T.G:Carter's real life review of the new MBpro +FCPX

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/thomas-grove-ca...k-at_b_12894856.html

www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6355

I think the 16gb RAM constraint points to a conundrum for "power users". We've always been told that you can't be too rich, too thin or have too much RAM. This was especially true in earlier days where CPU/RAM was everything and GPU had yet to be fully utilized. Instead of worrying about how many programs can be opened at once, editors/animators/graphics people need to worry about how their specific apps of choice deal with system resources.

FCPX is a relatively newer piece of software and GPU intensive. But After Effects is a fairly archaic piece of software that is only now being re-written for performance enhancement on modern operating systems and GPUs. After Effects wants lots of processor cores and RAM and utilizes relatively little GPU (apart from limited instances of Ray Tracing etc.) In fact, watching a full speed playback is called a "RAM Preview" so the emphasis is on how much RAM you have to allow for more to be rendered/played back. Motion, which is similar in function to AE, is capable of more real-time performance, so there must be something to how software is written for different systems.

As codecs improve and software is written to take advantage of modern processors and GPUs, is having a sh*t-ton of RAM (tech term) as necessary as it used to be?

Also the portion of your hard drive used as Virtual RAM is infinitely faster today then it was on drives made 5 years ago. So installed RAM is becoming much less significant. It is not an obsolete point yet, but "more" insignificant than 5 years ago.

… maybe a bit too philosophical, but:

in more and more sectors, 'better' technique gets beyond (average) User Experience, detergents washing even whiter than white, cars (most streets: not) allowing >200mph, cams with gazillion of pixels, speaker-cables with 99.999% 'clarity' (hu?), etc etc ...

Quality (grasp of Apple products!), usability ( … ) , beauty (the idle pulse of the power indicator, the pinch'n-zoom gesture, … ), 'Design' in its best, fundamental meaning - all hard to grab for those number-crunchers.

"Only the weak cover behind numbers" the best boss in my occupational life once told me.

The whole purpose of RAM is to have quick access to data because the throughput to and from spinning drives was (and in some configurations still is) much slower. Now that SSD throughput is much faster, more RAM may not always be more better.

OS code and application code has advanced greatly since the days when the advice of 'you can never have too much RAM' along with the advent of more affordable SSD storage and much faster RAID arrays alleviating the need for as much RAM as history has indicated we may require.

I'm glad to see positive reports on the performance level of the new MBP living up to the presentation as it was described by Apple at its introduction.

Once more we are learning that Apple has once again done their homework and all the internet nay sayers should keep their traps shut until we actually see the devices in real world use to make an evaluation. Then, if the hardware doesn't live up to expectations, at least there is real evidence based upon practical application to support their views.

My 20+ past life years of IT engineering, taught me that what's on paper is not what happens in real life. Especially in IT. Run it in real life first, then decide how efficient it is. Lab benchmarks and specs only show a portion of the whole truth.

All this said, you're still not going to edit 4K feature films with 8GB RAM on a Mac Air. And SSDs are no quite as fast as onboard RAM, so at least 16GB is still necessary for major work. But not 64 GB RAM.