rMBP irreplaceable RAM is a deal breaker!

[maflynn]

Apple shouldn't be pandering to those people who want the macbook pro to be thin and as light as a feather.

I don't think its pandering to a select group of users as much as its been their desire internally to shrink designs down.

I also don't think the thinness is the major reason apple went with the soldiered ram but rather a major factor is planned obsolescence.

The proof will be in the pudding when the newer models come out later this year. Will the cMBP have ram soldered onto the logic board or using proprietary storage

 

[Doward]

Apple shouldn't be pandering to those people who want the macbook pro to be thin and as light as a feather. That's what the air was designed for. Macbook Pros should be designed for people who want more power. I don't really care if the soldered in ram is a few nano seconds faster. I would like a macbook that is future proof, and one where I can eventually put in 32gb of RAM. You might not need it now but a few years down the line you might. For those of us who run VMs they eat up a lot of RAM if you want multiple ones running in the background.

This a millions times THIS. Let the Airs be the 'thin light fashion accessories' - leave the Pros to do real work.

 

[Lolito]

retina macbook sucks. 8gb is too little, you don't need more now, but you won't be able to upgrade. 32 is too much too expensive. 16 is the only chance, but you can have than in current mbp so... i would never ever buy a retina macbook until they make them upgradable.

 

[trigonometry]

retina macbook sucks. 8gb is too little, you don't need more now, but you won't be able to upgrade. 32 is too much too expensive. 16 is the only chance, but you can have than in current mbp so... i would never ever buy a retina macbook until they make them upgradable.

Well I don't think you'll ever be buying a rMBP then.

 

[ColdCase]

Apple shouldn't be pandering to those people who want the macbook pro to be thin and as light as a feather. That's what the air was designed for. Macbook Pros should be designed for people who want more power. I don't really care if the soldered in ram is a few nano seconds faster. I would like a macbook that is future proof, and one where I can eventually put in 32gb of RAM. You might not need it now but a few years down the line you might. For those of us who run VMs they eat up a lot of RAM if you want multiple ones running in the background.

I disagree, but there is no right compromise for everyone. A few years down the road when you may want to add RAM or Storage, wouldn't you also need a more powerful processor and GPU to keep up. Oh the display will also be lacking resolution. So to be future proof for say like 5-10 years, you would want the processor, GPU, RAM, hard drive consumer upgradable... hmmm... just like the wallstreet . You probably would also want a replaceable battery, keyboard, and trackpad as those will likely wear out, maybe the display for more resolution (or touch). For that upgrade price, may as well as get a fresh laptop. Apple has seen the market for that kind of laptop dwindle, I think.

I love the power and portability of the rMBP. I loved the power of my 2008 MPB, but that was heavy and clunky to carry around. The 2013 rMPB is just perfect. Load it up with 758 GB of internal storage, a 128GB SD card and 16GB of RAM.. perfect. Did I say how much I love the rMBP size, weight, performance. It was the only thing that pulled me away from the 2008.

Now perhaps Apple could offer a more traditional cMBP for those stuck needing DVD drives and TBs of storage for their work... or put pro features in an Air package. But the sales number of the cMBP have dropped way off, indicating soft demand I think. A desktop machine may be more suitable, perhaps some here are trying to have the portable do way too much.

Not arguing, but presenting another POV.

 

[Lolito]

Well I don't think you'll ever be buying a rMBP then.

indeed. or maybe in the future they make them with upgradable ram. or maybe they bring retina to other model.

 

[B...]

indeed. or maybe in the future they make them with upgradable ram. or maybe they bring retina to other model.

Apple is moving to universal soldered RAM with the Air and rPro lines. They will likely not move backwards. They might bring Retina to Air, but it is soldered as well.

 

[maxosx]

My years as an Apple user, loyal customer, and critic when I feel they're going against the grain, have taught me that Apple is more like a dictatorship. They do only what's in their best interest.

Then spin it with warm and fuzzy marketing.

It took me awhile to get into acceptance with the way they've morphed into a throwaway appliance maker. It is what it is. No more upgrading available to the user, an option I liked & took advantage of. Oh well times & things change.

My 15" MBPr s a nice machine. Hopefully at its end of life point, Apple will keep their promise & properly recycle it.

 

[splitpea]

People talking about 32GB of RAM in a laptop have me drooling over the idea of being able to spare 8-16GB for a RAM disk. How cool would that be when running databases, and for Photoshop scratch space and as the "hard disk" for ephemeral VMs and stuff like that?

 

[Crzyrio]

The replies in this thread fill me with despair.

I am far from the top end of motion graphics and animation, and I make use of my full 16gb of ram on a daily basis. Aka when I only had 8 my system was regularly becoming unbearably sluggish and unresponsive, often while running only a single application.

Once upon a time apple's pro laptops were marketed to people who actually used them for heavy computer work. Now it seems like people are buying them as fashion accessories (whatever, it's your money) and for some reason like to make sweeping generalizations that almost no one has needs any greater than there own.

Sigh.

No doubt it is easy to fill up 16GB of ram depending what you do but if you really need that much go ahead with a hi-res cMBP.

It is a decision you have to make, nodvd drive and non user replaceable parts for a thinner ligghter and better screen. You cant have the cake and eat it too.

I wish apple catered to my needs to and gave me an i7 4Ghz processor with 64GB ram, 3 drive bays and kept the same design and style

 

[Lolito]

Apple is moving to universal soldered RAM with the Air and rPro lines. They will likely not move backwards. They might bring Retina to Air, but it is soldered as well.

we will see that, but if that is the case, I will switch to a sony vaio again, with windows 7 and linux mint. been there already. I will then be able to upgrade everything, and i will have a laptop for half the price. either that or make a hackintosh with a hp elitebook.

still, mbp will be around for years, i will stick to mbp for 5 more years at least.

And if everyone does like me, apple will release an upgradable laptop.

 

[rocknblogger]

Are you running some big server??

There are very few laptops on the market that will take more than 16 GB of RAM even if it is swappable.

After much debate, I ordered my rMBP with 8GB... I'm not a "power user" but I do have a lot of applications on the go at once:

- Parallels / Windows 7 (w/ 2GB RAM allocated)
- MS Office - Word, Excel and PPT always open
- Chrome and Safari
- Programming Tools - Eclipse, and teaching tools Greenfoot and BlueJ
- Messages/iMessage or whatever it's called
- Usually other misc like Preview

I have NEVER had all the RAM in use. My swaps are zero. I also play games in Bootcamp/Windows 7 and RAM has never been an issue.

I'm wondering what you think you need 32 GB of RAM for...

My experience was vastly different than yours. A week and a half ago I bought the base rMBP and I ran apps similar to yours with the exception of Office,

- Parallels Win7
- Photoshop and/or Illustrator (CS6)
- BBEdit
- Terminal
- Chrome, Safari, Firefox sometimes all at the same time but usually two out of the three
- iMessage
- Evernote
- DEVONThink

And some others on and off. But these were usually going all day during working hours.

For me the base model was a dog. I had more page outs than page ins, sometimes a third more and sometimes almost 50% more. Everything lagged. When opening the Apps launcher (grid mode), swiping between screens/full screen apps, going into or out of Mission Control and of course the browsers of which Firefox seemed to perform best.

I kept it four days and last Sunday took it back and got the 16GB RAM 512GB SSD and 2.7GHz processor. Same apps running I have zero page outs and the lag is nearly imperceptible. The jury however is still out. I have one more week to decide if I'm keeping it. I plan to post my full experiences later this week. Originally I had ordered a 2.7GHz cMBP and planned to do the RAM and SSD upgrades myself. But when I went to the Apple store I have to admit that the screen caught my attention more than when I looked at it previously.

Anyway, don't want to hijack the thread just wanted to add my experience so far.

 

[Lolito]

the thing is quite easy:

- I use mbp because is the best tool for professionals.
- If this changes, i will change too; if mbp is not the best tool for a professional, i won't be using it anymore.

It's extremely simple.

----------

or... somebody shows how to solder, un-solder the ram. must be not too difficult. lot of people in this forum could do it quiet easily.

 

[ColdCase]

Once upon a time apple's pro laptops were marketed to people who actually used them for heavy computer work. Now it seems like people are buying them as fashion accessories (whatever, it's your money) and for some reason like to make sweeping generalizations that almost no one has needs any greater than there own.

Sigh.

This topic seems to come up every time there is a significant produce revision. Todays rMBP would kick the butt of anything Apple sold or could be customized 4-5 years ago with RAM, processing power, high speed ports for external drives as well as internal storage. So it is a much better power user machine today. Except for storage, this rMBP rivals my Mac Pro desktop performance and is also nicely portable. I may actually be able to do some work on it. You couldn't say that just two or three years ago.

Apple marketed the Mac Pro desktops extensively to heavy users. Many found, however, that they could get by pretty well with what Apple sold as a portable.

Apple probably provided battery, hard drive, RAM replacement features for maintainability/warranty aspects because those components were most likely to break. The features were not provided to allow for customizing. That was not the Apple market as there is really no business case for it. Some cleaver individuals here discovered methods to take advantage and customize anyway.

Its getting harder to customize any consumer product that sells well. Now that technology has advances in speed/size, it is beyond the scope of the amateur to tinker with. There is a thing about look and feel, and if you have a solder machine and coding skill, I'm sure you could add RAM or storage.

 

[rocknblogger]

I don't think its pandering to a select group of users as much as its been their desire internally to shrink designs down.

I also don't think the thinness is the major reason apple went with the soldiered ram but rather a major factor is planned obsolescence.

The proof will be in the pudding when the newer models come out later this year. Will the cMBP have ram soldered onto the logic board or using proprietary storage

I believe this to be 100% accurate. Imagine the gushing pros would be doing if the cMBP had a retina display but remained primarily unchanged but with better cooling like the retina.

This a millions times THIS. Let the Airs be the 'thin light fashion accessories' - leave the Pros to do real work.

Agree with this also. They could have also introduced a new high end Air Retina Pro version leaving the MacBook Pro a true pros machine.

I disagree, but there is no right compromise for everyone. A few years down the road when you may want to add RAM or Storage, wouldn't you also need a more powerful processor and GPU to keep up. Oh the display will also be lacking resolution. So to be future proof for say like 5-10 years, you would want the processor, GPU, RAM, hard drive consumer upgradable... hmmm... just like the wallstreet . You probably would also want a replaceable battery, keyboard, and trackpad as those will likely wear out, maybe the display for more resolution (or touch). For that upgrade price, may as well as get a fresh laptop. Apple has seen the market for that kind of laptop dwindle, I think.

<snip>

No not necessarily. If I can get about 6 years out of a piece of crap that was the dv6000 HP then I should easily be able to get the same out of a ~$2500 MacBook Pro. I upgraded the hard drive a couple of times and maxed out the RAM. The SSD gave me an additional two years of use out of it. I still have it and my wife uses it occasionally to surf the web, email and Facebook. Now that we again have 2 Macs in the home that'll probably come to an end. The point is that the laptop is still usable.

The problem with Apple is that they like to leave users behind if the user doesn't feel the need or want to buy the newest shiny thing. I have to give credit to Microsoft here in the respect that they don't leave anyone behind. If you want to install and try the newest Windows version they don't limit any features. If your computer can run it fine, if not fine, at least you have the option of deciding on whether you need to upgrade now or later.

This is the problem I have with my brand new rMBP. I don't know what I'll be facing 3 or 4 years from now regarding software and OS X. My shiny new rMBP may be dead in the water and may not be worth as much on the used market as MBP's used to be and still are. I guess we'll just have to wait and see but I'm uncomfortable looking towards the future

 

[B...]

the thing is quite easy:
or... somebody shows how to solder, un-solder the ram. must be not too difficult. lot of people in this forum could do it quiet easily.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1561478/

You need a $15,000 piece of equipment and years of experience. No, I doubt anyone on the forum could do it.

 

[stevemiller]

No doubt it is easy to fill up 16GB of ram depending what you do but if you really need that much go ahead with a hi-res cMBP.

It is a decision you have to make, nodvd drive and non user replaceable parts for a thinner ligghter and better screen. You cant have the cake and eat it too.

I wish apple catered to my needs to and gave me an i7 4Ghz processor with 64GB ram, 3 drive bays and kept the same design and style

I think you are misinterpreting my argument on several fronts.

First, I have no issues with the rmbp. It offers 16gb of ram which is currently the max you could fit in there given the two stick design. By the time 2x16 sticks become available and not obscenely expensive, you'd probably be looking at an overall upgrade anyway (assuming you do work that demands performance).

Second, the "have your cake and eat it too" argument doesn't make sense, considering that a "retina" ips screen is in no way mutually exclusive from having user replaceable parts. And my guess that would be the most appealing feature for people such as my self who do graphically intensive work. I do already have a 2011 mbp with hi res screen option, and the processing improvements since then have been incremental enough that I'm in no massive rush to upgrade.

Finally, my real gripe was not about the hardware so much as the people who have decided that market for MacBook pros should be people who barely need 4-8gb and those of us who make full use of the 16 or more have no business running our mouths.

 

[rocknblogger]

I think you are misinterpreting my argument on several fronts.

First, I have no issues with the rmbp. It offers 16gb of ram which is currently the max you could fit in there given the two stick design. By the time 2x16 sticks become available and not obscenely expensive, you'd probably be looking at an overall upgrade anyway (assuming you do work that demands performance).

Second, the "have your cake and eat it too" argument doesn't make sense, considering that a "retina" ips screen is in no way mutually exclusive from having user replaceable parts. And my guess that would be the most appealing feature for people such as my self who do graphically intensive work. I do already have a 2011 mbp with hi res screen option, and the processing improvements since then have been incremental enough that I'm in no massive rush to upgrade.

Finally, my real gripe was not about the hardware so much as the people who have decided that market for MacBook pros should be people who barely need 4-8gb and those of us who make full use of the 16 or more have no business running our mouths.

How does your 2011 hi-res display compare to the retina? Is it a dramatic difference if you compare them side by side? Or is it more subtle? I don't know if you read my earlier posts but I have a retina now, but originally I was going to go with the cMBP. Until I compared it in the store. I've never seen a hi-res MBP so I have nothing to go by and as I said earlier the jury is still out on whether I'm going to keep the rMBP.

 

[adjeff8]

This a millions times THIS. Let the Airs be the 'thin light fashion accessories' - leave the Pros to do real work.

I agree. Enough is enough. I want a Optical Drive but I'll learn to live without it. I use it like 3 times a year. But what I kinda need is a Ethernet port. I work in far flung countries and many times there is no Wifi. I certainly don't need two thunderbolt ports. You should have a option with those ports in the BTOs. But you don't get the option because the rMBPs are too thin to fit the Ethernet port in.

 

[Lolito]

problem is that, no matter how you look at it, rMBP are gonna last too little because they are not ram upgradable. they will also have a lower value as second hand. so for that people who plan to buy it and sell it after two years, that won't work as good because of this.

current generation of mbp, you could buy them with 4gb, upgrade them yourself to 8gb, and in the future 16gb... we all know that APPLE PRICES FOR RAM ARE A RIP OFF.

now, if you buy 8gb in rMBP is enough, but only for 2 years, 16gb is too expensive and not enough for a life of 6 years...

long story short: PROGRAMMED OBSOLESCENCE. If that is want you want, congrats!!! that si what you get.

this is great news, as it will foster hackintoshes in laptops!!

----------

How does your 2011 hi-res display compare to the retina? Is it a dramatic difference if you compare them side by side? Or is it more subtle? I don't know if you read my earlier posts but I have a retina now, but originally I was going to go with the cMBP. Until I compared it in the store. I've never seen a hi-res MBP so I have nothing to go by and as I said earlier the jury is still out on whether I'm going to keep the rMBP.

do not keep it man. right now, is by far the best laptop ever. but you will regret in 2-3 years. the 15" mbp with 1050p is the perfect balance. get an optibay and make a ssd raid, or a ssd+hdd. hope new ones accept 32gb of ram for the future.

rmbp are for professionals or posers. they have no middle point.

 

[applepie555]

I agree. Enough is enough. I want a Optical Drive but I'll learn to live without it. I use it like 3 times a year. But what I kinda need is a Ethernet port. I work in far flung countries and many times there is no Wifi. I certainly don't need two thunderbolt ports. You should have a option with those ports in the BTOs. But you don't get the option because the rMBPs are too thin to fit the Ethernet port in.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD463ZM/A/thunderbolt-to-gigabit-ethernet-adaptor

 

[LuxoJunior]

So, the OP started a discussion and hasn't been seen since. nice.

 

[~~Hello~~]

You should be able to put 32gb of RAM into the most recent cMBP shouldn't you? So you won't need to have a processor upgrade for it.

 

[B...]

You should be able to put 32gb of RAM into the most recent cMBP shouldn't you? So you won't need to have a processor upgrade for it.

No because there are currently no 16 GB DIMMs.

 

[Handsome Bacon]

LOL I just love how people who use MS Word, Excel and Safari all at once (woooo) can't seem to comprehend why someone would need north of 8 or 16GB. I have Kontakt orchestral libraries that can chew up 20GB plus when running under 64bit. Just because YOU don't need it doesn't mean others don't need it. Soldered RAM is kinda silly on what's supposed to be a "pro" machine. There's nothing "pro" about that thing, and it's definitely not future-proof. Pretty screen, though.