Out of luck (again)
In an email response to a customer question concerning the 16GB memory cap on Apple’s new MacBook Pro lineup, a longstanding ceiling for the notebook series, SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller said the design decision stems from a need to prolong battery life.
Apple’s LG partnership seems to indicate that Apple may have shelved plans to build a new display, something that’s been confirmed by The Verge’s Nilay Patel. According to Patel, Apple told him it is out of the standalone display business.
Jason Snell at SixColors:
Well, it’s my sad duty to report that the MacBook Pro keyboard has the same key travel as the MacBook. Apple says the stainless steel dome switch beneath each key has been honed to give you a more responsive feel, but to me it feels just like the MacBook’s keyboard. (To be fair, I don’t have a MacBook available to test directly. It’s possible that this keyboard does indeed feel more responsive than the MacBook, but I would never mistake it for the old MacBook Pro or MacBook Air keyboards or even the Magic Keyboard.
BGR:
Since the cards are brand-new, we don’t have a sense for how they’ll perform in the real world quite yet. But just by comparing some basic specs, we know that performance should be similar to or a little worse than the GTX 965m graphics card, as found in the new Surface Book and other portable laptops.
Things get worse when you compare the $2,000+ laptop to other 15-inch Windows laptops, most of which tend to be designed for performance. A quick search throws up numerous 15-inch laptops around the $1,500 mark, which have much more powerful graphics cards, and more RAM and storage to boot. For a little extra weight, you can even get laptops with desktop-level GTX 1070 or 1080 cards, which are hilariously better than the Radeon Pro 400s in the MacBook Pros.
Don’t get me wrong, the new MacBooks look like very good laptops. My concern is that the Macs are more and more like iOS devices: they’re all designed with the same constraints in mind.
They’re for people who travel/move a lot (small, light machines) and are power corporate users (not that much powerfull machines in the grand scheme of things but that last a long time to go from meeting to meeting all day long).
It’s fine for Apple to target mainly that demographic but if you have needs outside of these, what is Apple offering you ? Certainly not a laptop. If you need a powerfull graphic card, well sorry, Apple has absolutely nothing for you in store. If you need a retina external display at least you can go to LG for now. But for how long ?
And If you need more than 16 Go of memory to run big VMs, you have to look for a desktop …
From MacRumors Mac Buyers Guide:
