no-one seems to have mentioned it, but the highlight of this update to me is Apple moving the mini-displayport to the LHS side of the USB ports.
anyone who actually owns one of the unibodies (as i do) will be able to attest that the old positioning looked nice & Apple-y (ie ports decrease in size from left to right) however was functionally stupid.
the things that you tend to have plugged in all the time that you are at your desk are of course the power cord, ehternet (for those not wireless) and monitor cable if using an external monitor (as i do all day).
usb devices on the other hand tend to get plugged in and out throughout the course of the day (eg sync iphone, plug in camera etc)
the old layout meant that the monitor cable was always obstructing access to the USB slots - sounds small, but an annoying issue to deal with EVERY time you need to plug in a usb device. i'm amazed it wasn't picked up earlier, but good to see them making amends...
no-one seems to have mentioned it, but the highlight of this update to me is Apple moving the mini-displayport to the LHS side of the USB ports.
Nice observation and welcome to the forums. I noticed it had moved but think twice about the implications. Since I can't recall ever using an external monitor on a notebook and figure that utilizing only the built-in display is by and large the norm I can see how it can be overlooked.
Going from a ploycarb MB to the first unibody MB I did notice that thy moved, at least, the USB ports ever so slightly together. I hope they were able to allow more spacing this time as I had to buy a 12" USB cable extender to get my 3G to work while my iPhone cae was plugged in, where it had fit before. Once we get rid of the optical drive I hope Apple goes crazy with port options, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yeah, but who doesn't walk around with a USB memory stick in their pocket these days? I just bought a new 16GB one for $30 at Radio Shack. 400Mbps transfer on USB which beats out the SD-card slot, and they're given away like candy at many places.
Thats the data speed over USB 2.0
The fastest USB flash drives only get to around 30MB/s with most doing anywhere between 8 and 24MB/s.
An external HDD can get up to around 40MB/s on USB.
What? Changed to another format that has been around for 10 years?
Apple introduces a port that every other manufacturer has had for years and it is now revolutionary??
True but booting Windows from an SD card, admittedly based on a quick scan of the internet, involves some use of clever 3rd party software, etc. not to mention a bunch of work by the user.
Is this whole SD card slot move by Apple their first step in paving the way for the rumored tablet/netbook/mobile internet device? That is certainly a potential class of products screaming for technologies that don't require an optical drive. Couple SSD's with SD and now you've opened up a new dimension in portable computing.
The transfer rate is no where near high enough. Also RAM doesnt save data and is wiped when the power is off, SD cards... well they wouldnt be much good if they got wiped when taken out would they?
Interesting now given the fact most digital camera now can send the pictures directly to your laptop wirelessly..via wifi or blutooth....this seems like a step back plus having it stick out so much is really un-Apple like...appears as an after thought......
ER..... no. Actually most cameras are still wired or card based. GPS and wireless and other advances are coming and in some cameras, but considering the millions and millions and millions that are out there and still being sold, I think Apple hit a sweet spot.
That'll be the $29 version! If you want it on optical media, ya gotta pay the old $129 upgrade price...
(of course a cheap card reader would blow holes in that theory, but what a hoot it would be!)
But the costs are dimes for stamping a disc and tens of dollars for the solid state version. The only way there would be $100 for the older media is if they included the drive in the box too.
I think the OS installer a solid state chip would be worth the extra expense. In volume, Apple could probably make their requisite margins by charging $20-$30 extra for a solid state version.
I am no computer engineering genius, but would there be some way to use an SD card as extra RAM for the MacBook?
It costs $1000 to fill up the new ones with 8GB of RAM, but only $40 for an 8GB SD card!
At the very least you could use this card as a scratch disk for Photoshop...
Just hoping!
RAM is expensive for a reason; it's orders of magnitude faster than SD storage on a USB bus.
And you will decrease performance if you use this card as scratch disk for Photoshop. Unless you have a drive attached to the SATA port. USB, firewire external hard drives also make very poor PS scratch disks. What I would be interested in is one of those new FusionIO PCI Express drives used as a scratch disk. That is the kind of speed that would improve performance.
One can format a SD-SDHC card to GUID and install OS X on it. The new MBPs don't support SDXC yet in hardware/software.
I am amazed to no end. I have read all the posts about SD and its capabilities. The fact that you hang around your neck a bootable 2TB drive is amazing. HOW Many photo's can you take in tiff before the SD CARD FILLS UP.
I will still burn cds and dvd's for friends and I will still burn dvd for my own archives .DVD back up storage is forever. I have burned so far about 35 full dvd DATA disc's 4.65 g each 2x. One sEt each for MY two sons. They contain every song, every movie, everythingI ever did on my 9 mac.s. All those old home movie footage left raw for them to have when i die. Also i have burned about 45 dvd home movie imovie discs and have about 80 more to go. The dvd data discs cost less than 4o cents each .
Yet the amazing storage in such a small space is fantastic sci fi kind of stuff. Imagine carrying around the library of congress in your pocket. SD type media storage will change our world very soon.
Tiny hand held devices that .....we have yet to dream them up yet..
1. I've taken SD cards out of spring loaded slots tens of thousands of times on laptops, camera's, cell phones and have never once, not a single instance had a problem with one, ever.
2. The card does not stick out 1/2 way. It sticks out exactly 1.1 centimeter. A standard SD card is 4 cm long.
3. I can confirm that I was able to set up time machine effortlessly with my 32gb Patriot SD card on my new 13" Macbook Pro. Tomorrow I am installing a 128GB Corsair SSD and 4gb Ram as soon as UPS drops them off, and I will do some speed tests for booting from Harddrive, SSD, and SD card.
Is the 128gb SSD enough storage for you ?? SEEMS like you may be a tad short. No ?
And are SD card reliable after many uses?Are you sure ? If yes, who said it was reliable as your number one data back up ? Also I would never leave an SD card in for long peridots of time.
I'm sorry, but I was disappointed hearing Apple removed the expresscard. This is what sets it apart from the MacBooks. I have a 1st gen MacBook Pro where I use the expresscard when I'm at home to hook up eSATA drives. The SD is a nice feature, but I already have a cheap USB dongle solution for that. Booting from a SD card is a nice feature, but it isn't practical today as the I/O is slow. Yes, one could go with a 17" MBP, but we're talking about a $800 price difference. Not to mention the extra weight.
I agree 100% and I'm in the same situation, using esata to hook up HDD's. It's faster than using FW800 and if you're rendering HD video or compositing you can use both and really speed things up. It is kind of messy, but it works quite well. An SD card feels like a loss, sure it's convenient, but it's a lot less versatile, and a slower connection, even if they up it to SDXC.
I'm glad they added firewire back to the 13", and I hope Apple will reconsider express card as they did FireWire on the 13".
Edit: Why would you add notebooks to the proline and remove pro features from the 15"? Many pro photogs use CF cards, not SD. SD is fine and useful, but it's a consumer feature, so why call it pro if you're biased toward removing pro features for consumer ones? I know Apple says that few used the express cards, but I loved them!
Is the 128gb SSD enough storage for you ?? SEEMS like you may be a tad short. No ?
And are SD card reliable after many uses?Are you sure ? If yes, who said it was reliable as your number one data back up ? Also I would never leave an SD card in for long peridots of time.
Let us know .
Thank you
9
128gb is PLENTY for me. I normally never own a computer for more than a year, with my only exception being my 24" iMac that I bought September 2007, as the upgrades since then have been lackluster to say the least. I've had over 80 different computers since 1990, and in that time I have never used more than 95gb on ANY computer.
My music collection is about 9GB, my photo collection is about 15GB, and I usually have 5-6 DVD's encoded on my desktop to offload to my cell phone or ipod as needed, thats only about 3GB. I setup up VMware Fusion and Windows with a 20GB partition so that I can run AnyDVD and UPS Worldship on all my Macs. Mac OSX and all my programs on the Mac side add up to about 35GB.
I own several retail businesses and an online store and even with every single file I have to my name have never cracked 95GB. By the time I start to get close to the 118GB thats available on this SSD, the 256GB or 512GB SSD's will be sitting nicely under $200.
In general people just think they need the biggest baddest thing, when 90% of the population coould get by with a 120gb HD.
I would also trust a SD card over any mechanical drive. But I was just testing the SD card out to see if you could actually use Time Machine with it, I have a WD Passport that I back up to.
Why would you never leave an SD card in for long periods? My SD card in my girlfriends digital camera has been in there 2 years and never been removed.
Anyways to my test results.
It took 36 minutes to install OSX on the Corsair SSD. Not sure if this is fast/slow/average. This SSD is not known for being the fastest on the market, but is in the top 3 as far as reliability. After using a SSD in my Dell Mini for the past few months, I can never ever ever go back to a hard drive in a laptop again.
Each test I did 5 times and averaged all the results out.
Stock Harddrive in new 13" Macbook Pro with only the pre-loaded programs installed, and all updates applied. The only other thing I did was delete Safari and Mail and install Firefox and Thunderbird.
Boot Time: 34.3 seconds
Shutdown Time: 4.1 seconds
New Corsair 128GB SSD with everything exactly the same, same pre-loaded programs, Deleted Safari/Mail and installed Firefox/Thunderbird.
Boot Time: 22.6 seconds
Shutdown Time: 2.8 seconds
Where the SSD really shines is launching apps, instead of the 3-4 dock bounces I got on my iMac when launching Excel and Photoshop, the Macbook loads both programs on the first bounce,
Since OSX took so long to install on the SSD, I didn't even bother installing it on the SD Card. Maybe I will this week if I have some extra time. I was kind of surprised a clean install of OSX took up 19GB!!!
Comments
anyone who actually owns one of the unibodies (as i do) will be able to attest that the old positioning looked nice & Apple-y (ie ports decrease in size from left to right) however was functionally stupid.
the things that you tend to have plugged in all the time that you are at your desk are of course the power cord, ehternet (for those not wireless) and monitor cable if using an external monitor (as i do all day).
usb devices on the other hand tend to get plugged in and out throughout the course of the day (eg sync iphone, plug in camera etc)
the old layout meant that the monitor cable was always obstructing access to the USB slots - sounds small, but an annoying issue to deal with EVERY time you need to plug in a usb device. i'm amazed it wasn't picked up earlier, but good to see them making amends...
no-one seems to have mentioned it, but the highlight of this update to me is Apple moving the mini-displayport to the LHS side of the USB ports.
Nice observation and welcome to the forums. I noticed it had moved but think twice about the implications. Since I can't recall ever using an external monitor on a notebook and figure that utilizing only the built-in display is by and large the norm I can see how it can be overlooked.
Going from a ploycarb MB to the first unibody MB I did notice that thy moved, at least, the USB ports ever so slightly together. I hope they were able to allow more spacing this time as I had to buy a 12" USB cable extender to get my 3G to work while my iPhone cae was plugged in, where it had fit before. Once we get rid of the optical drive I hope Apple goes crazy with port options, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yeah, but who doesn't walk around with a USB memory stick in their pocket these days? I just bought a new 16GB one for $30 at Radio Shack. 400Mbps transfer on USB which beats out the SD-card slot, and they're given away like candy at many places.
Thats the data speed over USB 2.0
The fastest USB flash drives only get to around 30MB/s with most doing anywhere between 8 and 24MB/s.
An external HDD can get up to around 40MB/s on USB.
Can we please already drop CDs. Its been 20 years. Its time to switch to new media storage.
What? Changed to another format that has been around for 10 years?
Apple introduces a port that every other manufacturer has had for years and it is now revolutionary??
Can we please already drop CDs. Its been 20 years. Its time to switch to new media storage.
Snow Leopard shipped on SD?
What? Changed to another format that has been around for 10 years?
Apple introduces a port that every other manufacturer has had for years and it is now revolutionary??
True but booting Windows from an SD card, admittedly based on a quick scan of the internet, involves some use of clever 3rd party software, etc. not to mention a bunch of work by the user.
Is this whole SD card slot move by Apple their first step in paving the way for the rumored tablet/netbook/mobile internet device? That is certainly a potential class of products screaming for technologies that don't require an optical drive. Couple SSD's with SD and now you've opened up a new dimension in portable computing.
What? Changed to another format that has been around for 10 years?
Apple introduces a port that every other manufacturer has had for years and it is now revolutionary??
No, it's just more desirable now because it's in a Mac.
It costs $1000 to fill up the new ones with 8GB of RAM, but only $40 for an 8GB SD card!
At the very least you could use this card as a scratch disk for Photoshop...
Just hoping!
The transfer rate is no where near high enough. Also RAM doesnt save data and is wiped when the power is off, SD cards... well they wouldnt be much good if they got wiped when taken out would they?
Interesting now given the fact most digital camera now can send the pictures directly to your laptop wirelessly..via wifi or blutooth....this seems like a step back plus having it stick out so much is really un-Apple like...appears as an after thought......
ER..... no. Actually most cameras are still wired or card based. GPS and wireless and other advances are coming and in some cameras, but considering the millions and millions and millions that are out there and still being sold, I think Apple hit a sweet spot.
PS. Apple is wireless also. Just a thought.
en
Snow Leopard shipped on SD?
That'll be the $29 version! If you want it on optical media, ya gotta pay the old $129 upgrade price...
(of course a cheap card reader would blow holes in that theory, but what a hoot it would be!)
That'll be the $29 version! If you want it on optical media, ya gotta pay the old $129 upgrade price...
(of course a cheap card reader would blow holes in that theory, but what a hoot it would be!)
But the costs are dimes for stamping a disc and tens of dollars for the solid state version. The only way there would be $100 for the older media is if they included the drive in the box too.
I think the OS installer a solid state chip would be worth the extra expense. In volume, Apple could probably make their requisite margins by charging $20-$30 extra for a solid state version.
I am no computer engineering genius, but would there be some way to use an SD card as extra RAM for the MacBook?
It costs $1000 to fill up the new ones with 8GB of RAM, but only $40 for an 8GB SD card!
At the very least you could use this card as a scratch disk for Photoshop...
Just hoping!
RAM is expensive for a reason; it's orders of magnitude faster than SD storage on a USB bus.
And you will decrease performance if you use this card as scratch disk for Photoshop. Unless you have a drive attached to the SATA port. USB, firewire external hard drives also make very poor PS scratch disks. What I would be interested in is one of those new FusionIO PCI Express drives used as a scratch disk. That is the kind of speed that would improve performance.
One can format a SD-SDHC card to GUID and install OS X on it. The new MBPs don't support SDXC yet in hardware/software.
I am amazed to no end. I have read all the posts about SD and its capabilities. The fact that you hang around your neck a bootable 2TB drive is amazing. HOW Many photo's can you take in tiff before the SD CARD FILLS UP.
I will still burn cds and dvd's for friends and I will still burn dvd for my own archives .DVD back up storage is forever. I have burned so far about 35 full dvd DATA disc's 4.65 g each 2x. One sEt each for MY two sons. They contain every song, every movie, everythingI ever did on my 9 mac.s. All those old home movie footage left raw for them to have when i die. Also i have burned about 45 dvd home movie imovie discs and have about 80 more to go. The dvd data discs cost less than 4o cents each .
Yet the amazing storage in such a small space is fantastic sci fi kind of stuff. Imagine carrying around the library of congress in your pocket. SD type media storage will change our world very soon.
Tiny hand held devices that .....we have yet to dream them up yet..
9
Couple points.
1. I've taken SD cards out of spring loaded slots tens of thousands of times on laptops, camera's, cell phones and have never once, not a single instance had a problem with one, ever.
2. The card does not stick out 1/2 way. It sticks out exactly 1.1 centimeter. A standard SD card is 4 cm long.
3. I can confirm that I was able to set up time machine effortlessly with my 32gb Patriot SD card on my new 13" Macbook Pro. Tomorrow I am installing a 128GB Corsair SSD and 4gb Ram as soon as UPS drops them off, and I will do some speed tests for booting from Harddrive, SSD, and SD card.
Is the 128gb SSD enough storage for you ?? SEEMS like you may be a tad short. No ?
And are SD card reliable after many uses?Are you sure ? If yes, who said it was reliable as your number one data back up ? Also I would never leave an SD card in for long peridots of time.
Let us know .
Thank you
9
That'll be the $29 version! If you want it on optical media, ya gotta pay the old $129 upgrade price...
(of course a cheap card reader would blow holes in that theory, but what a hoot it would be!)
An $8 USB adapter solves the problem, if that were the case.
I'm sorry, but I was disappointed hearing Apple removed the expresscard. This is what sets it apart from the MacBooks. I have a 1st gen MacBook Pro where I use the expresscard when I'm at home to hook up eSATA drives. The SD is a nice feature, but I already have a cheap USB dongle solution for that. Booting from a SD card is a nice feature, but it isn't practical today as the I/O is slow. Yes, one could go with a 17" MBP, but we're talking about a $800 price difference. Not to mention the extra weight.
I agree 100% and I'm in the same situation, using esata to hook up HDD's. It's faster than using FW800 and if you're rendering HD video or compositing you can use both and really speed things up. It is kind of messy, but it works quite well. An SD card feels like a loss, sure it's convenient, but it's a lot less versatile, and a slower connection, even if they up it to SDXC.
I'm glad they added firewire back to the 13", and I hope Apple will reconsider express card as they did FireWire on the 13".
Edit: Why would you add notebooks to the proline and remove pro features from the 15"? Many pro photogs use CF cards, not SD. SD is fine and useful, but it's a consumer feature, so why call it pro if you're biased toward removing pro features for consumer ones? I know Apple says that few used the express cards, but I loved them!
It's cute.
Is the 128gb SSD enough storage for you ?? SEEMS like you may be a tad short. No ?
And are SD card reliable after many uses?Are you sure ? If yes, who said it was reliable as your number one data back up ? Also I would never leave an SD card in for long peridots of time.
Let us know .
Thank you
9
128gb is PLENTY for me. I normally never own a computer for more than a year, with my only exception being my 24" iMac that I bought September 2007, as the upgrades since then have been lackluster to say the least. I've had over 80 different computers since 1990, and in that time I have never used more than 95gb on ANY computer.
My music collection is about 9GB, my photo collection is about 15GB, and I usually have 5-6 DVD's encoded on my desktop to offload to my cell phone or ipod as needed, thats only about 3GB. I setup up VMware Fusion and Windows with a 20GB partition so that I can run AnyDVD and UPS Worldship on all my Macs. Mac OSX and all my programs on the Mac side add up to about 35GB.
I own several retail businesses and an online store and even with every single file I have to my name have never cracked 95GB. By the time I start to get close to the 118GB thats available on this SSD, the 256GB or 512GB SSD's will be sitting nicely under $200.
In general people just think they need the biggest baddest thing, when 90% of the population coould get by with a 120gb HD.
I would also trust a SD card over any mechanical drive. But I was just testing the SD card out to see if you could actually use Time Machine with it, I have a WD Passport that I back up to.
Why would you never leave an SD card in for long periods? My SD card in my girlfriends digital camera has been in there 2 years and never been removed.
Anyways to my test results.
It took 36 minutes to install OSX on the Corsair SSD. Not sure if this is fast/slow/average. This SSD is not known for being the fastest on the market, but is in the top 3 as far as reliability. After using a SSD in my Dell Mini for the past few months, I can never ever ever go back to a hard drive in a laptop again.
Each test I did 5 times and averaged all the results out.
Stock Harddrive in new 13" Macbook Pro with only the pre-loaded programs installed, and all updates applied. The only other thing I did was delete Safari and Mail and install Firefox and Thunderbird.
Boot Time: 34.3 seconds
Shutdown Time: 4.1 seconds
New Corsair 128GB SSD with everything exactly the same, same pre-loaded programs, Deleted Safari/Mail and installed Firefox/Thunderbird.
Boot Time: 22.6 seconds
Shutdown Time: 2.8 seconds
Where the SSD really shines is launching apps, instead of the 3-4 dock bounces I got on my iMac when launching Excel and Photoshop, the Macbook loads both programs on the first bounce,
Since OSX took so long to install on the SSD, I didn't even bother installing it on the SD Card. Maybe I will this week if I have some extra time. I was kind of surprised a clean install of OSX took up 19GB!!!