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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?

Of course Apple can't do either of those things. But they could have not reduced the battery size by 24%, and I bet that would have counteracted the increased power draw of 24 or 32GB of RAM. Instead, they chose to trim the battery size so that they could reduce the "volume" and "thinness" of the new MBP.
 
DDR 4 is SLOWER than DDR 3... Just thought you'd like to know.

Only in an 8gb configuration. DDR4 is faster but unnoticeable at 16gb compared to ddr3 and at 32gb it's not even close. Amazing how many times I have to repeat the same message in this thread.
 
Ram and storage are BOTH soldered on. Apple has purposely engineered OUT the ability to upgrade your hardware. Making the 16GB limit all the more egregious and insulting.

I render Maya 3D projects in 4k.... DON'T tell me how much RAM i need. If Apple wants out of the computer business fine.... but don't insult me by defining what "Pro" needs are based on how thin it must be. Ferengi has no concept of what a Pro user needs. OR.... he DOES have a concept and he's purposely driving us away.
I'm sorry; but if you are working in Maya, then you probably need a Mac Pro.

I have a 2013 Top Spec rMBP and I have see the "Your System has Run out of Application memory" message a fair few times in the 3 year's i've been using it - and that's just with Photoshop, Xcode, Brackets and Web Browsers usually have 2 of the following with 20-30 tabs open (Chrome, Safari, Roccat or Firefox).
Close Chrome and your RAM requirements will be back to some semblance of reality.
 
The main gripe that I have is the lack of an SD card slot. I understand all ports being Thunderbolt 3, that makes sense to me, but the removal of the SD card slot doesn't.

The card was probably too thick to fit AND thy probably wanted to sell bigger storage instead of letting people continue to use Micro SDXC as cheap internal storage..
 
My 16Gb MBP page swaps all the time. Was really looking for 32 in the new machines (and a variety of ports and magsafe since I do keep my MBP plugged much of the time). Too bad that the focus was on the displaybar and not on pro performance. Unfortunately, Apple seems unable to walk things back so the MBP is stuck where it is.

I wish they'd offer a high-end version with the old case, upgraded processor, 32Gb ram, and upgraded dedicated video. (alongside the new version) -- see what people purchase.
 
Yes, death to enclosures. :) I've been looking for solutions similar to this, and just haven't bit the bullet yet. Is there a real advantage to the BMD over something like the OWC dual drive dock Thunderbolt setup? I like that the OWC does 3.5" drives, and I could buy two for the price of the 4 bay (but nicer quality in appearance at least) BMD 4-bay...

Yep. I can see how the OWC unit could be really useful for transfers and backups to store away.
I can still pop in a 3.5 inch drive into an unused MacAlly or Glyph GPT50 FW800/USB2 enclosure if I need to, but I no longer purchase 3.5 spinners because the only ones that last more than a couple years are my Hitachi -not WD HGST Ultrastars.

The 4-bay MultiDock II is a professional piece of gear made to stay on 24/7. It's made out of steel. No wall warts, no fans, 1 rack space, no drivers needed, no power switch, Two Thunderbolt 2 ports on the back: It's really best for SSDs. Check out their webpage and you can see some workflows. I love this kind of true innovation.
 
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The thing is just as the post you quoted says, LPDDR4, which Sky Lake supports, runs at a lower power anyway, so if Apple wasn't so greedy they could've used LPDDR4 and easily put in 32gb of ram while saving even more power than the cheaper configuration they chose. The only reason for the ram limitation is more profit now and in the future when these machines will hit their ram limits sooner than the 4 year rMBP which was available at 16gb at launch.
http://ark.intel.com/products/88972/Intel-Core-i7-6920HQ-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz

Apple not using LPDDR4 has nothing to do with them being greedy. Skylake simply doesn't support LPDDR4. It only supports DDR3L, LPDDR3, and DDR4.
 
Realistically, I think Windows is quite a bit better on memory utilization at this moment.

I have a 2010 MBP with 8GB of RAM and El Capitan is performing pretty poorly, especially when I start really getting into a workflow.

But I can boot that same machine into Windows and have it run really well and not struggle nearly as soon. In fact, I often boot a lightweight Linux distro in VM from the Windows side whereas the OSX side has a really hard time with it.

I could put 16GB of RAM in since it's user-upgradable, but OSX only supports 8GB on my 2010 17" while Linux/Windows boot fine with 16GB installed. Just my rotten luck.

Having said all that, I'd like to see 32GB as an option since I don't know what my needs will be in the next 5-10 years, but if I'm going to shell out north of $4,000 for a laptop, I would like to be able to avoid that bottleneck.

Are you sure about the 8 GB limitation?

Check out OWC (Other World Computing). I believe they have discovered that you can stick 16 GB in that machine.
 
What is the power cost of going to disk when you run out of memory? I bet it is vastly (an order of magnitude or more) higher than fitting more RAM. Moving data around is power expensive, reads and writes from SSDs aren't free either.

Also to those who think that people don't need more than 16GB of RAM. Maybe you don't, but plenty of people do. See attached screenshot from my MacBook Pro on a normal work day.
 

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Refurb Macs carry the same 1 year warranty as new ones, and you can even purchase AppleCare for them for an additional two years of warranty (3 total).

I think the best thing would be to pick-up-in-store, unpack it, and make sure everything works before leaving the Apple Store.

In my 24 years of using Macs, I've found that the best warranty is the one you never have to invoke because corners were not cut during design or manufacture of the machine and all its parts. Maybe that's why those 2012 cMP Xeon 6-core and 12-core models and the i7 Quad-Core Mini's were/are so popular.
-And also my Mac IIci and G4 533 Digital Audio/AGP. :D
 
I'm sorry; but if you are working in Maya, then you probably need a Mac Pro.

Actually if you're working in Maya you need to go ahead and not buy a Mac at all. They are borderline useless as high end workstations.

That being said, when you're paying $3K+ for a laptop with Pro in the name, you should probably be able to run Maya on it and have it perform acceptably. You can't opt out of applications you don't run just because you don't think they are important. It is entirely valid to do Maya production work on a MacBook Pro and push it to the render farm when you finish a scene. That is a use case I have seen plenty of times for iterating on scenes.
 
The thing is just as the post you quoted says, LPDDR4, which Sky Lake supports, runs at a lower power anyway, so if Apple wasn't so greedy they could've used LPDDR4 and easily put in 32gb of ram while saving even more power than the cheaper configuration they chose. The only reason for the ram limitation is more profit now and in the future when these machines will hit their ram limits sooner than the 4 year rMBP which was available at 16gb at launch.
"Lower Power" != "Lower VOLTAGE". They are related; but not the same. Unless you can show me on the Skylake Datasheet that it supports 0.6V RAM, then all the "LPDDR4" labels really mean very little in terms of real-world power consumption. In MOS-based transistors, you lower the overall power consumption by one of two methods:

1. Reduce the Clock Speed
2. Reduce the Voltage

Either one (or both) of them can be used to reduce the CURRENT spikes caused by Di/Dt when the signals change state, and the transistors that keep the memory-cell-capacitors filled (or emptied) have to deal with the "Miller Effect" (that is, Junction Capacitance). The smaller the signals (and/or the slower the signals) the less "charge" to change in the memory cell transistors (and in the memory cells themselves), and the less overall battery-drain.

So, unless Skylake is actually able to support 0.6v logic levels, putting DDR4 or LPDDR4 in it isn't going to make an appreciable difference over the existing DDR3.
 
What's funny is I can't use a 16GB mac anymore because iTunes is such a memory hog that it alone requires about 12gb.

Note: apparently they fixed the problem in Sienna, how about that? Now it only requires 2GB. Well then.
 
Uncle Phil knows that most media "pros" can't afford their target prices!
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Do you really think it was the R&D team that made that decision?
No. But I am sure that they produced prototypes that had 32 GB of RAM and showed them, along with the results of their internal battery-life tests, to the higher-ups like Phil Schiller, that did make the decision.
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I'm perfectly happy with 5 hours battery life for that performance. My 2014 15" MBP only gives me about the same under load also.
Dood, that 5 hour figure was for WEB BROWSING and EMAIL. "Under Load", expect 1/2 that. Are you still ok with 2.5 hours? At that point, calling it "portable" only means you can lug it to the next Power Outlet...
 
Are you sure about the 8 GB limitation?

Check out OWC (Other World Computing). I believe they have discovered that you can stick 16 GB in that machine.

Yep. It will indeed take 16GB on the motherboard and boot in Linux or Windows.

OSX will fail to boot, though, unfortunately. There's various threads all over about it but it's specific to the 2010 17" I believe.

The 2011 17" model would have been much better both for the 16GB of RAM and quad-core 2nd-gen i7, but sadly those are plagued with logic board failures.
 
I swear if I read one more comment "It doesn't even come with a USB port" my head is going to explode (it comes with 4, BTW).
Actually, it comes with 4 USB-C/TB 3 Ports with THIRTY-TWO USB 3.0 Ports worth of I/O Bandwidth... :)
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Future Proof is one thing, and Present Retarded is another!
And anyone who thinks that one USB 3.0 port instead of one USB-C/TB 3 port is a good tradeoff in 2016 is the textbook definition of "retarded", I agree.
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Yep. It will indeed take 16GB on the motherboard and boot in Linux or Windows.

OSX will fail to boot, though, unfortunately. There's various threads all over about it but it's specific to the 2010 17" I believe.

The 2011 17" model would have been much better both for the 16GB of RAM and quad-core 2nd-gen i7, but sadly those are plagued with logic board failures.
I assume you know about the Firmware Update being necessary, right?
 
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I wonder when someone at apple will clarify that it's because there isn't room on the motherboard...

The response about battery life is really silly.

DDR3 CHIPS HAVE MAX SIZE OF 1GB EACH.

Have a look at the tightly packed motherboards apple makes from the an iFixit teardown of last gen 15 retina (yellow box).

RAM is already the BIGGEST space hog on the motherboard, nothing takes up more room. No one is soldering more than 16gb onto a motherboard. They would need to use height to stack in more memory if they wanted over 16.

DDR4 page on wikipedia mentions 2gb chips are in the spec, if I read right... But even if Apple went DDR4 tomorrow I don't think anyone is manufacturing 2gb DDR4 chips yet.

I think 32gb soldered on the MB is still 2 years away.
 
I'm sorry; but if you are working in Maya, then you probably need a Mac Pro.


Close Chrome and your RAM requirements will be back to some semblance of reality.

As we do web dev I usually have some form of WebKit/blink browser open sometimes I might have Roccat and Firefox - otherwise Safari and Firefox - but still have the same issue with Chrome closed, or with Firefox closed for that matter. But sure I do have a lot of things open in Photoshop. That generally takes up 10GB of RAM on its own any browser tends to use 2-3GB.

Ideally I'd like to keep Parrallels open too as we work with some apps which only work in Mavericks and below, but my Retina Mac freezes when that's opened on top for too long:( - so 32GB would have been great.
 
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