Teardown of Retina MacBook Pro finds soldered RAM, proprietary SSD - Page 5

So, why isn't a 1 TB option available?

I already suggested (indirectly) cost. While many customers would pay the price, if the denser flash is a scarce resource, every system sold with 1 TB would likely prevent the sale of two systems with 768 GB. It's more profitable to sell two systems with 768 GB than one system with 1 TB. Of course the 1 TB option could be priced so outrageously high that the sale of a single system would be at least as profitable as two with 768 GB, but that would open the door to third parties to sell 1 TB drives for much less.

In case it hasn't been covered yet, as I'm not going to read the entire thread, I see nothing proprietary about the SSD card. It looks like it's physically a mini-PCIe slot with a unique electrical pin-out. So how his that proprietary and not just custom? What patents and/or licensing is keeping others from creating their own MBP compatible SSD cards?

Why not 1.15GB? Why not 1.25GB? Why not 2.50GB?

At some point the cost, component supply, space, performance and reliability for denser NAND make it unfeasible.

It's said to be proprietary because it uses a controller not found anywhere else. Nobody knows what secrets reside there.

My previous post should have provided enough clues for you to know those are poor questions.

Looks like the controllers are Samsung and Toshiba. It's a flash on a PCB. I see nothing that another vendor can't make work in the new MBP in dependent of Apple's permission which means the connector is not proprietary.


The questions are valid. There is only a modern human desire to cut things off at the top of the hour or at base-10 quantities, not a practical reasoning to suggest that 768 is somehow wonky.


From AnandTech:

 

Sorry, "Samsung" on the controller doesn't mean it operates like any other Samsung controller known to the world. I'm not saying third party solutions won't appear, but one can't assume that third party solutions will be easy or as reliable.

 

Yes, Anandtech presents a good basis for there being a 1 TB option if 768 GB is offered.

 

Where is the real Solipsism?

Who was upset or irrational?

You asked a foolish, irrelevant question and I pointed that out. Then I pointed out the fallacy of your criticism of Apple's design decisions.

Where did you get 'bent out of shape'?

Who? You.

Where? From your own post.

You now show that you are quite ignorant of computer technology as well.

 

In 3 years you'll have an out of date notebook with a slow CPU and not enough storage. Until then, you have a new computer with AppleCare.

All Apple products have Samsung parts. Ever since the original iPhone and iPod. Even the original iMac had Samsung parts.

 

Perhaps you should ban purchasing Apple products all together because of your disgust of Samsung parts.

 

Your tactic has certainly failed.

 

With better control of manufacturing I would posit the points of failure goes down with more modularized system. It also makes for a more thoroughly testable manufacturing process.  With fewer chunks, test harnesses can be used that are completely impractical with assemblies that need multiple cross connections before they are workable.  Soldered on RAM just follows the same process as every other soldered component on the motherboards. Have we been complaining about those components?  No.   And there are hundreds of them.  

 

Soldered electronics that work after assembly tend to be far less subject to later problem than those that are seated via pins so I'm not even sure why there is a reliability question in the first place.

I'm sure OWC will be along shortly enough with an aftermarket card. Not sure what all the fuss about the SSD card is. Unless people dislike slim laptops, because that's not going to happen with a bastardized 2.5" SSD.

I'd bet a dollar that it is the fastener caused shorts which have cause most of the Apple li-ion battery issues in iPods, iPhones and laptop battery bricks.  And if Apple designed the batteries to last 4-6 years at normal use with little degradation, how many will ever even be candidates for replacement?  Even after that period the battery will still be good for  a half dozen plus hours.  How many folks would want to spend a hundred bucks for a battery on a 6 year old machine today?  Very few, it makes more sense to buy a new machine due to the performance differences of 3-4 generations of improvement.

 

Failures due to pin seating may be more common but they're easy to diagnose and remedy.  Cold solder joints are hard to find and a pain to fix.  And if one device in a million has a bad solder joint, that unit will be the one they send to me.

 

What gives me pause is not the relative volatility of the connection point but the difficulty associated with fixing what seems to be a fairly common failure point (i.e. failed RAM chip), that's all.

I don't know what's unclear. It's just that Apple engineers taking an entire device lifetime into account rather than just the original specifications.   And I don't agree with your pro computer means fully serviceable. pro simply means the ability to get professional quality business done efficiently.  One dimension of that is fast, another often ignore dimension is how much maintenance is required.  Less downtime makes the machine more valuable to the professional user.  

 

I find I now spend far less time on hardware and software maintenance than I did even five years ago.  The software stack has dramatically made that better for everyone except server admins (that still sucks by every account I've heard and read).  But I don't do server applications, I hardly ever even go to the utilities folder any more.  That used to be a nearly daily trip.   With a couple years of SSD use I have not had a single drive failure, that used to be about once a year with heavy travel/daily movement -- that alone saves probably 2-3 days of downtime or slaving to where the external backup mirror system was.  I don't even have a mirror for emergency boot anymore so that maintenance is gone too. And most of those changes in the software stack were enabled by hardware choices of one sort or another.  With Apple it is to the point that you cannot separate the HW and SW functional design processes totally because now they feed off each other and the efficiencies they reinforce. 

OS X has done quite a bit of that already with how inactive memory was managed.  That's been tweaked since OS X debuted, so while it looks like a totally new functionality,  it's really a small and logical extension from what Apple has been already doing for years.  NAND Flash SSDs across the line as defaults just motivated Apple to finish a first optimization for how their virtual memory subsystem works.  There are substantial differences in best practices for spinning drives and SSDs, and enough uncertainty that the CS research has only been generating useful papers on it for a year or so now.  Most of the previous stuff was either bunk or too early to use commercially.

 

I'll take those odds.  And with you soaking up those bad apples that do come off the line it just lets the rest of us get on with our work.  Thanks for the assist!  :p

I as really hoping for two hard drives since the optical drive is going away ( 1 ssd, 1 hdd). If you use a mbp for content creation as well as your personal machine you run through 500 gigs pretty quick.

The ram thing is weird. I wonder if you can take it to Apple for an upgrade later on. Not a big fan of these moves. Not really pro in a few ways. Good specs though.

 

I'm not trying to be a smart-ass and I don't disagree with what you wrote, but I am starting to wonder if we're getting to the point of putting the Ive before the horse...

 

How slim does a laptop need to be?  Sure, it's cool and everything, but if making it skinnier means sacrificing compatibility with universal standards, is it worth it?  I mean, my Unibody is pretty slim already, and it allows me to choose from any of a kazillion storage vendors.

 

If skinny is the goal, there's an Air for that. Giving up compatibility to save 5 mm (about 1/8") seems weird to me when a much thinner option already exists.

 

I'll not deny my post was adversarial, but I would dispute it being insulting. I also appreciate how well measured your response was, given that you felt insulted. Would that we all behaved so!

 

Now, regarding the substance of the matter, I called Toslink antiquated because its bandwidth limits are pale in comparison to HDMI. For instance, S/PDIF passthrough has a maximum of two uncompressed channels whereas with HDMI you can have up to 8 channels of uncompressed audio.

 

In any event, if you really require Toslink and the like, you can buy an adapter and leave it on the cable at your work place. They have usb adapters already on the market. My point is simply that the capability you claim is lacking in the RMBP isn't lacking. It is still there; the device has even more capabilities than you seem to require. Adapters may not be practical, I'll grant you that. The new tech may not be employed in a widespread manner, I'll grant that too. But neither of those facts do anything to dispute the claim that the tech (Toslink) is antiquated and has been surpassed by much better alternatives, even if no one employs them yet, for practical or financial reasons. Apple warned us in the Keynote, the RMBP is cutting edge tech only, practical considerations and finances be damned. That may not appeal to you, but that has nothing to do with capabilities.

I'd say yes. Floppy disks were universal standards that needed to be dropped. The same now holds with much that was dropped in the RMBP. The rate of progress would be miserably slow if we were always beholden to being compatible with universal standards. Out with the old and in with the new, and if we get sleeker, thinner, lighter devices along the way, that's just an added bonus.

Well, as you realized yourself, I’m an old run-of-the-mill engineer: I almost expect Apple to give away the schematics of their Pro computers, so I can service them using my own oscilloscope/logic analyzer. But I dream. As for the speed, I find that with new versions of Clang the code is rather optimized and quick, even on my old Core 2 Duo machine. Now, does it matter if your task gets done in 1 or 10 ms? Running after speed gets nutty… Increase in speed has too often been a pretext for software engineers to crank out poor code. Take Atlas, a software I routinely port to MacOS: with some adjustments in cache parameters, you can double or even treble performance with respect to the default version…

Now, for image or movie processing, every software should rely on OpenCL.

I have been working on the same regular HD for now four years and never had any glitch; I’m not a frequent traveler but my MacBook has spent a fair amount of time in my backpack during walks or train trips…

 

640KB ought to be enough for anyone.

 

Don't EVER assume that a certain amount of RAM is enough.  Give apple a few years,and I guarantee it won't be too hard for the machine to use all the RAM... And, what's the point of buying a $2500 machine unless you expect it to last a couple of years?

 

Phil

I don't know where you're coming from with this, but PCs were almost always disposable... I don't know many machines that EVER sat around for 6+ years unless they were a server, and even those are often replaced.  Computer technology has moved forward at a tremendous rate, and throughout the 90s, a 2 year old computer seemed like a dinosaur, and after three years you needed to upgrade it to use the latest CONSUMER software.  This hasn't been the case for the last 8 years or so..  

 

For a while now, a Pentium 4 had enough power to meet most people's needs (web browsing, email, music, etc).  Only now is something faster really becoming necessary.  By the P4 era however, consumer purchases had moved away from desktops.  Desktops became dinosaurs... Who wants to be tethered to a single desk?  Laptops really took off, and by their nature, they wore out faster.  

 

Even your argument about displays doesn't hold much merit.  A really awesome display purchased in the mid 90s might last two computers, but bythat point you wanted to upgrade.  In 1995 a 14 inch CRT monitor was about standard, in 1997 a 17" one was, and a few years later 19" and 21" became reasonably priced.  Sure the old ones worked fine, but in 2005 NO ONE wanted to be using a 14 inch CRT!  By that point LCDs were begining to take off, but 19 and 21" monitors were pretty standard.

 

Apple didn't really change any of these trends, and if anything, many apple computers have a longer lifetime than windows ones (often because the apple machines have higher specs than windows ones).With consumer electronics, apple does push for a regular replacement cycle, and it is quite annoying, but it seems like every phone vendor doesn't expect a phone to be used more than two years.

 

Phil

What makes you think 16 GB won't last a couple of years?

More importantly, you have to look at what most people consider when deciding if something is useful after a couple of years. If only a tiny percentage of people add more RAM to their computers after purchase, then the ability to add RAM is not important to most people.

Furthermore, I think we've reached the time when computer upgrades (both hardware and software) have slowed significantly. For example, I'm now using a 6 year old laptop - before this, I never let a computer go past 3 years. Most people I know are keeping their computers longer. I believe the reason is that for most people, current machines are more than fast enough for their needs now and for the foreseeable future. Similarly, the software is good enough to not need an upgrade every couple of years. 15-20 years ago people were anxiously awaiting the next OS upgrade because the current ones were never good enough. Each upgrade had significant changes which required more computer power. Today, the changes are incremental (in most cases). Windows 8 is basically Windows 7 with a new face. Lion and Mountain lion are relatively minor upgrades compared to, say, Leopard.

The fact is that for most people, today's computer is going to last a lot longer than any time in the past.

Now, there are a tiny number of high end pro users who might need 32 GB of RAM at some time in the future. But almost all of them would probably be buying a new computer to take advantage of CPU and GPU improvements by then, anyway. So you're asking Apple to put up with the unreliability, bulk, and cost of DIMMs because of the number of people who:

1. Need 16 GB now and will need more in the near future
and
2. Would not be buying a new computer during that time frame because the changes in CPU and GPU aren't important enough to justify the cost
and
3. The possible need for 32 GB at some time in the future would be a big enough concern to stop them from buying a new MBP - in spite of its other advantages (especially the display).

Sorry, but the number of people who meet all three criteria is probably tiny.

 

I understand the premise and don't disagree, but that's not really what's happened with the MBPR.  This isn't a case of skinny being a spin-off benefit of advancing better technologies.  It's exactly the opposite: skinny was the objective and the tech changes were made to accommodate that.  The changes do not advance the state of the art in this case (display notwithstanding, obviously), they just mean I have fewer storage options and the storage will cost more because it won't benefit from the economies of scale associated with widely deployed standards.

 

That's a hit in the wallet but at least it can be fixed by throwing money at it.  Unfortunately that's not the case with screen size.  The relentless march towards smaller/lighter/shiny/kewler means that I can no longer get a 17" screen.  THAT bugs me, and I can't fix it by selling a kidney.  I work to picture so I have to have a video window and a couple of plug-ins open on top of my work.  It's already crowded on a 17".  On a 15" it's either gotta be so small I can't tell what I'm looking at or more cramped than five fat folks in a Fiat.

 

Apple already makes a machine that's way small.  Why does the Pro have to be tiny too, other than so that it's "kewl?"  I just don't see this as being anything other than fashion over function.

Apple's not in the business of satisfying the geek crowd. They're in the business of selling computers - and in today's climate, 'thin' sells computers. This computer will sell like hotcakes.

v5v, you'll be happy to know the headphone jack still has digital in/out. Your Toslink is still there :)

 

Are you sure?  Yay!

 

I know it's a minor issue, but it's one less little headache I have to deal with.

 

Thanks for letting me know!

Yep TUAW has confirmed it. See:

 

http://www.tuaw.com/2012/06/14/attention-world-the-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-does-have-o/

Three words: BUY 16 GB

Seriously, I got the 8GB model and am seriously regretting that I cannot now upgrade the RAM as it tops out on me *all* the time - which means that the SSD swap file goes into overdrive and consequently so does the fan, which is pretty annoying