Are... are you sure? I'm just gonna crawl into a hole now. Kidding, I have absolutely no reason for ECC RAM, not even a MacBook Pro.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Skylake Mac Notebooks May See Staggered Launch in 2016, Led by MacBook and 13" MacBook Pro
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Apple underrates the value RAM.
Mac OS X is very RAM-intensive. I have a hard time using it with less than 16GB. And yet current Apple laptops lean toward 4GB or 8GB, with 16GB only being an optional feature of the MBP.
Seeing as MacBooks are now not RAM-upgradable, Apple really, really, really needs to offer higher RAM options across the line.
Mac OS X is very RAM-intensive. I have a hard time using it with less than 16GB. And yet current Apple laptops lean toward 4GB or 8GB, with 16GB only being an optional feature of the MBP.
Seeing as MacBooks are now not RAM-upgradable, Apple really, really, really needs to offer higher RAM options across the line.
Would love to see a quad-core Skylake Mini with a dedicated GPU option.
I also really hope the new MacBook keyboard doesn't make it past that model, going forward.
I'm in the same boat, having a 2010 hires 2.7 GHz version. I'm trying to survive with the occasional NVIDIA GPU panics, which now happen about 2-3 times a week. Performancewise that old 2010 MBP is still sufficient for work but the GPU panics are not acceptable. But I won't rush into a new one as before I replaced my 2006 MBP for this 2010 MBP. That 2006 MBP is the famous one with ATI GPU having even more severe GPU problems which could only be solved by taking it apart and baking the graphics board in an oven. Extended warranty doesn't work as problems always occurred way beyond the warrantly period and even after the recall periods ended - yes I took the MBPs to the Apple centers to have them checked: "no problems" they said. Next time I'll insist to have this conclusion printed and signed on paper.
If my MBP really breaks down, I'll just buy the current one. Otherwise I'll try to survive with my 2010 MBP until after summer. GfxCardStatus does help a bit here.
Agreed. I tried it in store, and I hated it.
Are you using a spinning disk? Because on an SSD machine 4 or 8 GB is entirely usable and fast unless you're doing something fairly heavy duty.
[doublepost=1454158858][/doublepost]
I agree. When i bought my 13" retina the options i considered were
- 12" MB
- 13" MBA
- 13" MBP
- 15" MBP (but quickly ruled it out due to not wanting discrete GPU anyway and physical size)
And i agonised over it for a while, and i'm a geek (i ruled out the 11" MBA because the screen is just TOO bad on it for me, i need higher res). Speccing to 8 GB and 512 GB storage made pricing very close too. In the end i settled for the Pro due to port availability, better GPU, and retina.
I think eventually, maybe not this time around, but within the next couple of cycles you'll see:
11" MBA - dead - non-retina, supporting non-retina displays is clearly not a priority at apple
13" MBA - dead - as above
12" Macbook : CPU / GPU performance improvements, an additional port
13" MBP (retina): dead
13" Classic: dead
14" MBP: same form factor as the 13", but narrower bezel so that the screen is now 14" in 13" size chassis USB-C style ports with a display-port style TB port for legacy peripherals (Much like they did with firewire on the 2011-2012 MBPs)
16" MBP: as above for the 14" but replacing the 15"
All above surviving machines in good/better/best spec with BTO for 32 GB on the 16" Pro.
Price on the Macbook will come down to MBA level.
Last edited:
Odd how my 8GB equipped Mac Mini does just fine with El Capitan. If anything has gotten a LOT worse it's hard drive support for rotational drives. Boots have taken longer and longer even with RAID0. Disk tests used to show ~250MB/sec read and write speeds here in Mavericks and Mountain Lion. El Capitan is more like 125-170MB/sec. That's a huge drop in speed for no obvious reason. I shouldn't have to get an SSD to get acceptable performance (the problem with SSD is the cost per MB is SO much higher. I have 5TB of storage right now and want to move to 8-12TB and there is no way I can do that with an SSD. At best I can get a 1TB drive for apps and high priority data and just deal with slower speeds for the rest. I think a 12TB SSD is around $12000-20000. 12TB can be had on two 6TB traditional drives for around $600-700.
Maybe OS X is doing less disk caching/read ahead now in new versions because it's less of a win with SSD.
If you're still running a hard disk, well... apple maybe aren't tuning for that.
But yes i agree, my 15" with hybrid drive is much, much slower to boot since Yosemite.
If you're still running a hard disk, well... apple maybe aren't tuning for that.
But yes i agree, my 15" with hybrid drive is much, much slower to boot since Yosemite.
What the heck are you doing?! I'm well aware there are some users who do need loads of RAM (lots of simultaneous virtual machines, editing multi-gigabyte images or other huge data files that need to be in RAM etc.) but if that's what you are doing then, yeah, you may need more than 16GB, but saying "Mac OS X is very RAM-intensive" is disingenuous.
8GB is adequate for the vast majority, and I don't just mean people who want to check their facebook page. If I got a new MBP today, I'd probably go for 16GB but only for future-proofing.
I have 8GB, Just fired up my typical web development stack: Netbeans (a resource-hungry Java IDE), a Win 7 VM running Xara Designer, apache & postgresql servers, Safari and Chrome, the latter debugging a web app showing 3 video streams, Mail running as usual, iTunes providing background music... all running smoothly and Activity monitor shows "Memory pressure" still in the green, no swap used.
Don't be fooled by the "Memory used: 7.99GB" reading - OS X always uses spare memory for caching. If your Mac is running like a dog then it may not be memory causing the problem.
I don't disagree that > 16GB would be a useful option on a "pro" laptop for a small proportion of users, but you do exaggerate somewhat.
Also bear in mind that the "pro" market gets a bit polarised: for the vast majority, 16GB is more than enough. If you're doing something involving huge in-memory data files then its likely that 32GB still won't be enough and error-corrected RAM might be an issue. If so, you're in Mac Pro territory, not ultraportable laptop land. Dell or Lenovo will probably sell you some thick-as-a-brick 'desktop replacement' laptop with 30 minute battery life if you need something luggable.
"Pro" is a bit of a difficult thing to quantify anyway.
Plenty of "pros" can get by with 2 GB or 4 GB.
Network professionals for instance who just do network diagnostics and router configuration all day and simulate stuff on a cluster, not on their laptop (and as an aside, the mac user is stereotypically into digital media, but they're also extremely common amongst network nerds such as myself, at least where i am).
They're still pro users, just not dealing with large data sets.
I'm one of them, but 8 or more is nice for GNS3. And VMware.
Plenty of "pros" can get by with 2 GB or 4 GB.
Network professionals for instance who just do network diagnostics and router configuration all day and simulate stuff on a cluster, not on their laptop (and as an aside, the mac user is stereotypically into digital media, but they're also extremely common amongst network nerds such as myself, at least where i am).
They're still pro users, just not dealing with large data sets.
I'm one of them, but 8 or more is nice for GNS3. And VMware.
There's no space on the 12" for an additional port, unless it replaces the audio jack. The edge to edge keyboard means any added ports need to fit under the keyboard, but the thinness means there's not enough vertical space to do that. I do expect a 14" (or so) Macbook with extra ports. The extra size means there is space outboard of the keyboard for ports. It may be a while before this is released: The GPU performance vs. power consumption may need to improve to be able to drive the bigger display with a fanless processor. This may require waiting until Intel does the next die shrink.
No need for a legacy type port. It should be possible to connect legacy (Displayport or TB1/TB2) devices to a USB-C port with just an adapter cable.
The real question is how many ports on a big MPB will support TB. The current model's USB, TB, and Magsafe ports might all be replaced 1 for 1 with USB-C ports. That's five USB-C ports! Would all support TB (extra chips)? Just two (not very Apple like to mix features)? Would some remain as USB-A ports (not very Apple like to keep the old)?
Again, I was clear that there are apps still not available in iOS which makes my suggestion not perfect. However, I am not about Rosetta or any silly solution like that. ALL app that I use are available in iOS, so for me there is nothing for which I require an x86 platform to get work done. My use case works for me.
Using web browsers.
Maybe it's just me, but I tend to leave a lot of windows/tabs open. And over time, my memory pressure creeps ever upward (into yellow, and eventually red). I try emptying caches and killing processes in Activity Monitor to cut down on memory usage, but eventually I get to the horrible eventuality where I need to relaunch my browsers or sometimes (gasp) even reboot my computer.
In a modern OS, one shouldn't have to take action to clear out junk that isn't being used anymore. But I certainly do.
Really? Other people don't see this? I'm really not doing intensive stuff on my home computer, but I hit against a wall of it's 8GB all the time.
Yes, give a longer shelf life to the 15" rMbp running on a 2013 haswell chip! Makes sense to me, NOT!! Might as well launch in Q3 with broadwell just to further piss people off
My thoughts exactly. I'm using the mid-2012 13" IvyBridge and it feels so SLOOOOWWWWWW.) My tax return is beginning to be recycled at the Apple store, but I do not want to drop that kind of cash on 2 year old tech. After a few years with this, I've realized I really need more screen real estate. If the 15" isn't coming to late summer, that sucks big time.
One would think that Apple would actually LOOK at the type of drive you're running and base their cache and settings on that rather than a one size fits all type thing, especially given the fact they are still selling a lot of computers with traditional and/or hybrid hard drives. It's not like SSDs were slow under Mountain Lion.
I really think they should spend a lot MORE time on optimizing OS X (like say the entire next upgrade cycle) rather than keep adding useless/worthless/pointless features all the time. I'd like to see an El Capitan that's as fast as Snow Leopard or even Mountain Lion, but keeping the current feature set (other than upgrading the disk manager to the prior functionality; I don't care what it looks like as long as it works). If Microsoft can manage to make Windows 10 run on ancient machines, OS X should be able to do what it does nearly as fast as older versions. It has too much bloat.
Some of us remember the days when every MAJOR release of OS X would be FASTER than the previous version (right through OS X Tiger). Leopard was the first version that was slower (noticeably so on my heavily upgraded PowerMac Digital Audio running at 1.8GHz). Everyone says how great Snow Leopard is NOW, but it wasn't really any faster than Leopard (about 1-5% slower here overall on my 2008 Macbook Pro that came with Leopard originally) and most of the space "savings" were from wiping out PPC files, not actually making it leaner). Lion was a freaking disaster of epic proportions in terms of BLOAT (and bugs early on). Mountain Lion was actually a huge improvement over Lion and ran very well on my 2012 Mac Mini and not bad on my 2008 MBP (slightly slower than Snow Leopard, but acceptable).
Mavericks had a few buggy issues early on, but to me the improved multi-monitor support was worth it. It wasn't appreciably slower than Mavericks here on either computer. Yosemite was a disaster for sheer SLOWNESS according to everything I read (I skipped it and Lion) and it got rather uglier, IMO. I actually like El Capitan's Dark Mode (goes well with Dark Mode on my new Windows Phone, believe it or not, which is WAY better looking than the current iPhone's CaRTooN O-Rama look, not to mention a 1/6 the price, even with a 200GB Sandisk storage expansion). But the slowdown from Mavericks to El Capitan on the hard drive front rather sucks. I think other things have slowed down as well in terms of graphic calls (XBench seems to think so), but because my 2012 Mac Mini supports Metal, I don't really notice it. It feels about the same as Mavericks (it should feel a LOT faster, considering and thus why I suggest El Capitan needs big time efficiency improvements).
I really believe it's the hard drive performance getting worse that has had a lot of that effect. My 2012 Mac Mini hasn't gotten any faster since 2012, but with Metal, it feels just as fast in every aspect as Mavericks EXCEPT the hard drive and it's not too terrible here (other than boot times) because I have a RAID 0 setup, which despite it's slowdown from 250MB/sec is still doing ~170MB/sec, which is twice as fast as a regular hard drive that non-SSD Macs come with. My mother's Macbook Pro from 2012 has the same GPU but just a single 5400 RPM drive and only the Core i5 dual-core CPU and it feels slow as hell any time more than two things are going on at the same time (boot loading, multi-tasking) and it's the hard drive that's doing it more than anything, IMO. It can't be the graphics since that's the same. Combine that with only 4GB of Ram (more disk swapping) and it starts going downhill. I don't think it's the CPU, though. My 2008MBP is way slower than her 2012 Macbook Pro in CPU terms and has the same amount of memory (4GB), but it feels faster overall for many of these tasks and that's probably because I upgraded its hard drive to a 500GB 7200 RPM model (hers is a 5200 RPM). My MBP gets 110-130MB/sec and hers only gets around 80MB/sec.
Last edited:
If a redesign is happening this year, I could definitely see a staggered launch for the 15".
Unless you go with a dedicated GPU model, however, if they're releasing in the second half of the year, it'd would almost make more sense for them to wait for Kaby Lake and release in September/October.
That is, unless Intel pulls the same Skylake BS on us and delays the mobile quad-core + Iris Pro Kabylake GPUs to late 2016/early 2017.
Unless you go with a dedicated GPU model, however, if they're releasing in the second half of the year, it'd would almost make more sense for them to wait for Kaby Lake and release in September/October.
That is, unless Intel pulls the same Skylake BS on us and delays the mobile quad-core + Iris Pro Kabylake GPUs to late 2016/early 2017.
Agreed. I'm hesitant to even buy a new macbook. I'm still using my late 2008 unibody aluminum macbook and would like to upgrade to a pro once skylake is out. As a video guy skylake is important to me because of its native H.265 encoding/decoding capabilities.
But I feel like Apple products are getting worse over time. The new macbook keyboard feels awful. I worry about a redesign because that usually means less ports and more non-swappable parts as Apple continues on its path to ever thinner gadgets. Personally I have no issues with the thickness of my current macbook. Which is about one inch thick. I've never once said to myself "man I wish this was thinner." I would rather a thicker machine with dedicated GPU (because if you call it a pro it really should have a dedicated GPU) and the ability to swap out ram, swap out SSD and has a bunch of ports. I could also care less about a retina display or lack of bevels.
Apple should move to ARM. Sooner or later. Intel is just so slow in rolling out their chips. Remember that when we read Skylake for late 2015? Not at all. I am running old 09 17 MBP which is extremely bulky and unpleasant to carry on, so MB 12 would be a joy. If Intel continues to do this then Kaby Lake MBP will roll out sometime in mid 2017...
Well, hope that skylake 15" MBP will be available soon.... To be honest, I would love to have a retina display, SkyLake i7 and the case like mine MBP early 2011 (this means also "user-upgradable") . But I will be happy even with the actual 15" with updated technology, current CPU and maybe DDR4...
. But I will be happy even with the actual 15" with updated technology, current CPU and maybe DDR4...Well, hope that skylake 15" MBP will be available soon.... To be honest, I would love to have a retina display, SkyLake i7 and the case like mine MBP early 2011 (this means also "user-upgradable")
Sorry but you are stuck in past... Do not buy Macs if you do not like the fact you cannot upgrade them over the time. Still it would be only RAM and SSD (you should max out RAM at the time of purchase, and it is quite easy to also choose the right SSD for your needs). It is good Apple makes their laptops thinner, they are meant to be portable...
Yes, I agree with you, I was only wondering about my dreams
. As I wrote, I hope the new MBP will be out soon, only thing that scares me it's that there's could be the 12" MacBook keyboard, that, in my own view, it's horrible to use (and see,BTW).