[mschuster91]

The biggest problem I have with Apple is that they've completely lost track when it comes to their core user group.

A modern MBP still can't have more than 16GB RAM, it has 0 legacy ports, and cannot be upgraded at all.

Yes it might be a perfect laptop for hipsters who just want to show off their MBP and do the occasional Photoshop, but without developers who create programs for OS X or professional users who make their entire company buy MBPs there will be no ecosystem to lure in said hipsters... more sooner than later.

[AlphaSite]

How many developers actually need >16gb for normal work? They exist for sure, but I would posit that its only some vanishingly small portion in practice.

[tracker1]

Anyone running a handful of VMs for DBs/apps/services while also developing Java or .Net "enterprise" (fat-stack) applications. It's pretty easy to hit very high usage.

I do mostly web-stack stuff with node, and chrome is probably my biggest offender... But I've also got multiple tabs in firefox open, not to mention VS Code and other desktop-ified apps (spotify, slack, etc). I do okay with 16GB... but I know when I fire up a windows VM with Visual Studio, man does it get tight.

[mschuster91]

For example when you work with dockerized enterprise CMSes on a Mac - you'll need 8GB RAM at minimum for the Docker VM, 4+GB for your browser, 4GB for the IDE (although IntelliJ can eat even more RAM easily!) and suddenly there is no more RAM.

Basically, you can easily use 32+ GB of RAM as soon as anything Java is involved. For what it's worth I usually don't do Java stuff but my Chrome RAM usage alone easily exceeds 8 GB. I could really use more than 16 GB.