[chrischen]

I have a laptop purely because it's portable. It has to strike the right balance between performance and portability of course. To counter your vocal opposition, I think the new macbook strikes that balance perfectly.

Longer battery life, and smaller battery also have benefits. Particularly, a smaller battery can be charged faster. Lower power consumption allows this, and their design decisions such as limiting RAM to 16 was made to achieve this.

I run a linux VM and do dev work and even on 8GB is fine. I'm a programmer, and technical guy, but I understand that Apple can still make better computer building decisions than me, or any other nerds who just like to ramp up spec numbers in their custom build PC.

[TheOtherHobbes]

8GB is most definitely not fine for anyone who works with media.

Considering the number of people who make YouTube videos, memes, SoundCloud tracks, web pages, blog posts, photo uploads and shares, and so on - that's a lot of users. 16GB means they're going to be waiting around the disk to thrash its way through a swap whenever they switch between applications.

My iMac has 32GB, and it's a bare minimum for comfortable thrash-free media creation.

Remember when media and creation was an Apple thing? That.

[moyta]

Not defending the MBP, but at least they have SSDs that can push 3.1GB/s [1] which is much better than most devices, esp. spinning rust. What Apple has done on the iPhones with their SSD's bus (moving off eMMC to a much faster bus) is also a big performance boosting move, really helps to keep RAM costs down now with the ongoing RAM shortage.

[1] - https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/01/2016-macbook-pro-ssd/