Redesigned MacBook Pro, iMac may come in first half of 2011 - Page 3

256 GB hard drives are now redundant. It doesn't matter whether they're SSDs or regular HDDs. Apple has to offer minimum 500 Gb drives and preferably I TB drives as standard with 2 TB drives as options.

Why? Everyone needs at least 500GB and the prices are low enough that 500GB+ SSDs are easily had?

redacted

Who is going to make a laptop with the specs mentioned?

Well, it does have nice quad i7s but at the 45w dissipation slot, not at 35w where Apple's current procs sit. That said, if they kill the optical drive they could have the cooling and battery for the extra proc power, maybe as a CTO

/doubt it though
//waiting for a quad to replace my '07 core 2
///sept/oct 2011 with ivy bridge probably

I was under the impression that USB 3.0 would be coming from Intel at the same time as Sandy Bridge, but while the internet is filled with speculation I can't find anything definitive from Intel. Once Intel supports 3.0 it's a no brainer for Apple to update their existing USB ports to support it.

People said the same thing about replacing the hard drive in an iBook, all aluminum Powerbooks, and first generation MacBook Pros. Do people actually prefer Apple's Rube Goldberg takeapart procedures because they think it makes them more "manly"?

Then Apple released the unibody laptop design...

Let's not kid ourselves for the sake of defending Apple. Taking apart an aluminum iMac is an absolutely atrocious procedure compared to the original iMac G5 where you simply removed the back cover to get inside the computer.

Have Apple's hardware designers ever had to work in Apple's repair department to fix actual customer's machines? Replacing a stick of memory does not count.

many of these WONT happen on a pc or just isn't high quality, thats why he came to macs (except bluray). at least let the kid dream on the machine thats closest to it.

Can we expect the Mini to get Sandy bridge in 2011 as well? That would make me all wobbly inside.

All this talk about "physical media being dead" is based around an idea that cheap bandwidth is widely available ALL AROUND THE WORLD. Until that utopian ideal is achieved there will always be a requirement for a high volume physical delivery medium. Remember the old saying - "Never understimate the bandwidth of a taxi full of (insert physical media of your choice)".

cheers
Greg

You can get an external BD drive quite easily - the Sony BDX-S500U. An internal would be priced more than $200 for and wouldn't do 6x write:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&Tpk=bdx-s500u

USB 3 is not going to be necessary with Light Peak and USB 3 can't scale to 100Gbps so USB 2.0 + LP > USB 3.

Dont forget that LightPeak will take a lot longer to be adopted than USB3.0 which has ports that are backwards compatible to USB2.0.

Why will take longer? Because a device you try to connect to a LightPeak port wont work any USB (FireWire) or whatever devices people have.

Sure, its protocol independent, but that doesnt mean that light and electricity will understand each other. Well need to have a physical adapter than can convert optical to copper and vice versa. Historically, HW convertors havent been cheap.

I wonder if Apple will be able to tackle this using their 30-pin connector. I think the FW pins are still unused. Perhaps its possible to equip future iDevices to read optical off those small pin areas. If possible, then they dont have to change the plug design and it would be able to use a 30-pin-to-USB cable, too.

Assuming you don't already have a need to connect to EXISTING USB3 devices!!! Some of us do. NOW!

Sure, *someday* there will be LP drives and interfaces etc., but in the meantime...

the Blu-ray specification for video and audio was finalised almost a half decade ago. Apple would have to convince the other eighteen (18) board members of the Blu-ray Disc Association to adopt a change to the video spec to include something other than MPEG2, H.264/MPEG4 AVC and VC-1. for audio, Apple would be up against DTS and Dolby Labs.

the only ongoing changes to the Blu-ray specification are physical (i.e., more than two layers) and Blu-ray 3D.

The first day of summer is 1st June.
But maybe it will be released at the middle of spring?

LP is backwards compatible with USB3.0

No, no its not. No optical connector is backwards compatible with a copper wire connector. Its not even simple as using the right connector type, you have to also convert the signal from light to electricity.

Light Peak fits onto existing ports:

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/stora...sb3-combo-port

They can be combined so if they choose not to support USB 3, they can go LP + USB 2 for backwards compatibility, powered devices and high performance.


That's one way of putting it. Electrical connections will certainly be legacy technology as soon as optical arrives because they don't have the capacity, which is one reason we use optical for telecommunications.

There's no reason not to support USB 3 other than purposely make a decision to drive adoption of the superior standard. Either connection will saturate a drive read/write for a while anyway so for the near-term it doesn't matter much.

A LP/USB3 combo gives users the best choice but I could see it driving forward USB 3 instead of LP, which is not a good thing. Of course if it's not difficult for device manufacturers to add both, they might add both anyway but LP might go the way of FW800 - relegated to more expensive devices and so few manufacturers bother.

If you buy 4 x 64GB SSD cheaply and put them in RAID-0 it should be possible eventually to get over 1GB/s transfer rate, this would actually exceed USB 3 speed. The following demo is only 2GB/s. USB3 tops out at 600MB/s, whereas LP is said to scale to 12GB/s:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

That’s not what that article is stating…

That’s a USB3.0 interface made to accept LightPeak’s optical, not LightPeak port interface being backwards compatible to USB3.0 port interface. So far, I haven’t seen anything that says this will be the standard LightPeak connector.

Then it clearly states…

Sounds to me that this new concept and demo will not be the standard option so making an all encompassing statement that the optical LightPeak is backwards compatible to copper USB is erroneous.

As previously stated, this will have the same growing pains as any new port technology that uses a new interface, and then some, due to the medium being completely different.

Also note that this article doesn’t state which USB port interface was used. We can assume USB-A, but what if the tech has certain limitations that make it difficult or infeasible to product for the consumer market using an unideal USB port interface type. The fact that this article doesn’t even specific something so basic is in itself suspicious.

I disagree-- I think if Intel bothered to implement a combo USB 3/LP port it's because they see that as the best way to drive adoption. All those millions of PC buyers will pick up the new computer with "USB 3" and have the stealth LP port waiting to go. I assuming Intel will be baking the format into their chip sets, so any manufacture of peripheral equipment that wants to use transfer speed as a selling point can implement the standard from their end and know that they're selling into a fair sized market of compatible computers.

It would be as if Firewire had been rolled into the original USB port design. At some point camcorders start coming with Firewire out, but no worries-- that computer you bought can handle it, with the right cable.

I don't see where the fact that a straight LP port is smaller changes any of this-- USB 3 will surely be just as ubiquitous as Intel wants it to be, and if they want LP smuggled in at the same time, there you go. Assuming it takes off as a standard, then you can start putting explicit ports on your mobile gear to save space, if you want. But I mean Apple can get USB ports on the 11" Air, so it's not like that port is particularly gigantic.

PC??? Which PC even gives you 4 hrs of 'real' battery life?

Plenty. PCs will also be the first to offer Blu-ray, Sandy Bridge chips, the 460M, HDMI, and whatever a 1080p full HDD is.

I dont disagree with this, in fact its what I was stating, though I see I may not have been clear.

I want optical and copper ports to mesh well. I wondered about Apples 30-pin connector being able to do this since there are unused pin areas for FireWire.

Another point I was addressing is LightPeaks protocol independence means that any cable will connect to it. This simply isnt true. Besides needing the right port type, you also need to have an optical cable, or a convertor box between optical and copper.

As for LP being addd to USB-A port interfaces on PCs, this would be ideal as USB-A supports all USB speeds already and its the most common port type. Add in my previous comment about Apples 30-pin connector and you have a seamless upgrade cycle between IDevices and Mac/Win-PCs that support LP transfers or USB copper over the same cable when one of these doesnt support optical.

The only contention is that is LP being added to the USB port interface. Arent there costs for using USB and why would this now be USB port interface piggybacking on LP when its LP piggybacking on USBs port interface. Finally, we still havent seen anything to say with port interface this is or if it can viable be done on a large scale. In fact, the details on LightPeak are still very limited for a tech people have been expecting to be in the next new Mac.

Light Peak couldn't replace USB so they have to put USB ports on anyway. No sense in adding dedicated LP ports if they can merge them with USB and save space. The issue with needing a converter box shouldn't be a big problem. For laptop users it will be a great docking solution as you can have a RAID system, external optical, networking, displays etc all connected with a single plug.

If you were capturing FW out in the field, it would be an issue but a converter box might be portable enough and run off USB power. They'll have thought of the workflow issues before making the move. People are going tapeless anyway so FW is kinda dead for anything except live capture anyway.


It's already in some Mac model so I think it's ok to expect it at some point:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/24/v...le-transferri/

It may not be ready for new Macs in January but if Apple redesigns the MBP, they will make it thinner and they can only do that by removing ethernet and FW800 and they can only do that if they replace them with LP.

I'm thinking February might be a more realistic upgrade time for the MBP given that the new Intel SSD won't arrive until February. That may of course be just the mass production versions. Apple use Toshiba NAND just now in their SSD parts but Intel will get to 25nm before them so they could switch over.

Exactly one big Nope

It isn't just the iTunes store, for many people there are to many negatives associated with Blu-Ray.

There is no free lunch though we could hope. I recently downloads a 6.4 GB movie from iTunes and it does take its time.

Which would be totally stupid in my mind. All that crap that comes with a Blu-Ray disk is one of the reasons I hate the format so much. When I grab a disk and slip it into a machine the only thing I care about is the movie and having that movie run without a bunch of crap menus and levels of distraction.

That is one nice thing about iTunes, just select your choice of entertainment and go.

I really hope not. As stated above when I select a movie it is because I want to view it not be side tracked with a bunch of useless propaganda, fluff and advertisements.

As I've said before the Macs will get USB3 when viable chipsets exist from either AMD or Intel.

This is very likely. Mainly because Apple has rejected the new GPL license.

CLANG and LLVM are fast at generating code, they do not always win against GCC. In fact it is pretty much a performance wash with GCC really kicking ass at times with respect to CLANG

The fact that Apple is stuck at GCC 4.2 means that a transition has to happen soon. Lion might be a good place to do so and at the same time flush out a lot of historical API's.

Remember that 45 watts is for a CPU, GPU and memory controller. It is very possible that net power will be lower. The problem is that all that power is now in a point area so that heat removal becomes a more serious issue.

What I'm trying to say is that you can't look at chip power and arrive at system power.

It will be interesting so see what Apple delivers. I'd like to have a pretty stiff upgrade over my early 2008 MBP. One item on the check off list would be quad cores. As long as the machine runs though I can get buy another year, besides I'm holding out for an iPad.

I came across this and thought this would truly make Mac Lion, king of the computer jungle. Mac 3D Display Patent. It would be so cool to have a 3D display on a macbook Pro and no glasses.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12...ple_3d_patent/

I think this tops a faster processor any day as big news.

True, though in any system using i7s in the next iteration you're talking upper end, which means discrete GPUs. Still, I hope you're right, maybe we'll see a quad early 2011...



I've been thinking about an iPad too, what stops me every time is I *want* one, but I can't come up with any reason why I *need* one.

Given that I can't *quite* justify the $500 to myself, no matter how much I try :-p

I'm not sure what I will do for my next system upgrade. At one time my only concern was replacing my laptop but now we gave more options. These options mean that going back to the performance of a desktop machine doesn't mean we give up on our portable needs.

In any event I really don't think anything is written in stone with respect to Sandy Bridge processors. The big rumor is that Intel intends to be very aggressive in pricing so a machine with a quad core without a discrete GPU is very possible. The only real concern I see is the issue of that point load. To that end maybe Apple will drop the clock rate a couple of hundred MHz tO lower power. In something like the 13" MBP I'd prefer four cores to having the ultimate clock rate.


Well I don't need the current one as I consider it to be to much of a rev one release. Given that the rev one issues get fixed I could see myself looking into an iPad and would be strongly driven to a smaller model. It would be a case of the iPad being an upgrade over how I use my iPhone now with one extension. That extra use would be for use as a reader of magazines and PDFs. It would also make e-Mail and web browsing a bit easier on the go. The big question in my mind is would I be willing to keep it with me constantly like an iPhone. Plus I'd still would need that laptop from time to time.

This is actually a tough cookie to crack. In many cases I'm convinced that a slightly larger iPhone would be a better choice but of course Apple doesn't have one.

Yeah I understand 100%. The big disappointment I've had with the Mac Airs is with the lack of 3G which I consider to be very important these days. As the iPad and the suite of software apps available on app store matures though it becomes a device that is better suited to many potential users mobile needs.

The prices are quite high for SSD.Why does everyone kneed a 500 SSD?

A few years ago AI was predicting the imminent demise of the mini. Since then the mini has gotten a good bit of love from Apple so I would expect a 2011 update for the mini. Probably around the time the base macbook gets a rev so Apple can move away from C2D except for the MBAs.

Because our computers don't have slots for a 16GB SSD to put the OS and some applications on, forcing us to completely swap out our old hard drives, necessitating a much larger capacity.

I would think that that would be pretty obvious.

As someone has already pointed out you have the problem on laptops and many of Apples desktops of having only one drive easily installed. This means that everything has to go on the SSD. A better solution is to remove the CD drive and stick a magnetic drive in there and run an SSD form the normal drive bay. The problem is you need to be willing to give up the optical drive since not everyone is willing to do that you are back to needing a big SSD.

Currently I struggle with an old MBP that runs a 200GB internal drive. That I have to supplement with an external 1TB drive, even then the stuff I need on the local drive means that there is very little free room there. So just basic requirements outside of media storage now require more that 200GB.

Obviously this depends upon the user but install a few apps a a development environment or two and your drive ends up stuffed. I'm actually shocked at the number of people that even bring up the question of why, it should be pretty obvious why.

I agree with everything that you said EXCEPT this one. Apple has not Made their stance. They simply haven't done it yet. They CANNOT ignore BluRay forever if they want to continue to be a Major player in Professional software (like Final Cut). I believe delaying BluRay is their stance, but I don't think they can afford NOT to include it at some point, at least as a BTO option. I would agree with you if Steve Jobs would say. "Apple has NO plans to include BluRay at any point in the future". Then and Only then would I say that they've made their stance. I believe Steve would have NO problem saying that if that were his stance but he has not said that. He has said it about other technologies (ie.. Flash).

Apple Does this thing were the include ALMOST everything you want in a product, but they hold out for the next few releases to give you more. It keeps you coming back. Can we say iPad camera? It's all about marketing. Steve knows that BluRay AND iTunes can live happy together Side by side. What I would love to see is the ability to import directly into iTunes (should be renamed to iMedia but I don't think they can call it that).

Looking at the state of iDVD and DVD Studio Pro I have to think they simply arent going to address optical media ever again. Sure, Blu-ray will be the best HEC format but how much would Apple benefit from this that it would be viable their languishing app in FInal Cut Studio.

Even if they do update FInal Cut Studio that doesnt mean that Apple would have to add Blu-ray drives to Macs. Most of their business is notebooks that currently use 9.5mm ODDs. These cost $500 and up as BTO options from other vendors. I cant see this coming to Mac notebooks at all, and thats a big deal.

Remember that Apples goal is to sell HW and all the code they makes pushes toward that goal, so making a way to put the users eyeballs on some other vendors Blu-ray drive on your HEC isnt a good objective for Apple.

SSD benefits all read/write so if you are a photographer and need to open/save large images quickly or if you edit film and duplicate large clips, a large SSD is a good thing. For the boost to application launch and OS boot, a small SSD is ok but is just a holdover until we replace HDD altogether.

I really hope they drop the price considerably with the 25nm batch so the transition can really get moving. Even $1 per GB is expensive compared to $0.1 per GB for HDD but is the threshold where it will offer the standard sizes in entry machines at an affordable price.

Apple are still at the $2-3 per GB rate with their Toshiba SSD chips and Toshiba won't go 25nm until later in 2011 so that may have implications for the MBP refresh.

Are professionals actually using Blu-Ray to that extent? Besides I would not be surprised to see Apple tell professionals to kiss off because they really have no desire to screw up their OS just to satisfy the demands of the Blu-Ray group.

The big problem with Blu-Ray isn't the recording technology but rather all the crud that comes with being compliant with the licensing requirements. It is very reasonable and rational for Apple to keep Blu-Ray out of Macs until the implementation requirements are more reasonable.

They could build in a Blu-Ray drive into a Mac Pro tomorrow but won't because it requires extensive modifications to the OS. This is a big problem as the DRM requirements are extensive.

Steveo hasn't ruled out Blu-Ray by any means. It is however currently an unlikely play, especially in Laptops. He has been able to use his influence to get the licensing authority to significantly redo their terms and requirements but I don't think it is enough.

Can we say you don't know what you are talking about?

Well it is about marketing and frankly Blu-Ray has not been a marketing success. Rather it is an over priced niche product that has never took off.

It is funny that you should post this because I was just very recently in one of the big media retail stores in the area. WE are taking thousands of square feet of retail space devoted to optical media, be it music of video. Ask me how much of that space was devoted to Blu-Ray? A rough guess was a couple of hundred square feet, if that. Worst there where very few interesting tittles. You can whine all you want about Blu-Ray but the fact remains that it is dead in the mainstream marketplace, and also in the specialty markets.

The lack of media is one issue but the high prices are even more significant. If they had addressed pricing they might have had a chance but there is little to offer in a Blu-Ray disk considering the delta in price. When we come out of recession there is a very good chance that we will have eclipsed the optical media epoch and Blu-Ray will then be found in the antique stores along side the old tubular recordings. You may laugh at that but it would only take a little initiative to do so.

Here's hoping an iMac redesign makes them easier to maintain. At least make the hard drive user-accessible.

I think we should plan on seeing bigger changes than for form factors we are used to. Like an iMac that slides into a horizontal position in order to multitouch.

I think Lion and 2011 are going to be the biggest year for the mac since the intel transition.

The October event was purposely coy, because Apple is finally going to have some sort of multitouch screen.

I'm not sayin'....I'm just saying.[