Apple shafts Macbook owners
APPLE MACBOOK PRO owners are incandescent with rage after reports that their over priced toys have a slower SATA connection speed.
Disk I/O speeds of 3Gbps were expected but some users posting on the Apple support forum say that their SATA connections are showing 1.5 Gigabit speed during testing.
Of course Apple fanbois claim that it must be an honest mistake and have huge difficulties with the concept that the fruit themed outfit might have intentionally capped the SATA drive speeds.
What is surprising is that older machines have higher SATA speeds and newer machines have had them halved.
Many Macbook users, particularly those with ordinary hard-drives, are unlikely to notice any difference, but those who paid an arm or a leg for SSDs on their high-end machines should be spitting tacks.
No word from Apple of course. µ
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Same old song, Apple has a long story of products suposed to be high and turned out to be low, not overall but on parts.
Take the example of the old Macbook Pro and it's screen. I live here a link to prove older Macbook proes are no different: http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/macbooks2.html
I'm not an Apple fan but its not much of an issue really.
Standard HDD users wont notice (I guess most are 5400rpm drives anyway?) and as for SSD?
Can anyone afford a SSD option after buying a Macbook?
Maybe it was done in a vain and fruitless hope of reducing battery power somewhere?
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3580
Interestingly on battery life, Anand did a review and found that battery life actually exceeded Apple's estimates, with Anand finding the 15.4" MacBook Pro getting 8 hrs on the battery with internet usage and playing music.
Seeing that the same nVidia chipset was used between the previous Unibody MacBook Pro with SATA 3.0 and the current one with SATA 1.5, it definitely appears to be an artificial limitation. Apple should have listed the difference in their specs even if most users won't notice a difference and it was done for battery life reasons. Since it's the same chipset, it can probably be added with a firmware update.
It may not be a big deal to a rational person, but if Dell/HP/etc. did this the Mac Zealots would've been printing up slicks to distribute in the streets, writing degrading commercials, and creating annoying flash adverts to let you know how uncool that is and how Macs are 1000x faster because they're running SATA at 3.0 Gb.
But hey, when Apple does it, it's a "that's ok, our jesus phone store has way more apps than yours" retort, because Apple does no wrong. Let me quote from the lost book of Jobs- zealots, feel free to use these as your morning devotions. "These owners really DID want 1.5 Gb, they just didn't realize it. The MacBook Air is NOT a 4x overpriced netbook. My Macbook screens ARE superior to anything else out there, even though they have the same part numbers as any other laptop screen. The hard drives and RAM are a touch faster than anything else in the same class because it has an Apple logo. Apple would do no harm to me, Apple is not another company. Apple is my friend, my loving friend, who nurtures me, provides cool apps for me, and holds my hand." - Jobs 15.6.09
Have you seen how fast the prices of SSDs have been dropping recently? Capping the interface to 1.5Gb/s was a particularly shortsighted decision.
Doesn't surprise me, though. Knowing Apple and their iPhone tactics they've most likely hobbled it with every intention of making you all pay more for an OSX update - one that fully enables the hardware you've already paid for but is marketed as bringing magical performance improvements.
Anandtech's estimates are overoptimistic - seems Shimpi has gone Applezombie as of late and swallowing all their BS.
No doubt that the 8 hour figure will be quoted by the fanbois but as an example for the validity of that list, I have real problems getting any more than just under 4 super-ekeing wireless hours out of the 2.4 'unibody' Crapbook, and I never, ever got more than 3.5 hours out of the 2008/B Crapbook Air. I also struggle to get 5:50 out of the "8-hour" Crapbook 17-inch. And we're talking 1-segment display brightness and full power savings kicked in while doing nothing too demanding, but real-life.
By the same token that means I can claim 10 hours out of my Sony Z with an extended battery (which is incidentally still considerably lighter than the 13-inch Crapbook/Pro).
If you go to Apple's web site and look at the two MiniMacs they offer and click on compare. You will see Apple charges $200 more for 1Gb of extra RAM and a bigger hard drive. LOL
They also point out in the comparison that the pricier model has 256MB of shared video memory available while the cheaper one only has 128. But both models use the same board and 9400 video chip. They are blocking video RAM on purpose in the BIOS or somewhere on purpose, that's just wrong in my book to cripple something like that for money.
I could see the extra $200 if the more expensive unit had the 9600 chip like in the upper tier Macbook Pros. But this Minimac stuff is a scam.
Whoopie-di-do! Just state the obvious, will ya: "Apple screwing over fanbois"! Boy, now is THAT news or what?
C'mon, Apple DEPENDS on its users being complete idiots; how else can it sooth their furrowed brows with gentle emissions of reassuringly expensive products?
Never known a real engineer yet who admitted to using an Apple; ya can't get under the hood and doink with it.
Oh, and don't all you phonies with "engineer" in your title bother calling; I mean REAL engineers, those that can legally use the title Professional Engineer (P.E.) or its equivalent in your country or state of licensure. If you're not a P.E., you're just a glorified monkey.
Which ones are those, the ones who read The Inquirer?
If you're really so blind to see how little this matters and how it's doubtful that any mature SSD tech will still be running on interfaces for mechanical drives. Then maybe you should try some gold-plated TOSLINK cables eh?
Then again, maybe you plan to install a large RAID array in your MBP :(
Thats what happens when you cheap out and buy a second rate chipset.
not that it matters though because the cheap hard drives they use would never even get close to 150
Sounds like Apple have cocked up the layout of the PCB. It's non-trivial to correctly route 3GHz signals on a PCB, and I reckon they've made a mess of it and have had to drop down to 1.5GHz to make it work. There's not really any perceivable advantage in dropping to 1.5, not even in battery life I reckon.
@Rich Wargo - I am a real engineer (CEng), and I don't have a Mac. I do know CEng's who do though...
I have to say that given your post I reckon that you wouldn't know a real engineer if one leaped up and bit you on the nose, and then built a bridge up your butt, and a tunnel through your brain, all designed on a Mac just to spite you.
Vaat ist zist? [yawn]. Listen-up Blazing Firewire, "Their Sorenesses" live for the regularity of a colonic revival from Up High - to a zombie, a "shafting" is but a sparkling send-off otherwise life has no meaning. "There, there, sweet whimpering sighs, better now?"
The problem with people is that they lack valuation of what is living and what is not. When two energy levels meet, the lower energy always [try to] take from the higher level but what is more alarming is the relinquishing of one's energy [the Attention in reality] to an object. This is where the exact science of "vibrations" comes in - the innate [but momentarily changing] timing/coefficiency/"ID-Tag" within all. Should one attained the level, even Destruction has no option but to declare his true status, every time, be his form a "high" official or a mass produced gadget. The higher senses do not utilise, say, the ear to see which their unenlightened cousins are prone to do.