstation. It's a Thinkpad W530. Go ahead and look up the specs, you'll see what I mean. 32GB of RAM, a quad core i7, a massive screen, and it weighs about three hundred pounds. It also gets 4 hours of battery life, and that's with the extended battery sticking out of the back. A MacBook has never been a mobile workstation. It's always been a notebook that's been as portable and battery-efficient as technology has allowed, while also being able to easily run the tools that most professionals require. Not once has Apple ever said "Pixar ditched their rendering farm for a single 13" MacBook Pro!"
I'm sorry if your preconceptions of the brand have been shattered. I'm also sorry to say that your preconceptions have always been wrong. You're upset because Apple didn't make a device that you were waiting for, but they've never made that device. So maybe instead of complaining that "the new MacBook Pro isn't made for professionals!" you can understand that your definition of professional doesn't necessarily line up with Apple's. It never has.
As much as that would be appreciated, its no longer Apple. Those users are typically building their own hardware to hackintosh spec instead - better than nothing but still many (myself included) would rather buy such a solution from Apple themselves as you say.
If Apple still feels the need to have a system for real professionals, then it has a choice: (1) upgrade the Mac Pro on a regular basis or (2) go back to a tower system.
The Mac Pro has proven to be a bit of a disaster, because it hasn't been upgraded for more than three years and users can't usefully upgrade it themselves. A rational Apple would just go back to doing towers. (Even with a tower, you can still handle external as well as internal upgrades.)
You're right that this is hackintosh territory. However, I've seen a lot of people switch to PC towers runing Windows instead. If they spend most of their time in Adobe programs, they are still using Adobe's UI. And users can boot/dual-boot into Linux if that meets their needs.
I can't see many reasons for "creative professionals" to stick with MacOS at the moment, no matter how much they like it. Even Final Cut Pro users recognize that Adobe is the industry standard, and there are several other decent video editors for Windows.
I don't travel as much anymore (I used to), but I still spend a lot of time working from cafes that don't have a power outlet, and right now I'm sitting next to a lake and watching the ducklings run around. Being able to work outdoors in sunlight is a huge improvement to quality of life.
That said - I would gladly take the 32GB and extra thickness. I'm running off a MBP mid-2012 as it is (bought in 2015), so I'm used to extra thickness & about 2kg weight. And even the 2012 gets a solid 7 hours battery life, whereas reviews say the TouchBar MBP model is struggling to manage 6 hours.
Not familiar to me, no. I have a desktop for desktop-style use, and guess what, I don't have to worry about it being limited to 16GB of RAM because it doesn't have to consider size, power consumption, or anything else that a laptop has to consider.
On the other hand, I also have a 13" 2015 MBP[1]. It is only ever plugged in when it needs charging. I bought it specifically for it's size and battery life, because, as ludicrous as this might sound, I want my laptop to be as portable as possible. I don't _want_ it to be plugged in and I don't want to feel like I've been working out when I've been carrying it.
I know, this is crazy talk, but might I suggest that many of the people complaining are doing so simply because they bought the wrong tool for the job? It sounds to me like an awful lot of the complainers would have been better served by an actual desktop computer.
[1] I had never even used OSX before, and own no other Apple products, but I bought a MBP based entirely on battery life and size, because it was the best option out there.
I'd like to see apple do what they do best, push a new bit of tech nobody else would get away with.
There are now external GPU chassis you can get. What would it take to have an external set of CPUs or massive block of RAM? Make the macbook a reasonably powered thing you can carry about but have a tower you can plug into that extends your processing ability massively.
Or something more radical, make a neat system for moving storage around. Make the vast majority of the hardware entirely interchangeable, so you can move to a new desk, go home, go wherever and just plug in your 10 gram chip. M2 drives are pretty tiny, that seems like a tech that's arrived. Allow me to use a lightweight, low power device while travelling then go and plug myself into a monster of a machine at home.
I don't understand the imperatives to make the machine thinner and increase battery life.
I would have paid for a 32 or even 64 GB model, but instead I'm going to delay my upgrade for 6-8 months so that I can see if something better than the new MBP comes along.
I am of the opinion that a Pro machine does not need to be the thinnest available model.
Lets be honest; If you want 'Pro' you just gotta build a tower yourself.
IMO there is no such thing as a 'Pro' laptop. I've owned MBPs, XPSs, MSI Gaming Laptops, and they all fall short. Especially 6ish months later when I want some extra oomph but NO; Laptop; At best you can maybe upgrade RAM / Disk but thats about it.
For me, 'Pro' is being able to max out anything, swap parts/upgrade when I want or need to. And this is only possible with a tower, hell even a mini atx build can kick anything Apple is selling out of the water. And you will always be able to upgrade at your own pace / price point.
For portable, I like my Chromebooks and do like the Macbook Air. But for the Air you gotta buy it maxed out, and with the Apple extended warranty.
>IMO there is no such thing as a 'Pro' laptop. I've owned MBPs, XPSs, MSI Gaming Laptops, and they all fall short.
You bought what I would all consider consumer laptops, and thusly feel 'pro' laptops dont exist? What you are describing are business laptops. Thinkpads, Latitudes, Precisions, Zbooks etc. You want a new wireless card, you can swap it in. Different screen model? if you venture outside the consumer market, there are varying levels of upgradability.
I will give you that many brands outside of Apple will allow you to swap the wireless card, maybe another keyboard (still their keyboard), but never would I want to attempt replacing a screen in a laptop.
But this reminds me of actually the real reasone why laptops will never be pro.
Pro is in the Peripherals!!
My monitors, keyboard, and mice are all things im super picky about. And dont want tied to and priced into the core of my computer. I've used the same mouse for over decade (Microsoft Intellimouse). And keyboards, when I find a good one it will stick with me for a while, but always trying new ones. I have recently upgraded all my monitors to 4ks, but before that I was fine with my few year old proarts.
Apples trackpad is A+, but their keyboard is a F for me. Biggest Grip, the LCTRL key was at the most left key. When I use macs I always have to use the full usb wired keyboard because of LCTRL.
All the other brands trackpads and keyboards are B- at best.
These are things that no single vendor can satisfy for me, and the lockin that's required for laptops just absolutely will never make them first-class/pro machines for me.
Anecdotally, my father used to think I wasted my time 'playing with computers' when I was growing up. He'd tell me stories about how at my age he was building cars from junkyard parts. From a time long ago when you could build a beautiful car in your garage with any number of parts and some hacky engineering. Later in life, I was able to explain how my computers and software and art was very much like him building his hotrods, decorating them with flaming skulls, and I think he finally understood my interest.
If you like laptops for reasons that I dislike them, that's fine.I still wouldn't call them 'Pro' Every part of them deprecates faster than any parts that you used to build a desktop. Any and Every part.
Laptops offer nothing but faster turnovers for the brands that sell them.
True. Unfortunately, Apple discontinued its tower, and that leaves you with two out-of date systems -- the Mac Pro and the mini -- that are not designed to be upgradeable.
This is a problem with proprietary systems like Apple, where you have no alternative hardware supplier. If Apple doesn't want to make it, you can't have it (unless you can Hackintosh it).
I'm not sure what they're optimizing for. If they had some bad ass machine that wasn't the thinnest machine in existence I'd still buy it. I own a pro and an air from the last generation and I think they suck. Give me something worth the bucks and tack on a few millimeters to make it happen. I absolutely will not pay for their current trajectory of lackluster stats and a small physical footprint. I need better. If that means bigger, they should get over it and deliver.
That's not really the point - other manufactures make laptops that are much more powerful than Apple. The ThinkPad P50 can be configured with a Xeon, 4K display and 64GB RAM for nearly the same price as the base 15" MacBook Pro.
Ok maybe it doesn't have all day battery life - but most people, especially people who want "Pro" hardware, probably only need a few hours max.
I've had an Air for two years, and I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I've used the full battery - all international flights and trains I've been on have had power sockets, so I can charge on the go. Plus thanks to USB-C, you can use a power bank to charge your laptop if you need more power:
Apple is no longer giving consumers a choice, before there was the MacBook (old one) if you wanted a more-affordable entry level machine, the Air if you needed ok performance but great portability, and the Pro if you wanted performance in a laptop package.
Now everything is lumped together with portability as the #1 priority. If Apple had just launched this as a new version of the Air I don't think anyone would be complaining so much.
Other manufacturers don't make computers as good. If they did, you'd have bought one of theirs by now instead of complaining about Apple's offerings.
Part of the reason why they make bad computers is they cave and make design decisions based on what random users ask. Users who potentially have no knowledge or experience in system design.
As the famous quote goes, if you ask people what they want, they'd tell you a faster horse.
> Other manufacturers don't make computers as good. If they did, you'd have bought one of theirs by now instead of complaining about Apple's offerings.
That would be a reasonable conclusion if I could run macOS on these computers. If I could develop iOS apps on a Razer Blade without running a fragile Hackintosh setup, I would have ordered one already. (Plus a sticker to cover up the gross green logo.)
Not sure why people are downvoting you, but yes you are right. That's the reason why so many people are frustrated about this. I don't want a "Dell XPS Pro" I want a Mac. I hope this model is just a stepping stone (apparently even the 13" has thermal support for current gen quad-core CPUs) for something a lot more powerful next year.
I downvoted him because PC manufacturers make really good laptops these days. It's not the days of hollow-body plastic things like the old Dell Studios (my last PC laptop, from about 2008). The world's caught up. I probably would already own a Razer Blade Pro if I wouldn't be embarrassed by that green thing on the lid. Sager makes really solid machines that feel good to use, too, and right now I'm strongly considering a Thinkpad P50.
Apple makes kind of above-average computers, and ones that fall down for current-day, up-to-date professional uses. They make a better operating system. The reason people are pissed is because Apple used to do both, and it's rapidly becoming the case that the lousy hardware and high prices aren't balancing out the operating system. If not for already being comfortable, it would probably be more effective for me to switch between Windows and Linux as necessary on PC hardware (both desktop and laptop) than to use OS X anywhere. That's why I'm probably going to have to switch, and that's why I'm kinda mad.
Estimated battery life is quite bad for it. This is I'm assuming the base configuration with 16gb ram, so if you jack that up to 32 or 64, battery probably drops significantly more.
It's these details of actual use that drive me to apple, as I've tried thick, full of ports, jacked up laptops with touch screens and in practice they almost always never work well.
Apple's 10 hour battery life estimate assumes that you are just browsing the web. If you want to do "pro" activities put the CPU/GPU under any sort of sustained load, the smallness of the battery will become apparent very quickly (see for instance http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/11/review-cheapest-2016-ma...)
Sort of. If what you are doing is CPU bound then the Precision line has more options with their Xeon CPU.
But, if anything you do could even be mildly improved with GPU support you're better off looking elsewhere. Most of the precision line are on some old Quattro's which are simply annihilated but the new released GTX 10 series GPU's.
Most of the base line CPUs are the lower 6300HQ models too, rather than the 6700HQ you get in others like the XPS 15 line or nearly all of the gaming laptops now released, so you have to bump the price straight away to get comparable baseline performance on many other models.
I'm very much looking around at the moment for a new laptop as a MacBook Pro (2010) refugee and have looked at way too many to list here.
So do consider the Precision line but it's certainly not the 'best' one out there.
Incidentally, one of the best I've seen is actually the new Razer Blade (if you put a skin or cover over that horrible logo) or even the Alienware 13 with the OLED screen.
Whilst these are traditionally 'gaming' setups, the Razer Blade certainly has the style and form factor to mimic the MacBook and the Alienware with it's toned down styling looks far more like the business Dell's of yesteryear. The Alienware also has what almost all reviewers/users state to be an exceptional keyboard (something where the XPS line has not done so well).
As for upcoming models, the Q1 2017 release of the XPS 15 would most likely come with a GTX 1050 (unless they copy Razer and find some Vapour Chamber cooling magic and stick a GTX 1060 in there) and it'll also probably have one of the first of Intel's Kaby Lake quad core mobile series too.
So it may be worth waiting if you can to see what comes in the next few months as there is a MASSIVE amount of change occurring with Nvidia's new GPU and Intel's new CPU offerings.
Well, I'm tired of an employee coming up to me and saying "this thing is going so slow" and it's just Firefox and some other things open. The hardware can't keep up with today's software demands. Whether it's a memory constraint or otherwise. Apple today doesn't "just work". It's not like I'm asking my employees to render the next Toy Story. We're talking emails and opening pages in a browser.
I now do all my work on a beefy box running Ubuntu, as I did prior to my last year's stint in trying Apple hardware full time. I'm transitioning who I can onto similar setups and moving away from the laptop-as-the-main-computer setup. They just aren't good enough for it.
> I'm transitioning who I can onto similar setups and moving away from the laptop-as-the-main-computer setup. They just aren't good enough for it.
Beefy desktops also have much better ergonomics (unless laptops are used on a riser with an external keyboard etc).
This should mean fewer computer-induced injuries and fewer courses of expensive physiotherapy in the future.
I've needed two courses, after foolishly working full-time on laptops. As a result, I've gone back to desktops. The superior performance, lower prices, and the fact that they last much longer are extra benefits...
This was exactly what I was shooting for, myself. I needed something powerful but portable. Ultimately what I got was very portable but not very powerful. "Time to reboot!" should not be part of the daily routine.
> I am of the opinion that a Pro machine does not need to be the thinnest available model.
the "pro" in pro just means "professional", as in "connected to one's profession". It does not mean "professional computer-user" or "professional computer programmer"; it does not mean "this is the most powerful thing on the market", it means "you can stake your livelihood on the reliability and versatility of this tool".
A lot of professionals use their laptop every single day for work, and they commute with it every single day. Lightening the load in your bag matters to a lot of professionals. Making sure you can get through an entire day of meetings on a single charge matters to a lot of professionals.
Anyway, if this sounds like apple fanboy apologism: I'm not buying a new MBP. I've even gone as far as turning down a free one from my employer. It offers me nothing over my existing MBP, which will in all likelihood be the last Apple laptop I ever buy.
The point is: this computer is not designed for programmers, and that's ok.
When I switched from a Thinkpad W530 to my 2015 13" rMBP, I was able to fit my laptop in my backpack along with three changes of clothes. With one purchase, I was able to leave my suitcase at home and bring just one carry-on bag with me on business trips.
It was a game changer. I can get through airports quicker, I can pop my computer in and out of my bag anywhere I want. I can keep it on all day a client sites without having to plug it in. I only need to carry one bag with me when I travel Monday-Thursday. Prior to the MacBook, I was carrying a backpack with my laptop and a suitcase with my clothes, because they wouldn't fit together into a carry-on-sized bag. Now it's just one backpack.
I can't stress enough how much of an improvement that has had on my life. I wouldn't want to sacrifice anything: not a minute of battery life, not a centimeter of thickness, not a gram of weight. Every measurement matters when you're traveling.
I have a laptop purely because it's portable. It has to strike the right balance between performance and portability of course. To counter your vocal opposition, I think the new macbook strikes that balance perfectly.
Longer battery life, and smaller battery also have benefits. Particularly, a smaller battery can be charged faster. Lower power consumption allows this, and their design decisions such as limiting RAM to 16 was made to achieve this.
I run a linux VM and do dev work and even on 8GB is fine. I'm a programmer, and technical guy, but I understand that Apple can still make better computer building decisions than me, or any other nerds who just like to ramp up spec numbers in their custom build PC.
8GB is most definitely not fine for anyone who works with media.
Considering the number of people who make YouTube videos, memes, SoundCloud tracks, web pages, blog posts, photo uploads and shares, and so on - that's a lot of users. 16GB means they're going to be waiting around the disk to thrash its way through a swap whenever they switch between applications.
My iMac has 32GB, and it's a bare minimum for comfortable thrash-free media creation.
Remember when media and creation was an Apple thing? That.
Not defending the MBP, but at least they have SSDs that can push 3.1GB/s [1] which is much better than most devices, esp. spinning rust. What Apple has done on the iPhones with their SSD's bus (moving off eMMC to a much faster bus) is also a big performance boosting move, really helps to keep RAM costs down now with the ongoing RAM shortage.
Because it's a MacBook; with batteries in it. The value is in the mobility. If you don't need the batteries and mobility, you could buy a Mac Mini, iMac or Mac Pro.
In 2016, "buy a desktop" is no longer the only answer when talking about professional work. Like--check out what Sager offers. You can buy a fully kitted-out 17" notebook from them that meets or exceeds the top-end iMac in every respect (equal CPU, twice the RAM, significantly better GPU) except pixel density (a mere 170 versus 216) for a thousand dollars less than the top-end iMac--and you can carry it with you.
It's not uber-thin and light, no; this is a literal desktop replacement and weighs twelve pounds. It's not the machine I'd buy, because I don't need a GTX 1080 in a portable machine--but that machine is equivalent to Apple's best, actually-serious desktop while being cheaper and portable! It goes without saying that you can scale down to something that's a little more reasonable for a physical-effort-averse nerdy type and still get something that's very favorable compared to Apple's offerings, both in terms of perf and price.
Apple missed the memo: you really can have both, these days. Maybe they don't care about that audience anymore, and that's their prerogative, but it's why I'm probably bouncing back to Windows/Linux. (Dual-booting. Ew.)
But they didn't upgrade the Mini, iMac, or Mac Pro. The Mac Pro has been the current model for at least two years. The iMac is a hack that uses two logical display panels to produce the 5K resolution, because there isn't enough bandwidth for a single one. The Mini is nearing the 3 generations old mark.
Why even mention the way the iMac display works? Using the machine you would never know and its a very nice computer. The complaints about the mini and pro are legit but there is barely anything to complain about with the iMac.
It will matter once Apple decides to drop support for the current iMac. (Who knows, maybe the ARM switch will eventually happen? The G5 iMacs became obsolete over night when the Intel switch happened.)
As it stands, you can neither recycle it as an external display nor can you run Linux on it at full resolution.
Not really a "pro" complaint - just something to keep in mind if you plan to hand it on.
>> Because it's a MacBook; with batteries in it. The value is in the mobility.
For some people. But you can also look at a laptop as being the ultimate "all-in-one" PC.
The only cable you need to plug in is the power cable. For a lot of people, that's more convenient than having to deal with a monitor, keyboard, mouse and desktop with the associated mess of cables and added desk space. That a laptop is portable and runs on a battery is gravy.
> I don't understand the imperatives to make the machine thinner and increase battery life.
Then why all this fuzz? Why did the MacBook become so popular among professionals and programmers?
It's certainly never been the most powerful laptop on the market.
I'm not sure people are willing to admit it, but I think the reason the MacBooks have been so popular, even among programmers, is precisely because they've always pushed the boundary on being thin, sleek and portable.
Maybe you don't think the few mm they shaved off this time matters. But if they didn't have this attitude, they would still be the same size and weight they were 20 years ago.
I really appreciate the thinness of my current MBP when I haul my previous MBP around. I wonder though, where's the limit on this move to thinness? At what point do they stop balancing it with the other things we like about these machines? I've already lost some travel in the keyboard. I'm not too excited about the newer keyboards with considerably less travel.
Since the latest release, I've found that mentally substituting "Deluxe" for "Pro" helps to clarify Apple's design choices. I just can't see how a machine without USB non-C or display ports can be meant for professionals. I'd gladly pay for a heavier, thicker machine to have those things (and to avoid the dongles).
I think you’ve nailed it - this is a branding problem more than anything else. They have tried merging the Macbook Air and the Pro into one computer and its just pissed off both fanbases.
If they had just called these the Macbook 13” and 15” everybody would have been impressed.
Three laptops - Macbook 12”, Macbook 13” and Macbook 15” feels more Apple to me than this current frankenstein of brand names “Macbook, Macbook Pro, Macbook Pro w/ Touch Bar”
The Intel chipset being used supports the following kinds of RAM: DDR3 RAM, Low Power DDR3 RAM (LPDDR), and DDR4 RAM. However, LPDDR3 only goes up to 1600 megahertz in speed, but Apple uses 1866Mhz RAM. How is this possible? That is because there yet another RAM standard, known as LPDDR3E (E for enhanced) RAM, that does go up to 1866Mhz.
LPDDR4 is not supported by Intel’s CPU, and the DDR4L (another low voltage RAM type) standard is not finished yet. So desktop class memory (plainly spoken DDR4) would be the only option if they wanted to go past 16GB.
I don't follow the argument here. Why not just put another 16GB of LPDDR3E on the board?
It's literally hiding right there on every link you provided. Let's just blame everything on Apple, am I right!?! It's not like Intel hasn't hampered previous Apple products with arbitrary limitations... http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/faq/macboo...
Funny you’ve linked an article from 2008.
The same year, Intel has made two CPUs, L7500 and L7700, exclusively for Apple to power their then-new MacBook Airs: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2422
If Apple wanted more energy-efficient RAM for their MacBook's, with their volumes, Intel would be happy to help.
Intel is only so flexible. They didn't make new cpus they accelerated the development of chip packages by a few months so the installed processor could take up less room.
>If Apple wanted more energy-efficient RAM for their MacBook's, with their volumes, Intel would be happy to help.
The lack of support for the LPDDR3 greater than 16GB is a problem in the memory controller. Intel would have to respin the silicon to fix this issue for DDR3 when they are moving to DDR4. Intel is not going to fix an silicon issue on a product(Skylake) when they have already released the successor(Kabylake).
I would guess that it would require more than one vendor, even one as large as Apple, to request it aggressively earlier in the dev process for something like that to get done, because of the amounts of QA required.
I would further guess that 4 DIMMs, more than just memory controller support, might have required too much precious board space - which, when combined with the power requirements and additional feature enhancement requirements for Intel, might have made it a nonstarter.
That's the big question, right there, indeed. This is an artificial limit by Intel, after all. 16GB DIMM DDR3 modules do exist, it's just that Intel put an assert into the firmware to not allow for those.
It would make for a great pro laptop and I'm not joking at all, especially since there's no other way to get ECC support from Intel.
There are issues with that though, at least in Skylake:
* Mobile Xeon now require Xeon-decidated chipsets (C23X) which AFAIK don't exist in mobile form (and thus have a TDP ~double that of the regular mobile skylake chipsets).
* The mobile Xeon range (15X5Mv5) is very limited with just two Iris Pro 580 and two Intel HD parts.
* While the 1575Mv5 is higher-specced than any non-xeon mobile chip (3.0/3.9, graphics 0.35/1.1) it's also twice as expensive as the 6970HQ, which is already a $600 part.
I'm sure they've focus grouped this to death. Everyone wants battery life. It differentiates the product and sells computers.
Many people claim to need >16GB, but many of those folks really don't. The folks who need to run VMs (the biggest group, IMO) have workarounds.
The folks left are a small number and have alternatives, mostly in the cloud. And they make the Mac Pro to address those folks, although obviously that's a flawed product as well.
I know quite a few people who require >16GB, and not one of them is a power user nor do they use a VM. What they do is edit large amounts of 4K video in FCP, and they're rather screwed without an actual MacBook Pro.
No, there are no cloud options for them, they need the RAM for the video. No, the Mac Pro isn't a viable option for them at that price, nor is it portable.
I'm pretty sure they don't give a damn about battery life, either. They do their editing at a desk, and then take the MBP with them.
So, for now, they're stuck with old models until there's a better one, or they spend a fair amount of money building a new pipeline and purchasing new software.
What old models? As far as I know there aren't any older MacBooks that support more than 16GB of RAM either.
If you're going to compare to desktops, start with the iMac, which is "only" a year old at this point, unlike the Mac Pro which is several :(. The iMac with 5K display starts at $1,800 and is configurable to 32GB RAM, while the MacBook Pro 15" starts at $2,400, and then you probably want an external display too. (That doesn't include the rather high price of actually configuring the iMac for 32GB, but its RAM is [still] user-upgradeable, so better to buy it somewhere else.) Actually, considering that the Mac Pro starts at $3,000, which is not that much more than $2,400, I'm not sure why you think the price puts it out of range...
But I definitely understand why you'd want it in a laptop.
Even VMs can be run on these laptops. It takes effort to create them right. My clients routinely use machines with 4GB of RAM and need VMs to do development (We're in India). So we've made our VMs smaller and easier to install. The nice thing about that is when I demo to folks in Europe/US/Japan. Our stuff simply files on their hulking huge 16GB machines. Of course it's not free ride, one has to carefully eliminate packages on the guest VM that are not strictly necessary and carefully reduce the size of the image. Also they need to to avoid doing really large data computation on their VMs.
So your clients trade the cost of 4GB RAM (maybe a day or two worth of developer time) for having developers constantly tweak Linux images to run on a laptop with 4GB RAM? This is beyond simply removing packages, because you're talking about memory, not just disk space.
Actually, we (or more accurately our software automation) tweaks the images. You're right about RAM. Part of what we do when we 'tweak' is move memory intensive processes to either the cloud or a datacenter. Our client's developers just install and use the VMs as they normally would. No tweaking on their part needed. So our clients are trading the time of their developers and cost of upgrading entire teams to fancy machines, to paying us to deal with the pain of tweaking images and dealing with the devops. Most of their developers are doing web development. But a lot of them want to replicate the entire stack for themselves on their local machines. So we enable some of that by simply having the automation create dedicated dbs etc for them on shared/cloud infra and create just we webdev environment in their local VM. For ourselves, Wwe use automation (and build it) and some nice hardware to do the development (Definitely not laptops for devops automation). But then we're only 3 people. So even though each of us has several workstations, servers and laptops at our disposal, our clients don't need such expense for each of their developers. Works out well for both parties. :-)
Eh, it shouldn't take much effort.
Put Arch (or something similar), use openbox or LXDE for a reasonably useful GUI and you have an image that takes ..maybe.. 100 megs when idle.
You do not have to do this from scratch each time, just clone the disk, or even better have a script that generates these images modulo some parameters.
Server VMs shouldn't require a window manager. They also shouldn't be idle during testing though, and I would think 512 MB is a reasonable minimum for doing anything useful. Double that for a database.
My point is that you can get a laptop with 8GB RAM instead of 4GB and should pay for itself within a couple days.
...and yes, I'm aware this doesn't need to be done from scratch every time :)
It's still a waste of time if you need to reduce a standard minimal Linux install whatsoever (ISO via Packer, Vagrant, Docker, whatever the case may be)
I agree. there is no way they focus grouped this. I'm sure it was just Jony Ive saying "make it thinner. remove some buttons" and the engineering staff had to figure out how to do it.
This is why I built a hackintosh last week. 64GB, 4.5ghz OC, 6GB CPU. I'll keep trudging along with my 2012 MBP when I travel, but considering I work from home 80% of the time it was more important to optimize that time.
FWIW, building one is far easier than it used to be. Everything is working great, took me about an afternoon to get it there. Watching Photoshop open as quickly as Sublime text will never get boring.
How is Xcode support nowadays? I got a Hackintosh VM working circa 2013 but had a lot of problems getting the latest version of Xcode to function at all.
The market forces around laptops would seem to be a ripe area for serious academic study. I honestly can't find a laptop I _want_ to buy only ones I weigh silly trade-offs. (to be fair: my biggest complaint is around the lack of keyboard choices). It seems that the market desires either can't drive laptop options, or the market is vastly different than I perceive. For example: Why did it take so long for 720 screens to die as an option? For $50 more you get a 1080. I watched this for 6 years (2009 to 2014) and really can't fathom it.
Now... this is for Windows based machines, and I'm sure the forces are different for Apple, but it would be lovely to read a serious study on this. I suspect there is something along the lines of cost and supply chain factors dominating the "refresh cycle" but this used to be handled by different product lines with wildly different configurations. (it still kinda is... Alienware vs Inspiron vs Yoga vs T vs P series but Apple seems to buck this trend completely) Anyway... I just need the cathartic release of posting (venting) with these laptop articles.
My theory behind this is that the most efficient functioning market needs intelligent buyers and sellers. The buyers have to be able to discern what the specs mean, what the quality of the parts are, what the expected lifetime is, and with computers not only that, but they have to be able to evaluate the software options (Windows vs OS X, malware subsidized laptops versus not)? Even explaining malware to a layman is difficult.
So you had the two markets, business and professional consumers who knew what they were buying, and then regular consumers who mostly cared about price but are also swayed by large numbers (more GB, more HZ, bigger screen, more software a.k.a. malware).
Then I think the tide sort of turned in the past decade where even the common populace had realized Windows consumer laptops were full of crap that caused it to run slow and unexpectedly and people noticed Apple's laptops were more consistent with user experience (which they were), so now Apple has a reputation of being the no nonsense brand (which they deserve). Of course, now Apple can also charge a premium for this so you see people with disposable income sticking to Apple's ecosystem, and then the rest of the OEMs fight for price conscious consumers and getting barely any profit out of it.
Obviously for Apple, keeping things simple keeps their operating costs down, so they don't need to cater to every purchaser, and they probably decided that now they're the default brand to purchase if you have the money, they don't need to waste resources chasing after a small segment of the market looking for extremely high specifications.
Companies use projections for how well the line up will perform when they refresh it. They might be optimizing for different factors so the underlying logic is not always obvious but you can get a fair idea about where they are coming from if you visit a big box retailer during a weekend and just watch the sales interactions that are taking place. The 'average' consumer's needs are vastly different from the HN crowd, and even among such 'average' consumers preferences can vary widely by geography (primarily because of the difference in income) - something that companies other than Apple try to cover with product lines.
I wonder if it would be possible to design a system which would power down some of the memory when not plugged to a power source. I do all my dev on an MBP and would be more or less fine if the memory-intensive things were only available when plugged in.
That said, I don't really feel like 16gb limits me in any way except for doing data processing, but that should be happening on the cluster anyways.
1. OSs are generally unaware of the details of memory controller configuration, everything is preconfigured by firmware. Apple's vertical integration could help here, but they would probably need help from Intel and it would work only in OSX.
2. It's not the case that if you install four 8GB sticks they will be mapped at 0-8G, 8-16G, etc. and the OS can simply move data from one area to another. For performance, data are striped RAID0-style across all modules. They would have to disable this.
3. I don't know if OSX supports non-identity VM-mapping of kernel memory pages. Linux for example doesn't afaik. Without this it's impossible to move arbitrary kernel objects because you can't find and update all pointers pointing to them.
> Even if it weighed 10 kilos and cost $10k I would still buy it.
> (To show you exactly what I mean in terms of personal needs, I recently rendered a music video in HD using a neural net called Style app. Due to the 16GB RAM limitation it took several days and wrote 20.44 Terabytes to my drive in swap space (yes, over 20,000 gigabytes). This would have been an order of magnitude faster on a system with 32GB of RAM).
If your rendering video and can afford a $10k computer, then you should be using a Mac Pro. You can get a 2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache and 64GB of memory for around 8.5k.
I don't know of a cloud provider that rents OS X machines do you? OS X is needed for Final Cut Pro, etc. If you're using Adobe Premier then you could use Microsoft Azure or another cloud provider that supports Windows.
Depends on how the workload is split and such. Using AWS for video encoding is actually quite viable as long as Amazon don't charge for incoming bandwidth and dirt cheap spot instances could be found at the right time of the day.
Cloud render farms have been a thing in CGI for nearly a decade now. It can - sometimes - be cheaper to buy time than to buy hardware.
But there are a lot of disadvantages. The process only really works for final renders. All the creative work needs to be fast and local, but thumbnail renders don't always give you enough detail to make good decisions.
It doesn't work for audio, because audio isn't great with low-quality previews and often needs hands-on changes.
It doesn't work for many kinds of ML - not unless the render machine has the latest graphics cards.
It doesn't work for renders with huge asset libraries spread around a LAN.
And so on. Basically there is a list of use cases, but it's not even half of all possible use cases.
Meanwhile dual-Xeon servers have really started to kick ass. These are workstation grade machines with high four and low five figure prices. You can have up to 48 independent cores on a dual-CPU board, which is excellent for video rendering.
Or you can get a blade rack. Depending the project, they can be better value than an off-prem cloud account. (Sometimes).
Apple has turned its back on this space. I don't entirely understand why. Xserve had real potential, but they decided to go dumbed-down consumer instead.
In terms of Xserve, I think it made sense to drop it. If you're buying a server, nearly all applications make more sense using Linux and commodity hardware. The exception are desktop based (GUI) applications which Mac Pro targets. There really is no viable market for a Mac Server.
I'd imagine the latency of running a video editor in the cloud would be a pain, also transferring hundreds of gigabytes of raw video information into the cloud isn't insignificant.
It suited my needs so well that I switched to a monthly rental. 100E/month.
Then it suited my needs so well that I switched to a yearly rental. 1000E/year.
(taxes included)
So the blame is on Intel, not Apple. What does it matter? Apple is a big enough customer of Intel's that their needs should have been accommodated in the chip requirements before they were designed. Either way it makes no difference to the pro customers who need >16GB.
Of course the computer can always be improved. But the point is Apple is improved it the best they can, and certainly better than any competing manufacturer.
The weird thing is that Apple did not use all the space they possibly could for the battery. Have a look at the teardowns. There is room to put ca. 5% more battery. Supposedly they wanted to stay below 3 pounds.
That is the amount the other RAM type would have used...
So this was likely more about weight than battery life.
I really like machines with lots of battery life. I do lots of data work/compiling code and if something advertises 10hrs of battery life, this means it will definitely get at least three under heavy workloads, so its something that will work for me.
In the pro video camera space the mid range cameras and up are modular, so you have an imaging device which is just a cage with a sensor in it to which you attach storage, lenses, monitors, handles, etc.
There must be similar things in the pro laptop space, but it would have to be a hackentosh.
Interesting, I wanted my 27-inch iMac to have a builtin battery, so that it doesn't crash when there's a power cut. Even a five-minute runtime is enough, for it to shut down in an orderly manner. I have a UPS, but it would be better if the computer had it inbuilt, like a laptop. That's one of the advantages of a laptop for me.
I'd also like an 18- or 19-inch laptop with an Ultra HD screen. Apple could put in the biggest battery they're allowed to (100W in the US, for flights) and let it have whatever battery life it has. I think of it being portable in the sense of moving it to another room in the house, say to watch a movie in my bedroom, or to get work done in my home office, not that I'll take it with me when I go out.
If you can fit an iMac into your backpack/luggage, you could probably also fit a screen and a Mac mini in there.
I've traveled with a similar setup. The Mini has the additional benefit that you can keep it in your hand luggage when flying and governments can't randomly fiddle with hardware in your checked-in luggage. (Look at my shiny tinfoil hat.)
Provided you can provide enough wattage, I'm sure you could. A bunch of 18650s hooked up to a USB-C power delivery controller... I bet someone will hack something together.
I'm confused about what you want. What would you change about an iMac to make it 'portable'? It's already easy to carry. Do you want a laptop form factor? In that case what distinguishes it from a macbook with a dead battery?
> No battery means more space for other components, and removes the design pressure to optimise for battery life.
But what would you actually change? I wouldn't want to add any components, and the iMac doesn't seem to have better specs.
The weight of the battery could be removed but it's already light enough for that to not matter.
> And no, an iMac is not easy to carry.
Compared to a laptop of the same screen size, I'd rate an iMac pretty high on carryability. (The sizes sold today are irrelevant to a theoretical 'portable iMac'.)
I'm on AC like 90% of the time, and afer a year much to my surprise my laptop battery has hugely degraded performance.
I would've thought when you're on AC, the power can completely circumvent the battery and put no wear on it. I remember in the age of replaceable laptop batteries, I could replace the battery while connected to AC (or run without a battery) no problems
Pretty much everything degrades lithium ion battery performance. Charging, discharging, being fully charged, being too hot, being thought about too much or too little, etc. If it's plugged in, it's probably hot (running in full-power mode) and fully charged... this kills the battery.
Batteries have a certain amount of slow discharge, even when they aren't running anything. People like seeing a full battery all the time, but I don't think it's very good for the battery's life to keep it constantly topped off.
My HP ZBook is almost always on battery, since early 2014. Battery life is the same as it was when I bought it, some 3 hours when doing meetings with customers. I didn't buy it for battery life but for ease of upgrading components and 32 GB of RAM.
The real why is: Because we say so, you will buy it anyway.
Its cheaper(no slot) and easier(same production line) to manufacture, and as a bonus forces users to upgrade earlier, not to mention planned obsolescence. Same goes for the SSD.
Anybody want to guess how an official Apple data recovery procedure looks like in case of soldered SSD and no cloud backup? I can tell you how - there isnt one, just like with phones.
>"However, LPDDR3 only goes up to 1600 megahertz in speed, but Apple uses 1866Mhz RAM. How is this possible? That is because there yet another RAM standard, known as LPDDR3E (E for enhanced) RAM, that does go up to 1866Mhz."
Probably because its single channel. They bump voltage and freq to catch up in performance.
If they would choose 2x16 and lower freq, voltage resulting performance would be even better with similar power usage.
Apple prefer to make more money. They use power of brand to sell overpriced products to clueless crowd. Just go apple store to see audience, most people there do not even know what is RAM.
Not sure I agree with you. I'm here because I'm moving into the tech world but I'm coming from a background in photography.
Nearly all my friends in that world (me included) use topped out MacBooks for portable stuff and the video folks are using Mac Pros or hackintosh's. They certainly need more RAM, I know at least two guys who would have killed for 64GB RAM in a Macbook for their 4k video work. And I could certainly use it to speed up batch operations of hundreds of images, or even to be able to basically use the laptop when pushing around several 24mp RAW images in photoshop or even use a single RAW edit on a 42mp file from a Sony A7r2 which utterly killed my current MacBook with 8GB RAM.
I see loads of retorts like 'just use a desktop for the heavy lifting stuff' but that's so ignorant of the requirements on some markets. Needing to edit on the go is essential for many creators, especially for location shoots, and not even particularly complex ones, so power in a portable package is absolutely essential to folks well outside the 'developer' or tech world.
No one I know is thinking about getting the new MacBook. Some are hoping for next years update but others who are running older models and need an upgrade now are now casting around for alternatives.
They may know their market, but their market might not be what we think it is. It may be their market is moving to be like their phone market with a significant portion buying the brand jewellery Apple carries.
So I guess I'm saying that there is a large segment of media creators (who are often suckers like me for the styling of the Apple laptops) who are now not seemingly part of Apple target market, and that might be bad for the wider Apple brand.
I'm not particularly beholden to any manufacturer and nor are most of my friends. They go where they need to to get the kit that lets them do their job. There's an elastic period where a few issues can be overlooked but for me and others coming from this creation world the limit has been reached.
But didn't the video world already switch to Dell over two years ago because Apple could not keep up with high res video editing?
I might be totaly wrong, but I think the real pro world doesn't look for a nice looking tool but for one that does the job. That's why I think +16GB users already use other brands.
I kind of feel like Apple's design philosophy is off. It's not like the Oxo brand of having tools that are easy to use.
- I still can't hold my iPhone 6 without it slipping out of my hand (and I even have a case)
- My Macbook Pro Unibody is very sleek but it just slides off my lap because the bottom surface is so smooth.
- Off-boarding useful connections like USB, HDMI, DisplayPort etc meaning you have to purchase and carry around a bunch of dongles for whatever tiny saving they get from the battery / footprint.
- The new Macbooks are, as always choosing sleekness over just making a laptop that is more powerful than they've made over the last 4 years.
- People are complaining about the trackpad in the new MBP not having space to rest their wrists.
etc etc
They seem to just be optimizing for design's sake and not really considering the use case of what people use the computers for. It's starting to be a great little sleek computer for an executive to put in their carry-on and less like a strong office computer that can do hard work (for me it's software engineering) and be good enough to USE ALL DAY.
I'm basically going to run my 2008 Mac Pro desktop until it completely seizes up. It's been constantly upgraded since then, and is still going strong. When the day comes, I'll have to make the decision on whether to continue with MacOS, because nothing is going to replace this anytime soon apparently.
Be that as it may, I'd sacrifice some battery life to have the option of 32GB of RAM.
The moment you need to start running Windows VMs on top of OSX along with Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc., that 16GB limit becomes incredibly aggravating.
Battery life is an especially crappy excuse when you consider that most of the time I'm running on outlet power - it's very rare that I don't have access to a power point for 5 - 6 hours at a time.
And lest we forget, this is a machine called the MacBook Pro. Pro, as in, for the use of professionals. And professionals need more system RAM. Hello Apple, are you getting this?
I'd also like an option for a 2TB SSD and more (not less) ports, particularly USB, because I don't want to have to carry around a pile of dongles everywhere with me that all too easily become lost. Remember: the machine is called the MacBook PRO.
Or you know, they could just remove a non necessary component eating a lot of power - like that powerhungry screen they added on top of the keyboard no-one asked for.
A lot of these fights seem to revolve around the word Pro. I'm a professional: I've worked with computers and software my whole life, and I am very good at it.
I don't think I'll particularly need 32GB of RAM or USB ports on my laptop. Does this mean I'm not a true professional? Real men need 32GB and USB?
That said, I'd probably opt for 32GB and a bit more weight.
That's a fair point and it wasn't my intent to start a "real men need X" style of discussion. Nevertheless, VMs, and particularly Windows VMs with VS and the rest - at least on the kind of systems I always seem to end up working with - are resource hungry. I'm not suggesting that 32GB is for everyone, but I'd at least like the option available knowing that I might be trading some battery life by selecting it.
(Worth knowing about the 2TB option - thanks for the tip. I refreshed last year when 1TB was the top end. Fortunately I think the drive is still user-upgradeable.)
And I'm not disputing that. Different people have different needs. What I'm suggesting is the option of 32GB. That way at least you have a choice, and can make it according to what's more important of you.
I am divided on this. I think we as the software industry have serious performance issues, maybe except for some legitimate use cases like number crunching, video editing etc.
I don't know of a non-trivial Rails app which uses less than a couple hundred MBs of RAM. We have a VM with a minimum RAM requirement of 8 GBs at work which runs a conglomerate of Rails APIs, which makes 16 GB a minimum on my laptop. The only reason the memory bloat/leak of a freelance Rails project I'm working on goes undetected is that Heroku restarts their dynos daily. For comparison, an Elixir/Phoenix app is using < 40 MB right now.
AFAIK base RAM requirements of many Java apps are even worse.
Opening Gmail in Chrome immediately eats 1 GB of RAM, vs. 60 MB for Apple Mail app. Many Electron apps like Slack, Atom and Spotify use hundreds of MBs to GBs of memory, vs. 150 MB for Sublime Text (5 MB for Vim!). And they are sluggish. As much as I love the open web (and I'm mostly a web/backend dev myself), I hate the fact that I often have to prefer native apps.
I'm seriously considering other laptops right now, but can't find a serious alternative, especially considering the fact that there are no Linux-rated laptops close to my location. And shoehorning Linux into Windows machines is pain, I tried that for ~1 years both at work and at home. The best non-Mac laptop candidate I'm considering right now has a long article written by someone describing how to install Linux on it, with some "slight" annoyances like a non-functioning webcam and a problematic wifi in the end. Windows? Nothing there comes even close to iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh combo (and many other tools, workflows etc). And I haven't even touched the subject of design.
None of this is heavy computing. I think we seriously need to consider slowing down this madness and try to improve. I'd normally love the 16 GB limitation so that we'd be somewhat forced to that direction but since there is no "kill the bloat!" initiative or something, we sadly need beefier machines for the short/mid term.
Great article. However, good arguments have never convinced some people. I'm so tired of this hand-wringing over the amount of RAM in a computer. The entitlement of some people is ridiculous. Apple, unlike Microsoft, does not produce software and hardware products for software engineers. It's time for software engineers to accept that and move on. I have.
16MB may be enough for today for 95% of the users, but in 3 years when Apple is still selling this model it is going to be an issue, especially when you consider that those laptops sold 3 years from now will be expected to run for another 5 years or so.
Too many factual errors in the article. Many of the comparisons state DDR3 - but DDR4 is not DDR3.
> the difference of power draw between DDR3 and DDR4 is almost negligible.
It's NOT. The article he's citing mentions IDLE standby power consumption. Not the same thing as active power consumption.
- Correction: Power draw of DDR4 and LPDDR3 is very similar under active usage (i.e. not in standby). DDR4 might be possibly slightly lower.
I couldn't find a direct comparison, but according to Samsung:
* LPDDR3 vs DDR3L uses 15% less power in operation [1]
* DDR4 vs DDR3L uses 37% less power [2]
- Correction: LPDDR3 is much more efficient for STANDBY (yes, you can have that 30 days standby). [3]
So without LPDDR3, in my opinion, the standby of MBP would be reduced to ~15 days from 30 days (haven't done proper calculations but it's roughly half). But it wouldn't matter in normal usage.
I still believe Apple didn't consider DDR4 due to size concerns as even SODIMM DDR4 on the logic board would larger.
I agree with many posters in this thread that Apple is taking "thin and light" to an extreme. I'd want other things than thinness and lightness, like being able to configure it with a 4TB spinning hard disc + a small SSD, configured as a Fusion Drive. This 4TB bus-powered hard disc https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZTRXFBA/?tag=thewire06-20&linkC... is only 0.8 inch thick, as opposed to the Macbook Pro's 0.6 inch thickness. I'd gladly take the additional 0.2 inch thickness for having lots of storage.
I'd also want it to have an upgradeable memory and storage.
SSDs are still unaffordable — the Macbook Pro with 2TB SSD costs more than $4000! While the aforementioned 4TB hard disc costs only $100.
I don't mind 16GB of RAM, I get the job done with 8GB (2013 model) using (Chrome, Atom/Sublime, Xcode, Terminal, Spotify, External 4k monitor..), what I want is dedicated GPU and Quad Core CPU by default for a normal price.
Apple are just victims of their own game - making stuff thinner/lighter every year as it's somehow the next world wonder. Unless they'll finally admit it and stop this BS, they'll get themselves cornered soon enough.
I mean just use the advantage of new technology to fill up the gained space with batteries. The premise of limiting RAM is also pretty much BS - if I get a device with 16GB RAM I still get the same battery life as now, but if I put more memory inside, I do this willingly to sacrifice battery. NOTHING CHANGES for people with 8/16GB configuration.
Unless they're doing this with the classic Apple smug "we know what's best for you" reason. Oh and to sell more adapters.
> I do this willingly to sacrifice battery. NOTHING CHANGES for people with 8/16GB configuration.
Did you not read the article? Everyone would be affected because they would have to use a completely different RAM technology. Even for people with 8/16GB configurations.
It probably won't affect 8/16 GB people. Since the RAM are soldered, each config will be a different board, so they can keep existing 16GB config, and offer a 32GB config with DDR4 + required controllers, etc.
I agree with you that it doesn't make financial sense. Maybe Apple can simply state the demand isn't there for 32GB, or just don't respond at all.
Edit: Want to add that I think some people are not happy since they perceive the line between thin (Air/Macbook) and powerful (BMP) is being blurred and MBP is becoming too MacBook-like.
I am currently a 2014 MBP user. I love it, but my next laptop probably won't be a MBP. I don't own a desktop, and I am running out of storage. My next laptop will have upgradable storage that uses a standard part (M.2, etc), and the new MBP doesn't fit my need. I tend to keep my laptop for a few years, and lack of upgradability impacts me significantly.
Lenovo T460p comes with quad core Intel 6th gen processors and up to 32 GB of DDR4 and claims up to 12 hours battery life on a 72 Wh battery. Why is it neglected in the comparison?
I'm not familiar with the ThinkPad T460, but the T560 has two batteries. If you need longer life, upgrading the second battery from 47WHr to 72WHr costs an extra £12.
Just curious relevant to this topic- who needs RAM over 16 GB in a thin, mid-range laptop whose processor ends with the letter "U"?
An advice for the multimedia pros- please stop whining about the RAM limitation of MBP 2016 and get a real workstation. a Mac pro (and some iMac) of any generation available in the market shall deliver several multiple of power that any MBP can do.
The credibility of the whole story fell to the floor when he said that sleep mode would kill more batteries because they fail when completely discharged. Apple has had top notch battery protection for years. Totally draining a macbook battery to failure has not been possible for many years.
I'd really like to see a recent reference on how much. Given the discharge maintaining the batteries is very small and very manageable I highly doubt it is significant over any lesser depth with these lipo batteries manufactured specifically for Apple.
I think this article misses the point that it seems many customers are disappointed they can't get more than 16gb and many would be willing to have the trade-off of 50% less battery life.
How many people work away from power for more than 5 hours at a single stretch?
First I don't think that the people who want (need) more than 16 gb ram would be okay with 50% less battery, at least not the majority, but, if apple would do that, how should they put that device on the market?
As a MacBook Pro+-, the one with 32 gb ram but only 50% battery life? Or just a note on the site that this device only gets up to 5 hrs of battery life? In my eyes, the number of people confused and/or pissed of by that would be far higher, than of those who need 32 gb and would be okay with 50% less battery life.
The real dream is a user-serviceable MacBook, positioned towards power users - a "PowerBook", if you will.
If Apple doesn't want battery life sacrificed, they don't offer the option to put 32GB of RAM in. Then if the user makes the choice to put in more RAM (because the PowerBook lets you put in more RAM as it does not have it soldered), it's their responsibility that battery life suffered.
The sad fact is that user-serviceability has a large engineering and design cost. More or less every Apple hardware component has a weird non-standard shape to squeeze as much hardware into the smallest form factor possible.
A user-serviceable MacBook would be larger, heavier, and have less battery life.
All things I'd be willing to deal with to have a powerful workstation - I'm not saying the current thing and light devices would have to go, after all.
For many people 16GB of ram is just to low to be useful. Forcing them to buy a different machine. 5hour battery life is quite a bit for someone that mostly leaves it plugged in. Worst case just use an external battery if you really cant't find an outlet.
Really, it feels like a MacBook not a MacBook Pro. Non power users are going to be happy with 16GB of RAM and get a lot more from extra battery life.
PS: And yea, I was one of those people ready to upgrade who kind of scratched their head and decided to skip this release. I was thinking of getting a new Mac Pro, but they did not upgrade that at all even though the current model is over 2 and a half years old.
I'm not saying you guys who would go for a 32 gb / 5 hrs battery life version aren't out there and there are probably comparatively quite many on hn. You are, as much as it sucks, probably just not worth the hassle. I just don't see a way to market / communicate it without all that hassle.
And something you should never forget. Those 5 hrs are 5 hrs when you buy the device. 1,5 - 2 years later you may end up with 3-3,5 hrs. If those 5 hrs were what you need, you'll already need your first battery replacement.
> Non power users are going to be happy with 16GB of RAM
That hurts btw. :( Let's agree on "non ram power users", because I would probably consider myself a power user but i'm quite fine with the 16 gb of my MBPr 13 from last year.
The comment is exactly how I feel and I wouldn't change it regardless of a few downvotes. There are plenty of laptops out there far superior to the macbook pro.
I think it's a catch-22, if the laptop had 32GB ram but 5hr battery life, folks would complain about it because, for example, it wouldn't last on a flight from East/West coast flight or across the pond.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
This whole MbP experience feels rushed; Like a new tech release. You see the possibilities but it just falls short...
>> if the laptop had 32GB ram but 5hr battery life, folks would complain about it because
Folks will complain no matter what. No version of the Macbook Pro can be everything to everyone.
Having said that, what I find most interesting about these recent debates is the back and forth about how much people actually need. The argument that "well, it's no problem for me, and I do x, y and z!" is not really a good rebuttal, in my opinion.
Everyone is different and everyone has had different experiences.
The people defending the new Macbook Pros need to remember that the complaining isn't coming from outsiders (Windows users) trying to stir the pot -- it's coming from people who love Macs and genuinely want better Macs.
It's important for these people to dissent, because if they don't, Apple will never know if they might have made a decision that negatively affects a significant number of people.
> Having said that, what I find most interesting about these recent debates is the back and forth about how much people actually need. The argument that "well, it's no problem for me, and I do x, y and z!" is not really a good rebuttal, in my opinion.
I guess what you're saying is just the fact that there is a limit is an issue?
This reminds me of a question I once read in Maxim magazine, about 10 years ago or so. The reader wrote in asking why speedometer on cars go so high while there are few places in the world you can drive that fast. The answer was that if car manufacturers would limit the speedometer, there would be an outrage from the general populace.
There have to be Mac users who are looking for workstation class laptops and have a legitimate need for more than 16GB RAM.
They may be a tiny population, but making presumptions that their complaints are invalid because you can't create a situation that taxes the Macbook isn't constructive.
People have been going on and on supporting USB-C only as future proofing the Macbook Pro (even though it's not even an ubiquitous standard now, and maybe not even for two years). Given how software is constantly requiring more and more memory, limiting RAM to 16GB is doing the absolute opposite of future proofing.
Totally agree with you, in fact I know of several Mac users who genuinely require a beast of a workstation. These folks (movie production industry) are willing to drop 4-5K on the most powerful machine possible and the 16GB limit is hindereding.
I shared an anecdote that came to mind, with no intention to dismiss your comment or downplay its significance.
But the whole front half of the airplane on most airlines (LCCs excepted) has power outlets. That includes premium economy and a bunch of regular economy.
I suspect the iPhone approach of new release then a higher performance "S" release of the same device a year later has taken hold in the MacBook division.
As for the "Pro" moniker, the new machines are pretty high performance (especially on the video front). That doesn't preclude Apple making some tradeoff and/or leaving some performance on the table.
This exactly. As a developer applications like docker and vagrant are part of my normal activities. The 16GB limit just does not work in this model. FWIW I was waiting on a laptop upgrade, and after seeing the new lineup from Apple I ordered a Linux laptop with 32GB of memory.
To run the whole system need multiple VMs. It's not enough to just run the app container anymore. There are a bunch of support containers and if you want to experiment with failure then there are even more VMs & containers to run. sure we could just dump $1,000 into a cloud provider for a couple months usage, for me I'd rather put that $1,000 into my laptop (i7 3.8GHz, 64GB RAM, 2x SSD, 1x2TB HDD) and be able to experiment at my leisure. Plus it's quicker to iterate if the experiment is running all the time, cloud is expensive to run stuff that doesn't generate income.
What on earth laptop do you have with all that for $1000? Or maybe you mean $1000 in upgrades, but still... what laptop will take 64GB of ram and 4 disks?!
A ThinkPad P-series workstation takes four disk drives: two SSDs, one HD, and one DVD. It has four RAM slots so you can have 64GB. Low-end CPU is an Intel Core i7-6820HQ but you can upgrade to a Xeon.
The Dell Precision M6800 (no longer available) supported a 4 drive configuration if one was a Mini Card plugged into a slot on the motherboard, It had three 2.5in drive bays. You could have a look at the current Dell models, or an HP Z Book.
This is exactly what should be expected from the Pro model. Not to mention that cloud requires connectivity, and the purpose of a laptop is mobility. I would prefer to be able to work entirely offline, and even when I have an internet connection it may not meet the bandwidth and/or latency requirements to make efficient progress with cloud servers.
> A major point of containerization is more efficient resource utilization
It's actually "more efficient resource utilization per instance". Perhaps, with increased capability comes increased utilization. While before one would run only one or two VMs and try to run all their apps within that, now one can run many containers.
----
That, and shareable memory across host and guests.
But I guess that works only if the host and guest run the same kernel. Docker and vagrant on OS X still have to dedicate some RAM to the Linux VM running as docker host, and I don't know how efficient other facets of docker on OS X are; but on Linux, I find containerization's memory usage almost at par with running the apps directly on the host.
For my situation I work for a large CDN and we have over 15k servers deployed globally and software I write has to run on all of them. This means various OS and kernel versions. This means in a given day I can work on 20+ different containers. The more time I spend spinning up or down containers to save system resources the more angry I get. I also travel a lot for work, so connecting to a cloud based instance from a plane is not possible, plugging into a power outlet in a plane seat is.
For me the issue comes down to lack of choice. Previously lack of choice from Apple was not a concern because the choices I would make were inline with what they are offering. This is no longer the case.
For those that asked, I am replacing 10 years of using MBP's with a System76 laptop. I don't have it yet so I can't comment but I am excited for the change as have been growing more and more frustrated with Apple.
Aside, but you say "various OS and kernel versions". One'd have to use virtualization in order to run a kernel different than the host. I don't think containerization can help you there, at least as far as spinning up an image with a different kernel is concerned.
They may be more efficient but when you need to run a dozen different containers simultaneously and you want each one to use a modest amount of memory, 16GB falls short. The issue is not efficient vs. non-efficient. It is scale. If I was writing a single web app on two containers sure 16GB would be fine. I am not though, and the scope of what I work on requires more memory.
I have the new MbP w/ 8GB RAM and ram 3 VMs (2 MS build for IE testing and 1 hetoku build-pack) + IDE consuming close to 1GB of ram and compared it to a mid-2014 MbP with 16GB ram with similar performance. Yes the 8GB was a touch slower but I assume with 16GB, it will outperform similar or upgraded systems.
I'm hoping I come across more real-world explorations of using the new MBP with multiple dockers/vms and showing exactly when/how it falls down.
I feel like I'm tired of being on a machine with a centralized system anyway. I want something basic with OSX images - an OS X just for work, and OS X just for finances, and OS X just for music work, etc. As it is I have multiple user accounts for different clients - I get some isolation that way but things still get in the way in a few ways. Strange IntelliJ bugs, occasional homebrew permission conflicts, etc. When I find myself considering buying multiple laptops to be free of all that, it's reached a ridiculous point.
I used 2 vms with 4gb a piece on a MacBook 12" with 8gb of ram and the system came to a complete halt. It worked, but very slowly. The most amusing part is that the haptic touchpad was affected as well, leading to a 10 second delay between pressing and feeling a click.
When I travel with my laptop, I often don't have access to power.
Most trips in a car are less than 100 miles. Yet nobody wants to purchase a low range EV. Extended battery life is useful on the occasions you need it.
FWIW, a lot of vehicles nowadays have inverters. Both my car and my truck have one, with a standard "plug-in" that you can plug any normal AC device into. I've run my laptop off of my truck's power many times.
Why promulgate the absurd premise that doubling the RAM would cut the battery life in half?
As the article is at pains to say, 16 GB of RAM only consumes 1.49 A, while the CPU is 4.61A, and the display is a very big power hog.
I am not in a position to prove it, but I suspect that increasing the RAM from 16 to 32 GB would only cut the battery life by 10%; maybe 15% at the outside.
Smaller batteries charge faster by reaching full capacity sooner. So if you jam a large battery into a computer, you'll get more battery life, and most components will not be optimized to be as power efficient. This means charging to X % of battery life will take longer than on a smaller battery but more power efficient machine.
Capacity, rate of charge, and efficiency are not mutually exclusive. They aren't even really related, based on what you're talking about, which appears to be limited solely to operating efficiency.
Personally, I would've went for the model with 32 GB of RAM.
I've got a MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM sitting here on my desk right now, the same spot it's in 95% of the time. Sitting right next to it is a 3.5 year old ThinkPad with 32 GB of RAM.
And furthermore, Intel CPUs can already power down caches to lower power consumption; there are ways to power down unused RAM too: https://lwn.net/Articles/446493/
I have a Mid 2015 15" rMBP w 16GB RAM.
I'm actually worried about the SSD wear and that's why I would like to have 32GB RAM.
I'm quite okay with its performance but I routinely have ~4GB of memory swapped out,
even though I'm trying hard to keep my browser tab count below 20.
I have 4-5 Clojure/ClojureScript projects open in IntelliJ; that eats ~1-2GB RAM.
For 3-4 of them I'm running a REPL; that's around ~1GB each, which is ~3-4GB in total.
Safari with 10-20 tabs; 1-2GB
Google Chrome Canary 4-5 tabs for the webapp under development (logged in with different type of users into different environments [dev/stg/prod]); ~300MB/tab => ~1-1.5GB total
Everyday utilities also add up to 1.5GB at least:
• Slack 0.4GB
• (sometimes Gitter 0.3GB)
• Spotify 0.3GB
• AirMail 0.3GB
• OneNote 0.2GB
• SublimeText 0.2GB
• iTerm 0.1GB
• 1Password 0.1GB
(and I don't even mention Box Sync or Dropbox or Google Drive or Ethereum or IPFS node
because I usually keep them turned off while I'm coding...)
My kernel_task is usually round 1.5GB but sometimes grows up to 2+GB
So that's 2 + 4 + 3 + 1.5 + 1.5 + 1.5 = 13.5GB
Then there is only 2.5GB left for disk cache and ~0.2GB memory is compressed at this point.
So that's the minimum memory requirement after a cold boot for work.
Anything else I do start to force memory to be compressed then swapped out.
BUT THEN I also have a personal account for non-work related things which obviously forces swapping.
I have to say though I see very little stuttering or beach balling,
though typing in IntelliJ can get jittery while it's indexing.
I think macOS' memory management is quite good for desktop usage.
I do try Ubuntu/Fedora from time to time on Macs and I do envy how much less RAM they require,
BUT everything else is rather clunky on them compared to macOS, IF they even boot.
• TouchPad dynamics are terrible.
• Gestures; forget it.
• WiFi connects a lot slower.
• Skype?... no comment.
• Multiple thunderbolt or HDMI displays with mirroring.
• HiDPI support with lower than physical virtual resolutions.
• Stable Built-in VNC server and client,
especially when there are multiple screens?
• Wake up after sleep can still be a problem in 2016
(eg it sets the display brightness to 100%).
and finally why is there no desktop environment which provides
macOS' keyboard shortcuts out of the box?
That would really help transitioning from macOS to Linux.
Find me a single review that laments the thickness and bulkiness of the 2015 model.
This is plain and simple industrial design gone amuck. Apple has beautiful hardware, but day to day use is important too (performance, ram, battery). Shaving millimeters and ounces hits the point of diminishing returns, especially when you focus on it to the exclusion of all else.