Serious professionals hoping for tons of RAM on the new MacBook Pro are out of luck.
Apple decided to limit RAM options on its beautiful new machine to just 8GB or 16GB. That’s the same amount as the last MacBook Pro, which is more than enough for most consumers, but Apple claims adding more would be also be bad for pros.
[contextly_auto_sidebar] In an email response to a MacRumors reader that asked why Apple didn’t add a 32GB option, Apple VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, explains that all the extra RAM would be a huge battery hog.
David’s question: “The lack of a 32GB BTO option for the new MBPs raised some eyebrows and caused some concerns (me included). Does ~3GBps bandwidth to the SSD make this a moot issue? I.e. memory paging on a 16GB system is so fast that 32GB is not a significant improvement?”
Schiller’s reply: “Thank you for the email. It is a good question. To put more than 16GB of fast RAM into a notebook design at this time would require a memory system that consumes much more power and wouldn’t be efficient enough for a notebook. I hope you check out this new generation MacBook Pro, it really is an incredible system.”
Along with criticizing Apple’s decision to only offer 16GB of RAM, other developers have also questioned the new MacBook Pro’s CPU and GPU performance. First shipments of the new machine are expected to arrive in 2 – 3 weeks, so we’ll have to wait until then to see how the MacBook Pro performs in the real world.
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
6 responses to “Apple defends skimpy MacBook Pro RAM”
So basically they are telling even though our new generation MacBook Pro are really incredible but we aren’t efficient enough to give 16gig of RAM and make it power efficient.
They want you to go for expensive model or if you are going for low segment model then you are stuck with RAM and now Storage and later you have to buy new Macs frequently. Now, this is incredible !!
I can’t believe they wouldn’t even offer the option to bump it up. It’s not like the people that actually want 32gb of ram from this machine are always running off battery power. This was the biggest let down for me. I want 32GB.
For MacOs, above16GB treshold, the extra performance curve is almost flat.
MacOS is good enough at swapping that it can use up its main memory and continue to perform? Why didn’t Apple answer with that fact rather than say they couldn’t maintain battery life? In a related note, Bill Gates said no one will ever need more than 640k
I have 16gb of RAM and running Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere in addition to an email app, Word and Excel docs, a web browser… etc… really really really eats memory. Having 32 GB Of RAM Would prevent swapping out to the hard drive would it not? Sometime’s I’m left with a scant 1.5 GB or even less.
This could be fixed by making a 17″ again, right? More room for everything (mostly battery, I know). Right Apple? Right? Eh? Eh? *elbow nudging imaginary apple employee*