Apple MacBook Pro is limited to 16GB ram for battery life

By admin On Oct 31, 2016

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Apple has indicated that the company has limited the maximum amount of RAM in the new MacBook Pro to 16GB to save power. Furthermore, the two USB-C ports on the right side of the 13″ variant can offer less PCIe bandwidth and power than the ports on the left.

According to Phil Schiller, director of Apple’s marketing department, the new MacBook Pro models feature an energy-efficient memory controller that can handle up to 16GB. “To put more than 16GB of fast RAM in a laptop design would require a memory system that consumes much more power, which is not efficient enough for a laptop,” he said in an email to a MacRumors user.

Some professional users were outraged that the new models will not come with a 32GB option. The MacBook Pro is popular with people who want to do graphics work and many graphics applications require a lot of RAM. To date, no model of the laptop has been released that can handle 32GB of ram. Other manufacturers do offer laptops with 32GB of RAM, but these are mainly gaming laptops and mobile workstations, which place less emphasis on battery life.

Another choice that seems to have been made in the interests of battery life is the choice of Thunderbolt controller chips in the 13″ model. According to AppleInsider, a Thunderbolt 3 controller can only handle one 5k display and the new MacBook Pros are with Touch Bar therefore equipped with two such chips. The 13″ model without Touch Bar has only one controller and only two USB-C ports. That model can therefore only control one 5k screen.

The 13″ model with Touch Bar does have four USB-C ports. However, the two ports on the right side of the laptop are believed to have a different Thunderbolt controller than the ports on the left. ports on the right have less PCIe bandwidth than the other ports.

MacRumors also writes about the power that different versions of the MacBook Pro can deliver from the USB-C ports. The two more expensive variants with Touch Bar can provide two devices with a maximum of 15W of power. The 13″ variant without Touch Bar can supply one device with 15W and another with 7.5W at the same time.

Apple indicates that the new MacBook Pro models can last 10 hours on a battery charge, an hour more than the previous models. However, the batteries have a significantly lower capacity than those of the predecessors. The 2015 version of the 13″ model had a 76Wh battery, while the 2016 version without Touch Bar has 54.5Wh. With Touch Bar, the battery is even smaller at 49.2Wh. In 2015 it had 15″ model has a 99.5Wh battery, but the one in the new one has a capacity of only 73.9Wh. The capacities have thus decreased by about a third and a quarter. Presumably, therefore, Apple has had to cut back on power consumption on several points to be able to deliver the improved battery life.