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There are a lot of use-cases for >16GB of RAM, but I'll share mine specifically. I develop network appliances for a "medium-to-large" enterprise. Specifically, these network appliances provide BGP, stateful packet filtering, and the other network services provided by our company's products.

When working on these appliances, I tend to spawn hundreds(close to 1000, but not more on my laptop due to RAM) of VM's, and each VM has between 4 and 48 virtual networks. Then all the appliances begin working, advertising and responding to BGP updates, setting up and tearing down VPN tunnels, and other test scenarios.

Right now, when I want to do this for network spec'd above size <N>, I can't use my laptop. I end up having to provision hosts in one of our data centers just to get my work done. If my MBP had 20, 24, or 32GB(best!) of RAM, that wouldn't be the case. Maybe in 4 or 5 years, 32GB wont' be enough either, but right now I'm only concerned with the immediate. If the MBP's had grown in maximum memory(like other laptop vendor's models), this would have been a great improvement to my workflow, and allowed me to keep it local.

There are probably tons of more common use-cases for wanting all that RAM out there, but that one in particular is mine.




Yeah I can see that (though keep in mind that this is a very fringe case). But on the other hand I'm not complaining that my MacBook can't run any game available at 60 fps.

If I want to do that, I get a desktop. I think that has been a common theme for a long time. Power - desktop. Portability - laptop. We're asking Apple to make laptops as powerful as desktops. It just won't happen, unfortunately.




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