> The nature of a dev's daily work can vary greatly with what kind of dev they are doing.

This was a very important part of your comment. It's good that 16gb isn't an issue for you, but for some of us, it is.

One thing I would like to know is how we got here - that some NEED 32GB of RAM in a laptop. Scouring the web for some time shows me that in 2015 it was quite hard to get a non-gaming laptop with 32GB of ram. Now, there are quite a lot of voices that cry that it is some bare minimum.

To me it seems that more people now prefer laptops to desktops and it is annoying to sacrifice performance for portability. The lack of a truly powerful desktop Mac definitely is not helping in this regard either.

Actually replying to lsadam0 but can't for some reason

> If the 2016 kept the same thickness but offered 32gb, I would have been happy.

That's not possible with the current chip offerings from Intel though. The Intel CPUs that fit the MBP form factor and other features APple needs only go up to 16 GB RAM. If you doubt this is a pain point for Apple, note that Apple standardized on 16GB RAM out of the box. I'm sure thy'd love to be able to offer 32GB as an up-sell.

Sure they could inflate the MBP form factor an re-design around the chipsets that do offer 32GB RAM, but the chipsets that suit the current form factor and support 32 GB are supposedly due out next year.

"That's not possible with the current chip offerings from Intel though. The Intel CPUs that fit the MBP form factor and other features APple needs only go up to 16 GB RAM."

That's entirely reversed. Your statement should read:

"That's entirely possible with the current chip offerings from Intel. However, it's not possible with Apple's requirements for form factor and power."

Thanks, I did not know that.

> One thing I would like to know is how we got here - that some NEED 32GB of RAM in a laptop

Inefficient programs with shiny GUIs.

OSX + GPU + Chrome + Hipchat alone consume over half of the available memory on my machine right now. And that's just the software which supports my development, no editors, compilers or VMs.

Start to throw in modern editors, VMs (software which behaves very poorly when swapped out), compilers that trade memory space to reduce CPU usage, or a JavaScript heavy website, and you're one errant command away from your machine becoming unusable as it starts swapping like mad.

I run a virtual machine (to which I allocate 8GB), Qt Creator, chrome, safari, slack, iTunes, Skype, Sourcetree (all of the apps that are deemed to be memory hogs) and some more support tools, and I still have memory to spare. I have the impression that macOS has got really efficient with memory management. On windows, I never keep so many applications open (mostly due to non-existing window management)

I don't really disagree with you. I'm not a big fan of laptops at all, but they have become necessary in my life. I would prefer a desktop.

That said, I use a 2014 MBP and feel it's already as portable as I need. If the 2016 kept the same thickness but offered 32gb, I would have been happy.

I generally expect to use a Mac for 4-5 years after I've purchased it. I've added memory to every Mac I've owned so far at some point in its lifecycle. I have a hard time believing that in 2021 16GB of RAM will still be sufficient.

That is a valid concern. I'd like to believe that at some point we will shift back to developing for performance. At home I have been using a 2009 mbp with 4GB of ram and only upgraded it to 8 last year. I have still managed to put an app to the store with it (before the upgrade).