Apple can't release laptops designed only for what is most likely coming several years down the road. Right now, there are major application installs, including (crucially) operating system installs, that are impracticable OTA. You can try installing Final Cut Pro over the 'net if you like, but the poster upthread made a pretty good case for SD right now and most likely over the average useful life of the machine.
I've downloaded an Apple OS before (from Apple, before anyone asks). It reminded me of those good old days when I would dial up a BBS in the evening, start a download over 300 BAUD, go to bed, and wake up with about a 30% chance that I had the file I wanted. For the next few design cycles, SD will wipe the floor with network installs in the general case. The only advantage DVDs have at this point is their absurdly low cost in bulk, but if you're shipping a $129 operating system or a $999 professional suite it's not a significant cost difference in real terms. Apple spends extra money to make their packaging impressive. I can't imagine them begrudging a bit extra to greatly improve the installation experience as well.
Exactly. For the next several years I expect DVDs to be the medium. They are cheap and plentiful, remember I started with that point. SD is awful damn expensive in comparison ~80x more expensive per GB. I don't see Apple moving to SD while the vast majority of its installed base doesn't have it from the factory yet. That's putting the cart way before the horse, premium packaging or not. Dual distro media and one is radically more costly to boot? Not likely at all.
Eventually when optical media dies the death of the floppy I believe it is much more likely to transition to over the network updates than substitute another physical medium. When? Probably not for three to five years at least, I never said anything about moving to OTA right away.
Seems like your complaint is more specifically about DVD based distribution. SD cards aren't the only alternative though.
In my opinion, a USB thumb drive would be a better option than an SD card at this point.
True. But actually for Mac use a FW thumb drive would be preferable with a USB2 option for MBA/Unibody MB users.
I'm all for this kind of distribution in the near future. A thumb drive or SD card can have much smaller packaging which fits in with Apple's green efforts.
What would also be a bonus is if the remaining capacity on such a drive could be put to use much like ReadyBoost (not that I have any experience of how well this works in practise but it seems a good idea in theory).
Exactly. For the next several years I expect DVDs to be the medium. They are cheap and plentiful, remember I started with that point. .
But there are advantages to dropping optical.
1) Potentially lower warranty repair costs. The superdrives are notoriously prone to problems.
2) Smaller lighter form factors for laptops.
3) Faster installs of SW distributed by this means and a better user experience.
4) Quieter, cooler and perhaps better battery life in the laptops. Again a better user experience.
5) By eliminating optical drives they keep nudging people towards digital downloading of content, music and movies, which could drive sales at the iTunes store.
I like optical personally. I really prefer my music on CD and would miss a superdrive in my laptop. But I think Apple are moving in this direction. Telling to me is that it isn't on the MBA. I think the MBA is Apple's 'concept car'. It seems to exist to usher in new technologies that make it eventually to the mainstream machines. The MBA has heralded the arrival of unibody enclosures and non-user replaceable batteries. Is the loss of optical next?
And the laptops will get thinner. We all know how Apple feel about thin machines.
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
Thinner may still be governed by the HDD, which is the same height as the optical drive, 9.5mm. If they use less platters they can go thinner or if they go with SSD as a standard then a thinner drive could be made, but I have seen no evidence of this yet. Would be nice, though.
The biggest impact SD drives could have is on the Mac Mini.
Unlike the laptops, the optical drive is what now sets the basic size parameters of the Mini.
I would love to see mockups of what the Mini could look like with an SD instead of an optical drive.
The biggest impact SD drives could have is on the Mac Mini.
Unlike the laptops, the optical drive is what now sets the basic size parameters of the Mini.
I would love to see mockups of what the Mini could look like with an SD instead of an optical drive.
That is an interesting concept. A lot could done without the inclusion of the optical drive. It really does have some specific needs thy determine some basic designs, but I don't think we'll see optical drives leave the desktops for awhile after they are gone from notebooks. They are just too cheap and space and weight aren't really pressing concerns, though I'd agree that the Mini would probably be to first to test this eventual new age in desktop design.
Even HDDs have a set size, as do Li-Ion Batteries. With SSDs and Li-Poly plenty of things could be reshaped. Perhaps not ideally, but at least it could be done where other factors were more of a concern.
The biggest impact SD drives could have is on the Mac Mini.
Unlike the laptops, the optical drive is what now sets the basic size parameters of the Mini.
I would love to see mockups of what the Mini could look like with an SD instead of an optical drive.
The motherboard defines the shape too - the ports on the back would all still have to be there so I don't see a significant change in footprint. But, a huge part of the Mini is the block holding the optical drive and HDD in place and is part of what makes the upgrades so tricky. They have to find ways to push the Bluetooth and Airport chips above this block.
With the optical drive gone, these could be positioned much more easily. Eventually, I'd like to see a design where you open it like a clam shell so you can easily change the Ram and HDD within a minute.
Plus the removal of the optical should make for much better air-flow/cooling and therefore faster CPUs. Better than the iMac in fact because that will always be constrained by the enclosure.
The height could also go down to the level of the Apple TV, which has no optical drive.
This is how I'd kind of like to see a future Mini:
The motherboard defines the shape too - the ports on the back would all still have to be there so I don't see a significant change in footprint. But, a huge part of the Mini is the block holding the optical drive and HDD in place and is part of what makes the upgrades so tricky. They have to find ways to push the Bluetooth and Airport chips above this block.
With the optical drive gone, these could be positioned much more easily. Eventually, I'd like to see a design where you open it like a clam shell so you can easily change the Ram and HDD within a minute.
Plus the removal of the optical should make for much better air-flow/cooling and therefore faster CPUs. Better than the iMac in fact because that will always be constrained by the enclosure.
The height could also go down to the level of the Apple TV, which has no optical drive.
This is how I'd kind of like to see a future Mini:
Except the HDD would be placed a lot better.
In this configuration, would you expect an SD slot or an SD dongle/USB? Could an SD be connected by FW?
The problem with excluding the optical drive is that if you do it too soon, you could see your sales evaporate. There is no App store for the Mac and so far digital downloads have made little headway into replacing DVDs. You produce a computer that you can't install software on and your can't export your movies for your not so progressive family members, there's not a whole lot of reasons for the more average user to buy it.
The problem with excluding the optical drive is that if you do it too soon, you could see your sales evaporate.
There is always that, but we know Apple is usually on the forefront of such changes. Now there are options, like making it only for notebooks first since they have the space constraint. Or perhaps even just offering the external USB optical drive for free for stragglers, but Apple won?t do that because they seem to hate adding any fluff to their system. The current external drive is $99 but that a 2 year old price and would surely sell a lot more, so the price could be lower, if they made it for their popular notebooks.
This change will come, the only question is when will it come.
In this configuration, would you expect an SD slot or an SD dongle/USB? Could an SD be connected by FW?
I think Apple should make SD slots available over the entire lineup so that there is always an easy way to transfer large files between computers. Putting it on the front might be tricky and Apple won't be keen on this for aesthetic reasons. On the back wouldn't be very accessible but I wouldn't mind particularly. If the machine is shorter, it's not so bad.
I think there are firewire Flash card readers but most cards aren't fast enough generally to saturate a USB 2 connection. The high end ones have reached that point. The Mac laptop readers are limited to 30MB/s but that should be enough as 32GB would fill up in just 20 minutes at that speed.
If SD cards reach a reasonable price for a 32GB card, I'll be ditching optical media for backups. I'd say they need to drop by a factor of 5. Dropping 30% four times ought to just about do it. If the current trend continues, that could be 4 years though and you might even get away with 1.8" 128GB SSD drives by then.
Apple only charge $300 for this upgrade in the MBA, which includes a CPU bump. This actually makes it cheaper than SD right now and obviously much faster.
This isn't a great format for data sharing with mobile devices though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BenRoethig
You produce a computer that you can't install software on and your can't export your movies for your not so progressive family members, there's not a whole lot of reasons for the more average user to buy it.
You still could, you'd just be coerced into buying an external bus-powered drive and probably save a bit of money in the machine. Apple would very likely save a lot of money not having to engineer the computers to fit an optical unit and could drop the prices by more than a 3rd party manufacturer will sell a bus-powered model.
I'd rather pay Lacie £50 for their mobile DVD burner, which is better than Apple's slot-loader as it accepts mini-CDs and have Apple drop the Mini price by £100 back to what it was before by being able to save on half the height of the case, the large moulded block holding the optical drive in place, the unit itself and the motherboard connections.
This change will come, the only question is when will it come.
No question about that. I just hope they don't before the infrastructure is in place.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
Apple only charge $300 for this upgrade in the MBA, which includes a CPU bump. This actually makes it cheaper than SD right now and obviously much faster.
This isn't a great format for data sharing with mobile devices though.
More convenient is always going to be more expensive though. You can't put an SSD in your wallet like you can an SD card.
I think Apple should make SD slots available over the entire lineup so that there is always an easy way to transfer large files between computers.
What you seek is a USB thumb drive.
But seriously. I'd be hard pressed to find a single person who has ever transfered a file via SD. By transfered files I mean via the file system from one computer to another. Offloading camera pictures to a computer doesn't count.
On the other hand, an absolutely huge percentage of computer users have used USB thumb drives. No additional hardware required. No separate case required.
SD slots are useful. But people aren't really clamoring for an alternative for USB thumb drives when transferring files. If SD slots do become standard, I'd think that the justification would have to be something different.
I've read all the thread and am wondering when Apple will make SDXC, or something similar compatible with their SD slots. 2TB's and 300 MB's on a micro disc seems amazing. Does anyone know roughly when?
It would be neat to have it on something like that, even if it were for an extra fee. Discs are cool, and as careful as I am with them - sometimes they get scratched.
I do agree it makes sense for software packaging to go in this direction. I agree with the earlier sentiment that installing software from a DVD is extremely slow. Also a solid state drive would require less packaging and would not be quite as fragile as a DVD.
The problem with this report is that SD slots are too rare in the Mac world right now to have a major OS release on them. If they were to do this USB flash drive would make more sense.
Now the cost is $11 more than the DVD alone so I'd guess that's what the storage format alone costs - likely an 8GB card as no separate compression is required.
If you cut out the DVD + printing and maybe shrink down the packaging a bit, the difference between an SD-only version of the movie and the DVD version is $9 more, maybe less. It should be quicker and cheaper to load movies onto an SD card too.
The motivation here for Disney will be their netbook line for kids rather than SJ on the board of directors looking to push another new thing with Disney support (e.g a move to SD and away from optical) but with a major company pushing (micro-)SD out as a distribution format, the costs will come down and maybe more studios will look towards doing the same.
The reality is that the future is thin and light. Few ultra-portables and certainly no netbooks ship with optical units. This means that they either have to use an inconvenient method of watching movie distributions such as dangling an external DVD or Blu-Ray drive off a USB port or the movie industry accommodates them by using a new distribution format, which works for all users from the smallest devices (even mobile devices with micro-SD) to the largest.
It doesn't have to replace it of course, it can just be an alternative.
Comments
Apple can't release laptops designed only for what is most likely coming several years down the road. Right now, there are major application installs, including (crucially) operating system installs, that are impracticable OTA. You can try installing Final Cut Pro over the 'net if you like, but the poster upthread made a pretty good case for SD right now and most likely over the average useful life of the machine.
I've downloaded an Apple OS before (from Apple, before anyone asks). It reminded me of those good old days when I would dial up a BBS in the evening, start a download over 300 BAUD, go to bed, and wake up with about a 30% chance that I had the file I wanted. For the next few design cycles, SD will wipe the floor with network installs in the general case. The only advantage DVDs have at this point is their absurdly low cost in bulk, but if you're shipping a $129 operating system or a $999 professional suite it's not a significant cost difference in real terms. Apple spends extra money to make their packaging impressive. I can't imagine them begrudging a bit extra to greatly improve the installation experience as well.
Exactly. For the next several years I expect DVDs to be the medium. They are cheap and plentiful, remember I started with that point. SD is awful damn expensive in comparison ~80x more expensive per GB. I don't see Apple moving to SD while the vast majority of its installed base doesn't have it from the factory yet. That's putting the cart way before the horse, premium packaging or not. Dual distro media and one is radically more costly to boot? Not likely at all.
Eventually when optical media dies the death of the floppy I believe it is much more likely to transition to over the network updates than substitute another physical medium. When? Probably not for three to five years at least, I never said anything about moving to OTA right away.
Seems like your complaint is more specifically about DVD based distribution. SD cards aren't the only alternative though.
In my opinion, a USB thumb drive would be a better option than an SD card at this point.
True. But actually for Mac use a FW thumb drive would be preferable with a USB2 option for MBA/Unibody MB users.
I'm all for this kind of distribution in the near future. A thumb drive or SD card can have much smaller packaging which fits in with Apple's green efforts.
What would also be a bonus is if the remaining capacity on such a drive could be put to use much like ReadyBoost (not that I have any experience of how well this works in practise but it seems a good idea in theory).
Exactly. For the next several years I expect DVDs to be the medium. They are cheap and plentiful, remember I started with that point. .
But there are advantages to dropping optical.
1) Potentially lower warranty repair costs. The superdrives are notoriously prone to problems.
2) Smaller lighter form factors for laptops.
3) Faster installs of SW distributed by this means and a better user experience.
4) Quieter, cooler and perhaps better battery life in the laptops. Again a better user experience.
5) By eliminating optical drives they keep nudging people towards digital downloading of content, music and movies, which could drive sales at the iTunes store.
I like optical personally. I really prefer my music on CD and would miss a superdrive in my laptop. But I think Apple are moving in this direction. Telling to me is that it isn't on the MBA. I think the MBA is Apple's 'concept car'. It seems to exist to usher in new technologies that make it eventually to the mainstream machines. The MBA has heralded the arrival of unibody enclosures and non-user replaceable batteries. Is the loss of optical next?
And the laptops will get thinner. We all know how Apple feel about thin machines.
Thinner may still be governed by the HDD, which is the same height as the optical drive, 9.5mm. If they use less platters they can go thinner or if they go with SSD as a standard then a thinner drive could be made, but I have seen no evidence of this yet. Would be nice, though.
The biggest impact SD drives could have is on the Mac Mini.
Unlike the laptops, the optical drive is what now sets the basic size parameters of the Mini.
I would love to see mockups of what the Mini could look like with an SD instead of an optical drive.
The biggest impact SD drives could have is on the Mac Mini.
Unlike the laptops, the optical drive is what now sets the basic size parameters of the Mini.
I would love to see mockups of what the Mini could look like with an SD instead of an optical drive.
That is an interesting concept. A lot could done without the inclusion of the optical drive. It really does have some specific needs thy determine some basic designs, but I don't think we'll see optical drives leave the desktops for awhile after they are gone from notebooks. They are just too cheap and space and weight aren't really pressing concerns, though I'd agree that the Mini would probably be to first to test this eventual new age in desktop design.
Even HDDs have a set size, as do Li-Ion Batteries. With SSDs and Li-Poly plenty of things could be reshaped. Perhaps not ideally, but at least it could be done where other factors were more of a concern.
The biggest impact SD drives could have is on the Mac Mini.
Unlike the laptops, the optical drive is what now sets the basic size parameters of the Mini.
I would love to see mockups of what the Mini could look like with an SD instead of an optical drive.
The motherboard defines the shape too - the ports on the back would all still have to be there so I don't see a significant change in footprint. But, a huge part of the Mini is the block holding the optical drive and HDD in place and is part of what makes the upgrades so tricky. They have to find ways to push the Bluetooth and Airport chips above this block.
With the optical drive gone, these could be positioned much more easily. Eventually, I'd like to see a design where you open it like a clam shell so you can easily change the Ram and HDD within a minute.
Plus the removal of the optical should make for much better air-flow/cooling and therefore faster CPUs. Better than the iMac in fact because that will always be constrained by the enclosure.
The height could also go down to the level of the Apple TV, which has no optical drive.
This is how I'd kind of like to see a future Mini:
Except the HDD would be placed a lot better.
The biggest impact SD drives could have is on the Mac Mini.
Unlike the laptops, the optical drive is what now sets the basic size parameters of the Mini.
I would love to see mockups of what the Mini could look like with an SD instead of an optical drive.
Isn't that precisely what the Apple TV already is?
(minus the tiny slot for an SD card)
The motherboard defines the shape too - the ports on the back would all still have to be there so I don't see a significant change in footprint. But, a huge part of the Mini is the block holding the optical drive and HDD in place and is part of what makes the upgrades so tricky. They have to find ways to push the Bluetooth and Airport chips above this block.
With the optical drive gone, these could be positioned much more easily. Eventually, I'd like to see a design where you open it like a clam shell so you can easily change the Ram and HDD within a minute.
Plus the removal of the optical should make for much better air-flow/cooling and therefore faster CPUs. Better than the iMac in fact because that will always be constrained by the enclosure.
The height could also go down to the level of the Apple TV, which has no optical drive.
This is how I'd kind of like to see a future Mini:
Except the HDD would be placed a lot better.
In this configuration, would you expect an SD slot or an SD dongle/USB? Could an SD be connected by FW?
Isn't that precisely what the Apple TV already is?
(minus the tiny slot for an SD card)
Yeah, but the form factor could change significantly.
For one thing, it could really morph into a standing 'minitower' without the optical.
Upgrading the hard drive could also be made much simpler, though Jobs will likely nix that.
The problem with excluding the optical drive is that if you do it too soon, you could see your sales evaporate.
There is always that, but we know Apple is usually on the forefront of such changes. Now there are options, like making it only for notebooks first since they have the space constraint. Or perhaps even just offering the external USB optical drive for free for stragglers, but Apple won?t do that because they seem to hate adding any fluff to their system. The current external drive is $99 but that a 2 year old price and would surely sell a lot more, so the price could be lower, if they made it for their popular notebooks.
This change will come, the only question is when will it come.
In this configuration, would you expect an SD slot or an SD dongle/USB? Could an SD be connected by FW?
I think Apple should make SD slots available over the entire lineup so that there is always an easy way to transfer large files between computers. Putting it on the front might be tricky and Apple won't be keen on this for aesthetic reasons. On the back wouldn't be very accessible but I wouldn't mind particularly. If the machine is shorter, it's not so bad.
I think there are firewire Flash card readers but most cards aren't fast enough generally to saturate a USB 2 connection. The high end ones have reached that point. The Mac laptop readers are limited to 30MB/s but that should be enough as 32GB would fill up in just 20 minutes at that speed.
If SD cards reach a reasonable price for a 32GB card, I'll be ditching optical media for backups. I'd say they need to drop by a factor of 5. Dropping 30% four times ought to just about do it. If the current trend continues, that could be 4 years though and you might even get away with 1.8" 128GB SSD drives by then.
Apple only charge $300 for this upgrade in the MBA, which includes a CPU bump. This actually makes it cheaper than SD right now and obviously much faster.
This isn't a great format for data sharing with mobile devices though.
You produce a computer that you can't install software on and your can't export your movies for your not so progressive family members, there's not a whole lot of reasons for the more average user to buy it.
You still could, you'd just be coerced into buying an external bus-powered drive and probably save a bit of money in the machine. Apple would very likely save a lot of money not having to engineer the computers to fit an optical unit and could drop the prices by more than a 3rd party manufacturer will sell a bus-powered model.
I'd rather pay Lacie £50 for their mobile DVD burner, which is better than Apple's slot-loader as it accepts mini-CDs and have Apple drop the Mini price by £100 back to what it was before by being able to save on half the height of the case, the large moulded block holding the optical drive in place, the unit itself and the motherboard connections.
This change will come, the only question is when will it come.
No question about that. I just hope they don't before the infrastructure is in place.
Apple only charge $300 for this upgrade in the MBA, which includes a CPU bump. This actually makes it cheaper than SD right now and obviously much faster.
This isn't a great format for data sharing with mobile devices though.
More convenient is always going to be more expensive though. You can't put an SSD in your wallet like you can an SD card.
I think Apple should make SD slots available over the entire lineup so that there is always an easy way to transfer large files between computers.
What you seek is a USB thumb drive.
But seriously. I'd be hard pressed to find a single person who has ever transfered a file via SD. By transfered files I mean via the file system from one computer to another. Offloading camera pictures to a computer doesn't count.
On the other hand, an absolutely huge percentage of computer users have used USB thumb drives. No additional hardware required. No separate case required.
SD slots are useful. But people aren't really clamoring for an alternative for USB thumb drives when transferring files. If SD slots do become standard, I'd think that the justification would have to be something different.
SDXC- http://www.sdcard.org/developers/tech/sdxc
The problem with this report is that SD slots are too rare in the Mac world right now to have a major OS release on them. If they were to do this USB flash drive would make more sense.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/22/d...to-pass-on-by/
Now the cost is $11 more than the DVD alone so I'd guess that's what the storage format alone costs - likely an 8GB card as no separate compression is required.
If you cut out the DVD + printing and maybe shrink down the packaging a bit, the difference between an SD-only version of the movie and the DVD version is $9 more, maybe less. It should be quicker and cheaper to load movies onto an SD card too.
The motivation here for Disney will be their netbook line for kids rather than SJ on the board of directors looking to push another new thing with Disney support (e.g a move to SD and away from optical) but with a major company pushing (micro-)SD out as a distribution format, the costs will come down and maybe more studios will look towards doing the same.
The reality is that the future is thin and light. Few ultra-portables and certainly no netbooks ship with optical units. This means that they either have to use an inconvenient method of watching movie distributions such as dangling an external DVD or Blu-Ray drive off a USB port or the movie industry accommodates them by using a new distribution format, which works for all users from the smallest devices (even mobile devices with micro-SD) to the largest.
It doesn't have to replace it of course, it can just be an alternative.