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Apple released a very expensive brick!
- Thread starter AdonisSMU
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Respectfully, and said in a good tone, I keep seeing people give the "buy a proper desktop" advice over and over again. However, no one seems to realize that there are plenty of us that travel the world and need portability that a desktop cannot provide. I have a powerful desktop, but I cannot take it with me when I travel and work in the field.
I think people are more just laughing at the computer engineering skills you clearly have.
Give the Touch Bar 4/8GB of RAM so that it can be shared with the system? What in the holy hell are you talking about? How would that that thing use that much RAM and how would you pool it in the system without running into the Skylake's limitation on LPDDR RAM?
You can get a bulky windows laptop, I don't want my MacBook getting any heavier or losing any more minute of its precious battery life just because some minority needs a 32GB RAM.
Like I said, there doesn't exist a scenario where a 16GB machine won't get your work done but a 32GB will. It's just a cache miss. With all due respect with a 3GB/s read speed SSD I wouldn't worry too much having a cache miss in a 16GB RAM system. Your mobile CPU can't even process all that 32GB in the instant. I'm sorry but your bottleneck lies elsewhere.
That's not quite true. 3GB/s is peak for large files.
I briefly had a 2015 MBA 13" which also has a scary fast SSD. Not 3GB/s, but fast.
When I hit the 4GB ceiling it was really noticeable.
So while the vast majority of users won't benefit from 32GB, a small number will, and for those users it likely will impact their use.
Doesn't affect me, but for those who need several VMs running consecutively it MIGHT be a problem.
And I see that you are also firmly planted in the camp that no one else really needs more than 16 GB of RAM. It's great that you don't need it, but there are others that do. I love the new ultra-fast SSD speeds, but it does not fully replace the necessity for large-scale RAM. As for moving over to a Windows laptop, I have zero desire to do so. My entire workflow is built around Apple and what I use it for is what pays for the roof over my head and it puts the food on the table, literally.
I'm not actively complaining about the RAM situation anymore because I now understand the limitations and that it simply will not be available until LPDDR4 RAM is supported. I made the decision to cancel my pre-order and I've made the decision to wait. Admittedly, that was and still is a difficult decision for me. In a perfect world, I'd love to drop $3,700 on a new MBP now and then transition to a 32 GB version when it is available 12-24 months from now, but the loss in resale value/money is too significant for my taste. For others, it may be different. To each their own.
Wrong, the speed is noticeable only because 4GB is not enough of RAM and you are constantly hitting cache misses. A 16GB RAM hitting a cache miss constantly but not on a 32GB system? Running too many VMs? Let's be real here why do you need so many VMs out there taking up all the memory while your CPU is doing nothing? To use up all available RAM you need at least 3 VMs plus your own host (assuming each VM has 4GBs), your mobile CPU can't even satisfy 2 machines fighting 100% for all available processing power and you are here talking about not having enough RAM for your VMs??? Bottleneck people bottleneck is the key, with that many VMs you will run out of compute power before you run out of RAM.
I think you're missing the point.
When you max out the memory, no matter how much RAM you have, and no matter why you max it out, it is performance impacting. It doesn't matter whether you have 4GB or 64GB. When you have to start paging, even to SSD, it will impact the performance.
Don't take my word for it though, try it. Open Activity Monitor and then start opening up all your apps and loads and loads of files and watch the performance degrade and let me know what happens.
4GB is perfectly fine if all you use your computer for is watching Netflix and surfing the web with two Safari tabs open.
That's not how RAM works, just because your system keeps 32GB of some exact copy of data on your drive doesn't mean it is faster than a 16GB machine. You only see a difference when a cache miss happens and you spend precious time waiting on the IO. Some programs have ****** algorithms so they don't know what to cache and what not to cache so they cache everything. Remember, just because a program uses more RAM doesn't mean it will run faster.
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Paging only occurs when you have a cache miss (something needs to be in the memory, but it's not there, whether it ran out of memory space or simply wasn't cached in the first place, doesn't matter) and there isn't enough physical memory, it borrows some space from the hard drive because each program, when runs, needs some reserved virtual memory space from the OS, and it needs to write some data to it. Now the OS needs to make that space available otherwise the program would crash due to obviously not having the minimum required workspace.
Now that is very likely to happen when your physical memory is not enough to serve all your running processes, which I believe for most users it would be around 4GB to 5GB (hence 8GB is really the sweet spot to make a daily working macOS machine smooth, the effect gets a diminishing return from here because everything you need is constantly in the memory). Having a 4GB RAM system with all your programs running means you are constantly running out of available memory, meaning your system is constantly wasting time waiting on swapping or using paged memory (the extremely slow ones).
Now again we've came across that sweet spot where 4GB and 8GB RAM makes a huge difference, give me a perfectly valid scenario on how an average user could max out 16GB of RAM easily without running out of its CPU power first?
I know how paging works.
Again, you're missing the point. The reason I bought up a 4GB scenario is because that was a real life scenario for me where the caching was evident.
Does caching still occur on a machine with 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB? Yes, when needed.
When that caching occurs, is there a significant performance decrease? Yes, in my actual experience there is.
And I already did give you an example. Running several active VMs.
And as I already said, it's not an issue with me. I can run fine with 8GB and have yet to see this significantly page. In fact now i'm tempted to do it just to try it out.
But for people who run several VMs (not me, but those people do exist) then they can break the 16GB barrier and it will be an issue for them. Again, as I said, 16GB is more than fine for the vast majority. But for those who need more than 16GB, they need more than 16GB.
Looks like I will no longer have to run docker in a VM so... I may not need more than 16GB after all.
Expensive brick??? Have you seen the $300 doorstop they just released? Now that's a brick.
Funny thing, for decades I've been throwing promotional junk mail and marketing materials away. Now Apple comes along and tries to sell us essentially the same thing, for products that are not even being made anymore. That's a true brick.
And yes, they should have given the new MacBook Pro more RAM. It also should have a user replaceable battery (all portables should have that feature, but especially "Pro" models).
Funny thing, for decades I've been throwing promotional junk mail and marketing materials away. Now Apple comes along and tries to sell us essentially the same thing, for products that are not even being made anymore. That's a true brick.
And yes, they should have given the new MacBook Pro more RAM. It also should have a user replaceable battery (all portables should have that feature, but especially "Pro" models).
Yes, and other people don't want their laptops being weaker and slower just because some minority needs an incredibly thin machine or two more minutes of battery life.
It's a shame that this couldn't be resolved by Apple having two different product lines which targeted these different markets, isn't it?
It's all up to apple...we can not understand what they do, and complain, and whine, but they're still one of the most profitable companies in the world!
Trollin requiers multipile 100s of tabs to be open in order to tell people how much they hate everything they like and vice versa...that requires more than 2 GB and a Skylake CPU, that's right Kabylake will not do for this honorable work of Trollin!
True, but... I'm not sure whether it will stay that way forever. Apple was once barely surviving, and they've recovered nicely, but they could get back there again if they throw away too much market share in pursuit of getting the absolute best profit they can from an ever-smaller market.
Running multiple VMs without them doing anything? This guy needs a purpose in life, not 32GB of RAM. This mobile CPU isn't designed to run that many VMs. Now if they are running something, you will run out of processing power before you run out of available memory.
You need to google what bottleneck means, if you are working properly, that is, be meaningful about what you are doing, bottleneck is the thing that's keeping your machine from performing better. Ignoring the bottleneck and spending money elsewhere is simply a waste.
The CPU in question is just fine for running multiple VMs. (And who said anything about them "not doing anything"?) It's just that it needs more memory.
See my revised post. That's not a valid working scenario and there's much better alternatives out there like online VPS where it's cheap and efficient to run multiple VMs without using too many of the processing power.
Huh, I don't remember voting on the person who gets to decide which working scenarios are "valid" and which aren't, but it's certainly an honor and a privilege to finally meet the one person in the world who has unquestioned authority to determine whether a given use case could ever be valid or useful to anyone, no matter what fields they work in.