I’d cut Apple some slack on the RAM front because Intel was supposed to ship DDR4LP a couple years ago, after years of being fairly good about hitting targets.

The larger point about recognizing that we’ve plateaued on size & weight benefits is important, though. As long as we need keyboards there’s not much point in taking on all of the other compromises.

Ironically, it was Steve Jobs' pep talk to new executives that went something like: "The difference between a janitor and executive is that VPs are not allowed to have excuses". So trying to share the blame with Intel is just silly.

Every single Apple's competitor delivers laptops with 32+ GB of RAM, and MacBooks are stuck at 16GB and there's no one to blame for it but Apple.

> Every single Apple's competitor delivers laptops with 32+ GB of RAM, and MacBooks are stuck at 16GB and there's no one to blame for it but Apple.

This is only partially correct: those are separate models which are bigger and have worse power and heat characteristics. Every laptop which is similar to Apple's shares the 16GB limit for the same reason; the difference is that Apple has decided not to offer that second tier.

Dell's XPS is comparable in size and performance to the MBP and has 32Gb of RAM available. Does the standard DDR4 they use effect battery life? Possibly, but that's a trade off I and others would take for our $4000 laptops not to grind to a halt when we spin up a few docker containers.

> Apple has decided not to offer that second tier

MacBook Pro, a first-tier plaything. If they do finally release a "second tier", what the hell are they going to call it? MacBook Super Pro?

I'd imagine they'd call it Macbook Pro 17"

> Every single Apple's competitor delivers laptops with 32+ GB of RAM, and MacBooks are stuck at 16GB and there's no one to blame for it but Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Book_2

It's impossible to provide decent battery life in a laptop with normal DDR4, it uses 80% more battery in standby:

https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/

"DDR4 would drastically decrease it from the 30 days of standby time that they get now to less than one week"

Fine, I'll take 32Gb of RAM and a less than a week of standby time thanks.

It’s possible by hibernating faster, which is the strategy lenovo used in my t460p with 32 gb ddr4. The downside is that leaving it with a closed lid for ten minutes makes waking it up a 5 to 10 second affair instead of instant.

Mah, there’s a mobile standard optimized for that use case... not using it because intel can’t get their act together would be asinine. I’d be shocked if there weren’t any Ryzen prototypes running in Cupertino, with daily performance test results CC’d to intel account managers. I’d to just that...

Part of the reason for Apple betting big on Intel was power efficiency. But with Ryzen going to 7nm before Intel makes it to 11nm(?) reliably, I have to think that Ryzen with integrated GPU starts looking damned attractive.