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by jimbokun 3520 days ago
"Likewise, with the new MacBook Pros, they are not going to release an update in a year's time that doesn't sacrifice ports and performance and battery life for size and weight, because doing so would be admitting a mistake."

I know this has been litigated to death in the original thread, but I think the 4 USB-C ports implicitly admits the MacBook with only a single USB-C port was a mistake. I think obsessing about having specific legacy ports is short sighted, and pushing forward with new connection technologies fits well with Apple's history of innovation. Having ports capable of being every thing from power connector to video display to high speed disk connector to mouse or keyboard port offers great flexibility and will seem like an obvious choice very soon.

I think the claimed battery life still fairs well against similarly spec'd PCs?

Size and weight are super important characteristics for many users. Not sure sacrificing these attributes would appeal to most laptop consumers.

"Nor are they going to dramatically cut the prices, such that they are actually affordable for someone, because doing so would be admitting a mistake."

It's only a mistake if their overall profits would be higher by cutting prices.

Now, the sacrifice I don't understand at all is capping RAM at 16GB. Makes the MacBook Pro seem like a very low end machine compared to the competition, and will almost certainly shorten its useful lifespan, especially for professional user.

3 comments

> Now, the sacrifice I don't understand at all is capping RAM at 16GB.

Apparently, the lack of a higher capacity RAM was due to the performance/energy ratio.

https://twitter.com/DanFrakes/status/791754757404626944

> Now, the sacrifice I don't understand at all is capping RAM at 16GB.

Totally agreed. The laptop I'm writing this on has 8GB and Firefox happily gobbles most of it. The server I recently built has 16GB which already feels very constrained. My next laptop is going to have 32GB for sure. If Apple don't have a 32GB Macbook Pro my next laptop ain't going to be from Apple.

Oh. And it's fares well, no?

SSD in Macbook Pro is crazy fast. So fast that finally, after many years, we can think about "replacing" RAM with it.

LPDDR3 RAM speed = 17 GB/sec, SSD read - 3 GB/sec. As much as it sounds crazy, i believe, SSD will eventually replace big and inefficient RAM's (which consume 6 W of power for each 16 GB slot)