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Any credible rumours of next gen rMBP having 32 GB RAM?

T

tbirdparis

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 30, 2015
292
206
I've been off the MBP bandwagon for a while since switching to iMacs and Mac Pros for work. But in the next year I wouldn't mind getting a fully pimped out rMBP to be able to have a portable workstation again.

I work with Logic Pro and when doing large orchestral mockups, the more RAM you can get, the better. I'm currently using a colleague's MBP (16GB RAM) and it's pretty good... but when you hit the RAM wall, it becomes almost impossible to work with, nothing but spinning rainbow wheels and having to force restart. As soon as you remove a couple of memory-hog instruments and drop below the threshold, everything's fine and dandy again, but it's obviously cooler to not hit that wall in the first place.

Anyway, I've looked around to see if there's any talk of 32GB coming in a future refresh, but can't seem to find any mention of it, apart from the usual speculation that it'll probably come at some point.

Has anyone read anything from reputable sources about likely specs coming in 2016? I know it's all speculation but I'd prefer to have a reasonable reason to wait, rather than pulling the trigger too soon. Cheers.
 
I just bought the latest rmp.. Al models had a Disappointing 8gb ram with it.
Can't believe they'll jump from that to 32.
 
I think we may have the models mixed up here.. the 15" models have shipped standard with 16GB for a while now, you must be referring to the 13"?
 
tbirdparis said:
I think we may have the models mixed up here.. the 15" models have shipped standard with 16GB for a while now, you must be referring to the 13"?
Click to expand...

the 13" certainly has a 16GB option, am running that now. are you sure it's just ram issues? not the CPU? just curious. anyway, the trick for me in the past (and not yet, knock on wood, on my new MBP): turn off wifi. reboot, and open ONLY logic...and work. see how that goes. maybe google a bit (optimizing logic x...). and, as with most things apple, no one really knows until apple shows us.
 
fisherking said:
the 13" certainly has a 16GB option, am running that now. are you sure it's just ram issues? not the CPU? just curious. anyway, the trick for me in the past (and not yet, knock on wood, on my new MBP): turn off wifi. reboot, and open ONLY logic...and work. see how that goes. maybe google a bit (optimizing logic x...). and, as with most things apple, no one really knows until apple shows us.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. It's not a CPU issue, it's not the case that Logic is unable to play the project due to CPU overloads - the MBP I'm using is actually faster than the iMac I'm used to. When the problem arises it's system-wide across the whole computer. Once you have a great many instances of Kontakt loaded with very large sample libraries, you can just tell that the computer is running with very little free RAM left and its behaviour becomes unpredictable. Even mousing over the menu bar, things will only partially redraw. The spinning beachball will come up and stay there for seemingly no reason, while Logic is idling and not even playing so there's no CPU demand anyway. It seems pretty clear that RAM is the difference here - we use cloned systems (identical plug ins, sound library etc) so we can open projects on different machines, and the major factor here is that the iMac I usually use has 32 GB RAM. That amount of RAM seems to be a reasonable sweet spot for the kind of orchestral film music work we often do, so I'd just love to see that become the standard for the laptops soon.. In any case I'm going to wait for the next revision and see..
 
if apple history taught us nothing else, never say never. at some point things will be faster, more powerful...and we'll see more ram. for now...freeze some tracks? at least, until you bounce out. check with OWC (macsales.com), see if they HAVE a ram update for the new macbooks?
 
fisherking said:
if apple history taught us nothing else, never say never. at some point things will be faster, more powerful...and we'll see more ram. for now...freeze some tracks? at least, until you bounce out. check with OWC (macsales.com), see if they HAVE a ram update for the new macbooks?
Click to expand...

No one has nor will have a ram update for any 2015 apple computers (Mac Pro excepted).
Ram is soldered on on all Apple devices
 
cariacou said:
No one has nor will have a ram update for any 2015 apple computers (Mac Pro excepted).
Ram is soldered on on all Apple devices
Click to expand...
fisherking said:
if apple history taught us nothing else, never say never. at some point things will be faster, more powerful...and we'll see more ram. for now...freeze some tracks? at least, until you bounce out. check with OWC (macsales.com), see if they HAVE a ram update for the new macbooks?
Click to expand...

Yep, ever since Apple laptops have moved to this "what you order is what you're stuck with" approach, we're kinda at their mercy as to what they decide is a desirable set of specs for a given machine. I get the feeling that going beyond 16GB RAM is not the priority for most people, so I hope in 2016 the RAM parts are cheap enough so that they see fit to put in 32GB just because they can.

As for freezing tracks.. I wish that helped, but freezing tracks still keeps the entire instrument loaded in memory anyway. In fact, I was trying to freeze some tracks (seeing if it would help) when things started going very weird - the spinning beachball kicked in for like 5 minutes when trying to press the track freeze button and the whole computer just became unresponsive (unable to get to the finder to force quit, for example). I've heard that in some other app (Cubase or Performer?), beyond the regular "freeze tracks" there's a "deep freeze" function. It not only freezes a track, but unloads the instruments and plug ins from the channel strip in question to free up memory - but it still "remembers" exactly what was there in case you want to unfreeze it to change something. That would be a great thing to have in Logic, especially when you're working on gigantic orchestral mock ups that can have well beyond 60 sample instrument tracks, each one of them a huge memory hog!
 
fisherking said:
i think owc can hook you up if you need more ram on a current macbook, but..irrelevant anyway, nothing over 16GB right now.
Click to expand...

Um, no. All the Apple laptops have RAM soldered to the logic board with the exception of the 13" cMBP, but that's really a 2012 model that's still being sold as new. When you buy a new (current generation) MBP, MBA, MB or Mac Mini, you have to decide at the time of purchase what amount of RAM you want as there's no changing it later on.
 
Skylake supports 32GB and DDR4 RAM. But with prices of DDR4 RAM being insane (similar to early SSD pricing), I would say probably within 2-3 generations after the Skylake refresh.
 
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