That's what they said about 4 GB a couple of years ago. And now 4 gb isn't sufficient for daily use.
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rMBP irreplaceable RAM is a deal breaker!
- Thread starter octavianguti
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That's what they said about 4 GB a couple of years ago. And now 4 gb isn't sufficient for daily use.
Wow, I wasn't expecting so many comments and fights out of this. 
Well, I got the rmbp for about 2 weeks now, its LG but I didn't get the shadow thing, so i couldn't get another one to try my luck in getting the samsung screen, all in all it's been good, yet editing 1080p movies could go slightly faster, for your reference I tried editing while FMing or without it, still 16gbs rmbp is good but super fast. The resolution and choice of colors were great, I have yet to give it a stress test as I haven't got the project to do so. Anyway, carry on fighting.
Well, I got the rmbp for about 2 weeks now, its LG but I didn't get the shadow thing, so i couldn't get another one to try my luck in getting the samsung screen, all in all it's been good, yet editing 1080p movies could go slightly faster, for your reference I tried editing while FMing or without it, still 16gbs rmbp is good but super fast. The resolution and choice of colors were great, I have yet to give it a stress test as I haven't got the project to do so. Anyway, carry on fighting.
Why the hell should I care whether people stay with Apple or not?
I'm telling you what's objectively true because people here just bitch about not being able to replace RAM (they could do the same for CPU and GPU).
To be honest Mac Pro is LESS OF A PRO machine at this point because it only has SATA2 ports.
Golf clap to you, sir, for that ridiculous (albeit entertaining) tantrum.
You still know that you only need ram because you don't have a clue about DFD and current sample libraries technologies right?
I can load an entire orchestra with less than 2-3GB RAM usage and it will play instantly.
If you think you you need more than 16GB RAM (and that is generous) for orchestral mock-up then you are doing it wrong, plain and simple.
No, of course not. But neither is Core2Duo CPU
Playing YouTube on Core2Duo Pro machine bumps cpu to 140%.
You people here are yapping just like the only thing forcing you to buy a new laptop is RAM.
You also seem to forget TWO THUNDERBOLT PORTS + a dedicated HDMI.
Thunderbolt is pro. And retina has more of them. >>> Retina is more pro.
You can connect a PCIe 960GB SSD (800mb/s) + external graphics adapter or another PCIe SSD for 2TB in RAID0 (1600mb/s) and still run an external screen via HDMI port.
That is not pro?! Because you can't swap 16gb RAM for 16GB in future when no 16GB modules will ever be available. Great stuff guys.
Compared to computers of decade ago you can say exactly the same for CPU, GPU or even soundcard.
I've replaced two CPU units in my old Pentium, but they did fail. I've yet to have a macbook fail on me, even if you can manually swap the last capacitor on it.
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I would love 32gb of RAM with the new Haswell rMBP. I run multiple VM's at the same time and would be able to give more memory to each machine.
Not going to happen, because 204 pin SO-DIMM RAM only go up to 16 GB in 2 slots. That will change with Broadwell and DDR4 RAM, but that is in 2014. Haswell machines will therefore not have 32 GB offered.
This is definitely a deal breaker for myself as well. While I would love one of these machines, I can't see myself buying a new MacBook until Apple decides to let us open them up again. I'm still on my first generation late '08 Unibody (removable battery) with a 2.53ghz Core 2 Duo, but have since upgraded to 8gb RAM and a 128gb SSD with a 1tb HDD in the optibay, and have replaced the battery numerous times. Considering this laptop will be turning 5 this year and is still a killer setup, I'm happy. But, I also prefer to make my $2000+ investments last for longer than 2 or 3 years… if the new MBP can't last me another 5 years, no interest.
4GB was perfectly fine on my 2011 MacBook Air for what I used, which included running Windows 7 within a Parallels 7 virtual machine.
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It's unlikely to happen. More and more manufacturers are soldering RAM. Actually, even today there are lots of Ultrabooks sold without even an 8GB option, much less upgradable RAM. Microsoft's Surface Pro rates as low as the rMBP in terms of repairability, and worse in terms of upgradabilty since it has fewer ports.
The smarter purchases in coming years will be further down the price scale. Buy a base model rMBP every 3 years or so, and it will be more economical than buying up and trying to stretch it to 5 years of usage.
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Wow, I wasn't expecting so many comments and fights out of this.
Well, I got the rmbp for about 2 weeks now, its LG but I didn't get the shadow thing, so i couldn't get another one to try my luck in getting the samsung screen, all in all it's been good, yet editing 1080p movies could go slightly faster, for your reference I tried editing while FMing or without it, still 16gbs rmbp is good but super fast. The resolution and choice of colors were great, I have yet to give it a stress test as I haven't got the project to do so. Anyway, carry on fighting.
So evidently it wasn't a dealbreaker, after all.
You're assuming that the new MBP will break.
SSD is replaceable, and I haven't had anything else broken in my old unibody (2008 2.53 as well).
To be honest HDD didn't break anyway.... I did buy this laptop with expectation that it will last me 4 years (and to still be able to sell it), and I think it will.
I had a 2011 MBP that the logic board went bad in. I suspect that if anything fails in my rMBP it will be the GPU or logic board. In either case it wouldn't matter which MBP I have. I was very against the rMBP paradigm shift but I had to put my "geek" aside and consider everything logically. While I am a "tinkerer" and I would like to have the ability to change the RAM to whatever I please, the reality is, there are no 32GB DIMM's for laptops currently available. Actually that's not entirely true. I did find 32GB DIMM's on some Chinese site but I never heard of them before and couldn't find it anywhere else no matter how hard I tried.
Today the price difference between Apple and 3rd party RAM is around ~$50. Not big enough of an issue when I'm spending in the area if $2500 for the entire computer. I still have my Windows box to keep me busy tinkering as the desire arises. For my daily work needs the rMBP is a joy to work with. The screen does make a big difference. It's not so noticeable in the store, but once I had it for about 10 days and THEN went back to the Apple store, that's when I really appreciated the difference. I honestly wasn't sure that I was going to keep it until that second store visit.
It remains to be seen what happens with my rMBP 2 or 3 years from now, but I chose to put some faith into Apple and trust that this computer will easily last me 3 to 5 years. I will say this. If the SSD was soldered in I would have bought the cMBP. As it stands I can live with 16GB's and I'm pretty confident that it'll be fine for at least 3 years to come.
This seems like a sensible and reasonable post.
I like tinkering as well... But the retina is so well built I'll just tinker with something else.
Soldered SSD would be a step too far. Proprietary SSD is a pain in the butt (could've used standard mSATA, probably wouldn't go up to 768GB though.) but you can still upgrade it, and they will get bigger.
Even just with Word, Safari and iTunes my 2011 MBP uses a huge chunk of my 16 GB RAM. I sometimes have like 2-3 Gigs of available RAM - and when I only had 8 GB I got constant page outs. So yeah, I wouldn't go for anything below 16 GB even for rather basic use.
Back in 2007, 4GB of RAM was more than enough to last me a few years. In 2011 that number, for me, had to be changed changed to 8GB of RAM. I still think it's enough for now. But I doubt it will be in 2 years.
Later this month I'll be upgrading my 2011 MBP to 16GB just so I can upgrade my 2008 uMB from 4GB to 8GB because it's paging-out about 1.5GB of RAM on my regular usage and slowing it down.
edit: my point is: with un-upgradeable RAM, you have to buy into the amount of RAM you think you'll need a few years ahead. That's a hard task. I'd buy the 16GB rMBP if I were to buy one now... which I wouldn't be able to afford
Later this month I'll be upgrading my 2011 MBP to 16GB just so I can upgrade my 2008 uMB from 4GB to 8GB because it's paging-out about 1.5GB of RAM on my regular usage and slowing it down.
edit: my point is: with un-upgradeable RAM, you have to buy into the amount of RAM you think you'll need a few years ahead. That's a hard task. I'd buy the 16GB rMBP if I were to buy one now... which I wouldn't be able to afford
Wow, I wasn't expecting so many comments and fights out of this.
Well, I got the rmbp for about 2 weeks now, its LG but I didn't get the shadow thing, so i couldn't get another one to try my luck in getting the samsung screen, all in all it's been good, yet editing 1080p movies could go slightly faster, for your reference I tried editing while FMing or without it, still 16gbs rmbp is good but super fast. The resolution and choice of colors were great, I have yet to give it a stress test as I haven't got the project to do so. Anyway, carry on fighting.
No IR here either with LG when I bought on Feb 20...today is another story. I'll replace when the semester ends and I have the time. It's getting comically bad too. I'll watch a lecture video that shows "slides" during the middle of it for at most a few minutes, and when it switches back to the professor, I still see the slide very clearly. I'm almost curious how bad it's going to get before I manage to have it replaced. :-/
Anyway, keep an eye out! IR took several weeks to show on my rMBP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot3Sg2Zq02o
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So evidently it wasn't a dealbreaker, after all.[/QUOTE]
Sorry, it wasn't super fast, I suppose 32gs of ram would do better. its not a deal-breaker but its not ideal.
All in all, so far getting the 15 rmbp hasn't been a wow experience. The monitor is pretty cool i admit, but other than that its not really that fast, hopefully the customized board is gonna get cheaper in a year time, and if this computer can take 32gs of ram in 2 years time, I believe I can stick with it for 3.
Still its not as heavy and is thinner, credit to apple, but who knows what gonna happen next.
As long as the next gen of rmbp is doing soldered ram, i would be alright, just dont make me the victim.
So evidently it wasn't a dealbreaker, after all.
[/QUOTE]Sorry, it wasn't super fast, I suppose 32gs of ram would do better. its not a deal-breaker but its not ideal.
All in all, so far getting the 15 rmbp hasn't been a wow experience. The monitor is pretty cool i admit, but other than that its not really that fast, hopefully the customized board is gonna get cheaper in a year time, and if this computer can take 32gs of ram in 2 years time, I believe I can stick with it for 3.
Still its not as heavy and is thinner, credit to apple, but who knows what gonna happen next.
As long as the next gen of rmbp is doing soldered ram, i would be alright, just dont make me the victim.
How am I assuming that it will break? I'm rightfully assuming that my needs as well as the needs of future software will require more from the computer. As opposed to purchasing an entire new computer, it is much nicer to put $300-400 into a current machine and get another 2 years out of it. I'm not if you've ever done any work on a computer before.
The only solution to my problem is having a true desktop (as in not an iMac) as my main computer from here on out… let's hope the new Mac Pro is as good as it is sounding.
Didn't you read? There won't be more than 16GB for current chipsets, ever. You can drop 1000$ in it but it will stay topped at 16GB forever, irregardless whether it is replaceable or not. And as far as "upgrading" goes you have more TB ports (via which you can connect PCIe cards..) which means more than upgradeable RAM thats not really upgradeable.
If you don't need a laptop and you are good with desktops I don't know why are you even considering MacBook Pro.
Soldered-on RAM is as likely to go bad as the soldered-on network controller, the CPU, the GPU or any other of the hundreds of the components. The reason slotted RAM goes bad is either some slight incompatibilities between the RAM and the main board (and the resulting stress) or simply a faulty RAM slot. Soldered RAM avoids all these potential problems.
Well this has been an entertaining thread! I decided to switch to the Lenovo w530 in order to get 32GB of ram, I do software development with a particularly hungry piece of server software. I need to deal with multiple VMs and quite often have 3 running - 32GB has been brilliant for that.
The downside has been moving to Lenovo/Windows and man has it been painful. The Lenovo is a perfectly good workhorse machine but still suffers from occasional blue screens, driver issues etc. Stupid Intel driver problems automatically changing screen contrast, all sorts of little niggles.
I sorely miss the pleasure in owning a Macbook Pro, I've been to the shop and played with a rMBP a few times and am sorely tempted to move back. I can get around the 16GB limit in some ways by having some of my VMs hosted elsewhere and remoting onto them, not ideal but possibly worth the tradeoff.
My usual strategy of buying the machines, owning them for 18months then selling with 18 months AppleCare also means that when the 32GB models come along it wouldn't be too long before I got one.
6 months ago I switched from iPhone -> Android, MBP -> Lenovo and got rid of the iPad. Pretty much regretted each of those decisions.
Rambling post but essentially there are plenty of power users out there that could easily need 32GB (not always possible to have a server either especially if you travel a lot) but then the overall Mac owning experience means I'll put up with 16GB for a while yet.
The downside has been moving to Lenovo/Windows
and man has it been painful. The Lenovo is a perfectly good workhorse machine but still suffers from occasional blue screens, driver issues etc. Stupid Intel driver problems automatically changing screen contrast, all sorts of little niggles.I sorely miss the pleasure in owning a Macbook Pro, I've been to the shop and played with a rMBP a few times and am sorely tempted to move back. I can get around the 16GB limit in some ways by having some of my VMs hosted elsewhere and remoting onto them, not ideal but possibly worth the tradeoff.
My usual strategy of buying the machines, owning them for 18months then selling with 18 months AppleCare also means that when the 32GB models come along it wouldn't be too long before I got one.
6 months ago I switched from iPhone -> Android, MBP -> Lenovo and got rid of the iPad. Pretty much regretted each of those decisions.
Rambling post but essentially there are plenty of power users out there that could easily need 32GB (not always possible to have a server either especially if you travel a lot) but then the overall Mac owning experience means I'll put up with 16GB for a while yet.
4GB was perfectly fine on my 2011 MacBook Air for what I used, which included running Windows 7 within a Parallels 7 virtual machine.
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It's unlikely to happen. More and more manufacturers are soldering RAM. Actually, even today there are lots of Ultrabooks sold without even an 8GB option, much less upgradable RAM. Microsoft's Surface Pro rates as low as the rMBP in terms of repairability, and worse in terms of upgradabilty since it has fewer ports.
The smarter purchases in coming years will be further down the price scale. Buy a base model rMBP every 3 years or so, and it will be more economical than buying up and trying to stretch it to 5 years of usage.
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So evidently it wasn't a dealbreaker, after all.
Did you check your pages outs? With a SSD you'l not notice the speed reduction much, but it will wear out your SSD which is why alot of RAM is important if you have a SSD.
If you get 0 page outs during the course of the week, then you know you got enough RAM. I can't even work with 4 gb and not getting pages out. I even get page outs with 8 gb of RAM sometimes.
Well this has been an entertaining thread! I decided to switch to the Lenovo w530 in order to get 32GB of ram, I do software development with a particularly hungry piece of server software. I need to deal with multiple VMs and quite often have 3 running - 32GB has been brilliant for that.
The downside has been moving to Lenovo/Windows
I sorely miss the pleasure in owning a Macbook Pro, I've been to the shop and played with a rMBP a few times and am sorely tempted to move back. I can get around the 16GB limit in some ways by having some of my VMs hosted elsewhere and remoting onto them, not ideal but possibly worth the tradeoff.
My usual strategy of buying the machines, owning them for 18months then selling with 18 months AppleCare also means that when the 32GB models come along it wouldn't be too long before I got one.
6 months ago I switched from iPhone -> Android, MBP -> Lenovo and got rid of the iPad. Pretty much regretted each of those decisions.
Rambling post but essentially there are plenty of power users out there that could easily need 32GB (not always possible to have a server either especially if you travel a lot) but then the overall Mac owning experience means I'll put up with 16GB for a while yet.
I honestly can't understand how you work frequently with 3 VMs running at once on a 15" screen. Isn't that just painful? Why not use a desktop and multiple monitors? I'm pretty sure that would be easier and cheaper.
The battery is more of a deal breaker to me than the RAM. I've never had RAM go bad in a laptop, but hard drives, logic boards and batteries? Yes to all.
By the time I want to upgrade the RAM to get a bit more out of my laptops I'm generally at the point where I need to spend a bit of money on it - new OS, new battery (not anymore though ha), more RAM, faster/bigger HD... etc and those upgrades will only tide me over a short while. At that point I feel like I might as well replace it rather than spend $$ extending its life by a small amount.
Obviously none of this was too much of a deal breaker because I recently bought a refurb retina. I went 8GB with the plan to possibly resell in 24 months if I start to notice it struggle.
My parents recently purchased a sony laptop and they are worlds apart in quality. I was starting to feel guilty for paying a premium for an apple and worrying about compromising on upgradability, until I was helping them set up their computer. I'll take the non-upgradable RAM any day.
By the time I want to upgrade the RAM to get a bit more out of my laptops I'm generally at the point where I need to spend a bit of money on it - new OS, new battery (not anymore though ha), more RAM, faster/bigger HD... etc and those upgrades will only tide me over a short while. At that point I feel like I might as well replace it rather than spend $$ extending its life by a small amount.
Obviously none of this was too much of a deal breaker because I recently bought a refurb retina. I went 8GB with the plan to possibly resell in 24 months if I start to notice it struggle.
My parents recently purchased a sony laptop and they are worlds apart in quality. I was starting to feel guilty for paying a premium for an apple and worrying about compromising on upgradability, until I was helping them set up their computer. I'll take the non-upgradable RAM any day.
I almost always use an external monitor. The 2 or 3 places I work have external monitors for you to plug in to.
Also as this is server software, having the VMs running doesn't mean I need to interact with them personally on screen. Only one of the VMs has dev tools in that I need to work with on screen.
A desktop is no good in a single location for me as I need to work in different locations. I represent a fairly unlikely working scenario and I realise that, there is no incentive for Apple to support people like myself, it would just be nice to have the option of 32GB
I am sure they could squeeze another couple of RAM slots in there somewhere....