Would have been if Intel had released a 32GB capable mobile chip that's not slower than the last generation.
Probably it got delayed after the overall shape and size were set in stone, so Apple had to go with the previous gen and work a miracle.
Or it was a conscious decision since this shape/size will be the base of all laptops for the next few processor generations and will be supported for the next 10 years or so.
How does the Dell XPS 15in or the Razer Blade laptops have 32gb of ram if Intel doesn't support that much? Do they use different chips in their laptops?
Because the chips aren't optimised for that much RAM they sacrifice a lot of battery life. Apple could theoretically ship these MacBook Pros with 32 gigs, but their battery life would probably be halved.
More like quartered, from what I've read, i.e., reduced by 3/4.
Those gaming laptops which use full-power desktop RAM also weigh 8-10 lb and they STILL have terrible battery life. They are effectively unusable without being plugged in.
The battery life on the 14 inch model is 6+ hours of streaming video out of the box which isn't bad at all I think. The real question is how well it holds up over time. Also, it is one of the few laptops available with the new 10X0 video cards. I'm honestly probably going to hold out for the newer XPS 15s with kaby lake and the 1060 cards, which are supposedly out in January sometime.
The Razer Blade Pro also has a laughable battery life: 2 hrs 45 min for WEB SURFING. That's hilarious.
What that means is, probably less than an hour of battery life if you are actually gaming, which is the raison d'etre of this laptop.
Laughable.
What would people say if Apple made a high-end professional machine with half an hour of battery life? We'd never hear the end of it. Perfectly acceptable in the PC world, though.
Nice cherry-picking, though. The desktop-replacement gaming laptops category in general is indeed 8-11 pounds, just like I was saying:
If the ram's power use is the main problem, then that disproportionately affects low-power uses. There's no reason to think gaming would have a similarly crippled battery life.
Any idea how long the MBP lasts if you peg the GPU?
I wonder if it would be possible for the OS to consolidate "hot" memory into as few modules as possible and power down the ones holding relatively cold data when memory pressure is low.
Oh wow, thanks for that info. Really good to know as I am in the market for a high end laptop and the 32gb xps was on my short list. I guess I'll be sticking with the 16gb version unless the kaby lake processors in the new xps 15s solve this issue.
Apparently the battery life on the 32GB XPS 15 suffers quite a bit. The RAM the are using isn't the low-powered RAM that future Intel chips will support.
My only complaint with Dell's approach of offering the 32GB option is that they don't seem to advertise the fact that it comes with a significant trade-off in terms of battery life. I'm all for "let the users decide," but they should have given the users the information they need to make the choice. As is someone buying an XPS 15 is sort of left with the impression that the 32GB option is a straight-up upgrade.
And it would have landed, if Apple had not decided to arbitrarily shrink their batteries, hence requiring low-power options for their components (in this case, RAM) that are not available yet.
No, it wouldn't. And no, the slightly smaller battery was not "arbitrary". And thirdly, no, it's not that LPDDR isn't available; it's that this generation of Intel CPUs usable in a laptop don't support the current generation of LPDDR yet.
In other words, it's Intel's fault, not Apple's, as posted above.
> this generation of Intel CPUs usable in a laptop
Dell XPS says hi. I don't care if it doesn't have much battery life - give me the choice, dammit. If I wanted ultraportability and umpteen hours on battery, I would have bought an Air.
> the slightly smaller battery was not "arbitrary"
I must have missed the day a tank threatened to blow up Cupertino unless they reduced the battery size. Again, nobody asked them to have an MBP as thin as an Air. It was an arbitrary choice, and (IMHO, of course) a bad one.
Wasn't this year supposed to be when 32GB landed?