New MacBook Pros Max Out at 16GB RAM Due to Battery Life Concerns

[scott911]

What are you doing that requires that??

probably some "PRO" work.

 

[jigzaw]

I'm so glad I maxed out the specs on my rMBP 2 years ago. It's hard sitting out some product refreshes, but my performance is still adequate. Maybe next year, or next ye.....

THIS! I don't even have new-shiny envy since I can't spot a reason to update my 2013 rMBP to this new one. Now what I AM interested in getting this fall for my desktop is a nice new iMa- DOH!!!

 

[MacsRuleOthersDrool]

Considering you can get a Dell XPS 15 with Skylake, Thunderbolt 3, 32 GB of RAM (removable even), 4K touchscreen, full sized USB ports, etc, all for the price of the base 15" macbook pro, professionals do indeed have a choice to make.

I have 16 GB in my MacBook Pro and I have indeed run out of RAM running several VMs at once.

Yeah, a choice between 10 hours of battery life with the MBP, versus FIVE HOURS with the XPS 15.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/dell-xps-15-review-performance-and-battery-life-page-2

And that's with DDR4 memory, folks!

Perhaps Uncle Phil isn't lying after all...
[doublepost=1477684975][/doublepost]

The funny part of this conversation is how many people think they "need" 32GB of RAM... but are probably really only needing 8GB.

Exactly. Most probably come from a Windows world, where memory management sucks, and the OS eats every available free byte of memory by design.

 

[macduke]

My 2012 rMBP has 16GB RAM. Why would I upgrade to a machine that only has 16GB RAM, especially when I am starting to bump up against that today? It wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't soldered to the motherboard and we could upgrade it ourselves. Probably wouldn't have mattered anyway for a lot of people because Apple currently charges $600 for a 32GB RAM upgrade on the iMac, which is absurd. The RAM is the only real reason I will not upgrade now. I mean, I've complained about price and everything, but no 32GB option at any price for professionals is ridiculous. They could even put a warning. I mean how much battery would it eat? Would it go from 10 hours down to 8 hours? That would still be perfectly fine. But I also can't believe they wait forever to upgrade and then go DDR3 with old CPUs. It's almost as if they finalized specs early this year and the Touch Bar delayed things until now.

In the next year I need to upgrade my home Mac and my work Mac. I'm thinking iMacs for both while keeping my old rMBP for when I need it, or possibly swapping that one for a low end MBP with Touch Bar. The iMac better be a solid upgrade using the latest components or I might do something crazy and get a Surface Studio. That's how desperate Apple is making me right now. My wife is quite the layperson when it comes to tech, and even she seemed pretty amazed when I showed her the Surface Studio commercial last night. She said she thought it looked more like something Apple would make, and more like something I could get use out of as a designer and artist. I wonder if I could get a Hackintosh up and running on that thing? Or maybe I'll just build my own Hackintosh. It's kind of a pain, but probably less of a pain than Windows. As a bonus I could get a gaming PC out of it, lol, so I could get back into that again and the joys of cable management.

Most likely the new iMac will come out in February-April and have the latest chips. I'll buy the base RAM and upgrade it to 32GB myself as long as the 27" models still allow for that. There's no reason to make the iMac thinner, but they will probably find one: money. I just wonder if the Touch Bar will ever come to the keyboard. You'd need a really fast wireless connection to update the display and input quickly, and it would probably chew through battery life. Perhaps Apple's wireless charging could come into play, or maybe they could build in charging on the foot of the iMac.

 

[5590982]

Imagine a dude in a college rock band. The band is pretty decent, but they don't appear to be setting the world on fire. Dude settles down, gets married and has kids with an average-looking girl from his hometown...

Then... all of a sudden, the band turns into the next Rolling Stones and he is a multi-millionaire and he has supermodels throwing themselves at him day and night..

How long, really, is that marriage gonna last?

That college rock band is called Apple, and the average looking girl is its PC customer base.

 

[Sylvan]

I would have rather it be a little bit thicker, which would allow for a bigger battery and more standard ports, like ethernet. Sad to say I'm not excited about this new model at all. I probably won't buy another one.

 

[Cavepainter]

Upselling: is a sales technique whereby a seller induces the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale. -Wikipedia (also Apple's First Commandment)

 

[Larry-K]

Should anyone take Phil's comment(s) seriously? He's a marketing guy...so he would say anything to make sales, right?

But he's such a demonstrably bad, marketing guy.

Does anybody believe anything this guy says anymore?

 

[BeefCake 15]

But, Apples prices never go down. In fact, the 3-year old Mac Pro has increased significantly in price - in the U.K. anyway.

Not necessarily, the pricing of the rMBP got a bit cheaper after 2012 (release year) for the same specs.

 

[malu05a]

From a guy who works in the VFX industry I just can't get enough ram. And would love to have 256gig at my workstation. My computer at work have 128gb ram. That usually use ~95% for VFX Compositing. But that is a extreme case, most in my position use ~64gb.

But for a laptop I would say 128gb is overkill and 64 is only if you do some intense raw 4k-6k video work.
32gb is perfectly fine, and should be the go-to ram configuration for professional creative work in 2016.
16 gb ram is "fine" i guess but you will get unnecessary slowdown under regular load and within 2 years you will start to see some serious drawbacks as the OS, Apps and web starts to eat more memory. (Crazy when I think about the 2011 Macbook Pro I have with 16 gig of ram, that is a 5 year old machine, and Apple have not moved on!)

Fortunately for me, I don't do that much content creation at home so I just preordered the 15'' mbp with 16 gig ram.

But for anyone doing serious (pro) Video, Photoshop, Motion Design or Color-grading i would find a good PC laptop with a modern Nvidia Graphics card. They are cheaper and better spec wise and will not cause you slowdown at work. You might not be able to send iMessages with fancy Emoji' using the Pro Touch Bar, but you will be able to do professional work and make i a living off it.
Annnnddd... there are quite a few good quality Windows Laptops out there. (check out Dave2D at youtube!)

 

[MacsRuleOthersDrool]

LOL, it would be a build to order option, you can still buy your 8GB machine and go on your merry way. I would love to hear your rational on why they used slower and more power hungry DDR3 RAM rather than DDR4 which has been available for a while now.

I ordered one mainly because I do iOS development and am locked into OS X for the foreseeable future, but Apple is straight grifting consumers at this point. The "Apple Tax" subsided for a few years, but it is now back in full force.

So, you think DDR4 is the answer?

Then explain why the similarly-speced (but DDR4-based) Dell XPS 15 only gets FIVE HOURS of battery life.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/dell-xps-15-review-performance-and-battery-life-page-2

 

[BeefCake 15]

Imagine a dude in a college rock band. The band is pretty decent, but they don't appear to be setting the world on fire. Dude settles down, gets married and has kids with an average-looking girl from his hometown...

Then... all of a sudden, the band turns into the next Rolling Stones and he is a multi-millionaire and he has supermodels throwing themselves at him day and night..

How long, really, is that marriage gonna last?

That college rock band is called Apple, and the average looking girl is its PC customer base.

LOL!!

 

[MacsRuleOthersDrool]

The CPU supports both DDR3 and DDR4 memory. No change necessary.

And not worth the difference. Check out the Dell XPS 15 with DDR4 memory (and Quad Skylake). It gets an "astonishing" (astonishingly BAD, that is!) FIVE hour battery life:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/dell-xps-15-review-performance-and-battery-life-page-2

Now, LPDDR4 memory is a different matter; but I don't think that Skylake supports 0.6v RAM.

 

[ImaxGuy]

So how is the battery life?

Did they make the battery smaller?

10 hours. I seldom use my 2013 rMBP on batteries as I'm always driving it to the max all day long. Phil's argument is weak tea, to put it mildly. Update the frigging Mac Pro then!!!!!

 

[OriginalClone]

People have been making this moan on this very forum every single day since the first iPod was released - and in that time Apple has grown to be the biggest tech company in the world.

But you know, everyone on this forum definitely knows better.

Weren't you the one moaning about the 1080/60p on the Apple TV 4 and how it ruins your film viewing experience? Didn't you know better in that thread you made? Just curious..

 

[Seed101]

And they have the guts to put this on their webpage

because, yeah, people that are going to be using TWO 5k displays and TWO Raid systems are definitely not the kind of people who are going to need more than 16GB. They just need the displays and Raid to create their annual Halloween invitation flyers with iWork Pages.

I think that confirms 'the joke'.

I guess this will drive a few more creatives over to windows...and a few more remainers to state 'go buy a 'whatever' then...

 

[pat500000]

That, and he didn't seem all that convinced himself. Like, a little nervous or embarrased maybe?

I agree...he appeared low energy.

 

[MacsRuleOthersDrool]

The worst thing about Schiller's answer is, I am pretty sure he was serious about it.

Damn it, I wish Steve Jobs was still around.

Because he could alter time (to make Kaby Lake Quad Core come out sooner) and/or the laws of physics (to make RAM magically take less power), right?

 

[mspman]

I'm sorry, that makes no sense. In my first post I thought Tim Cook said that. I can understand a marketing person saying that. It's nonsense. An extra stick of ram would not take more than a couple watts, even ddr3.

What's even more surprising to me is that it's ddr3. I assumed ddr4 at that frequency. Wow, that is really bad.

 

[ImaxGuy]

Give it time. I'm sure OWC will come up with their own memory that will allow 32GB in this machine.

Doubtful as the RAM and SSD is soldered on and not user upgradable. That's what all the fuss is about - no more ability to expand in the future.

 

[JackieInCo]

THEN PUT IN A BIGGER BATTERY YOU NUGGET.

They can't. They are obsessed with thin. Thin is in.

 

[now i see it]

The real problem is the name of the laptop: MacBook Pro.
It's just a name. Like the "Weedwacker Pro", or "Grillmaster Pro".

It's just an expensive consumer laptop. Unsuitable for many tasks. Fine for others. Drop the "pro", and it is what it is.
It's clearly not designed for mission critical professional use.
Apple hasn't made professional grade computers in years.

 

[magicschoolbus]

The funny part of this conversation is how many people think they "need" 32GB of RAM... but are probably really only needing 8GB.

Have you ever tried editing A 60min 4K video file?

 

[ij3f]

You know.. Apple could have added one more mm of thickness, and put in a slightly bigger battery and a freaking USB port. How am I supposed to charge my iphone? gotta buy an adapter.. friend gives me a flash drive? Nope.. need an adapter.. come the hell on.

 

[kildraik]

Anybody who needs 32GB of RAM needs a desktop. You would need an incredible reason to need 32GB, like scientific 3D modelling, or full-fledged filmmaking (towers, towers, towers). There is no point. I'm siding with Apple with this, even keeping ECC LPDDR3 with a nice bump to 2133mHz. This machine is going to be bulletproof.

Personally, I'm all in. Polaris alone sold me on it.

15", 2.7GHz+8MB/512GB/16GB/460+4GB. Arrives end of November. Woot.

Engineering. Amazing.