One of our designers at work got an iMac with 32G, and immediately maxed it out, bragging "I'll never have enough RAM!" So, yeah.

I think one of the good points made last week is that at this point, you're into workflow management when you hit limits like RAM because, yes, you could run two more VMs on your laptop if you had 32GB instead of 16GB, but you're already running 4, and then you'd run 6 and complain you couldn't run 10. Your base laptop will always have some limit that you'll need to deal with.

The question remaining unanswered for me is how much developers, like creative professionals before them, are influencers that drive secondary sales. I remember people crying doom for Apple when they gave up being the primary education computer with sweet deals for schools and students, because KEY DEMOGRAPHIC KEY INFLUENCE POINT KEY... and yet it didn't appear to hurt them at all. I actually question the whole "influencer" theory of marketing because of it.

As a designer myself, I certainly like that I can add 32GB to my skylake iMac, however I've never felt the strong need to upgrade. Even when I'm dealing with massive Sketch and Photoshop documents, tons of chrome tabs, running a development environment & editing code, etc all simultaneously (and watching activity monitor carefully), it's been my experience that my workflow has been limited primarily by CPU speed and the fact that Sketch and Adobe products need serious performance optimization. Even running nothing at all, Sketch and just about anything from Adobe will chug on simple tasks at random times. Certainly brute forcing it by throwing more resources their way would help (always been my strategy), but that has serious diminishing returns.

Good points about VMs and edu market.

It's much more about simulating a server in a VM, than running 4 VMs. And servers need lots and lots of RAM as the kind of database stuff usually run in them (even for prototyping) is usually memory bound not processor bound.

This is most likely negligence, but I typically have 3-4 VMs open. One is for hotfixes, one for next feature branch, one for secondary project, one for another experiment. It keeps things really clean from a deploy point of view and reduces the cost of context switching greatly. This is VMware stuff running on Windows 7. I'd love to hear more ideas. All 16GB of my random is always in use.

Doesn't have to be development related try editing 4K video with 16GB of ram.

Agreed but that's not necessarily bad on 16GB. After all, you can edit 4k on an ipad pro with 2-4GB ram. Disk IO matters a lot though - newest MBPs do 3.1GB/s so having a bit less RAM is nothing like it used to be before fast SSDs.

No you can't edit a video on an iPad pro at 4K, adding a few clips together isn't editing.

Open Adobe Premiere and After Effects load up a few 4K sources and start editing and talk to me about 2-4GB ram for 4K....

Splicing clips and adding transitions definitely is editing. What you're talking about is differences in workload, which of course have different IO and CPU requirements. The further you get into those complex workloads, the fewer users there are, and the more likely they're going to be sitting at a fixed station with a large monitor where an iMac / MacPro may be a better choice for said workload.

Even if MBPs had 32GB, you still will hit CPU & thermal limits which matter a great deal in rendering, and which are far less than an iMac. I imagine you're looking at a pretty limited set of use cases where 32GB freed up a speed bottleneck that the CPU didn't then quickly hit. Even more so factoring in these use cases needing to be mobile.

Also, Premiere / After Effects can most definitely take advantage of the improved disk IO, now that its available. As usual, developers will have to adjust to the platforms they're on. Having graphics performance doubled and disk IO up 66% is not a terrible state of affairs for rendering.

I'm not saying 32GB isn't important but there's a pretty understandable logic as to what fundamental constraints they're dealing with and how those compare to the market.

I think they would as well. If I am buying a machine that I won't be able to upgrade the memory on, I'll very likely buy the maximum amount available. If I were in the market for a new laptop now, I'd buy the 16GB model.

AIUI, Apple made a choice to limit the memory to 16GB based on size and weight, and battery life. They'd need more power if they went with processors that handled 32GB, and that in turn would either diminish battery life or increase size and weight. Apple does have a strong desire for good battery life, size, and weight. That doesn't square with some of their existing or potential customers, but I'm sure they took that into account when they made their choice.

And there were rumors that there are going to be updates coming out next year.[0]

[0]: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/31/macbooks-2017-price-cuts...

Note the update that this rumor does not line up with leaked Intel roadmaps, so it sounds doubtful. I also don't know the history of Kuo as a rumor source. I'm leaving this in for informational purposes only.

As an aside, I think SSD has changed this discussion quite a bit over the years as well. While still slower than RAM, SSD is so much faster[1] than HDD. We do always want faster, understandably. That said, swapping isn't nearly as bad as it was.

[1]: Yeah, that's an SI unit, I believe :)

Edited to qualify rumors of the 32GB MacBook Pro.

Yeah, when OSX moved to the BSD kernel developers loved it. *nix OS, pretty GUI and with virtualization and bootcamp you can run windows/linux when you need to. It is/was a universal device unlike any other.

BSD userland. The kernel is a Mach-derived kernel called XNU.

XNU combines a BSD-like kernel (providing POSIXish services) with Mach. The BSD portion of the kernel runs in supervisor mode like the Mach portion.

Oh interesting--I didn't realize that was the case. I guess it is correct to call the kernel BSD in that sense!

If they made 32 gb max, you'd want to get it because it's soldered to mobo. That means even higher price. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

But at that point you have a best-in-class laptop that can command the higher price. The problem is that the current configuration is expensive and is not really better than the competition in anything but trackpad.

And screen (p3 colour and macOS still handles hidpi better than anything else), and SSD throughput (3.1gbps), and probably a million other tiny things that you forget about cos they aren't as obvious as a number that says 16 vs 32.

For 3200$ in a macbook I get a quad core i7, 16GB of ram, crappy AMD GPU, 256GB at 3.1 GB/s, very good screen and battery, no ports and dongle hell, thermal throttling

For 1500$ I get quad core i7, 32GB of high performance ram, nvidia 960M, 256GB at 3.1 GB/s SSD AND a 1TB HDD, SD card reader, ethernet, USBs and HDMI port, fullsize keyboard, worse screen and worse battery life, proper airflow, anodized black alubody

Thats a model from last year btw.