Maximum MacBook Air Drive 80GB for Now

[MacRumors]

http://www.macrumors.com/images/macrumorsthreadlogo.gif (http://www.macrumors.com)

Apple is presently offering only two mass storage options for the MacBook Air: a traditional 80GB 1.8" hard disk drive (HDD) and a $999 64GB 1.8" solid state drive (SSD) upgrade. Those interested in upgrading on the size of their MacBook Air drives may have to wait as long as 2009 to get significantly higher sizes.

In its pursuit of thinness, the MacBook Air uses a 1.8" single-platter HDD which measures only 5mm high. While larger capacity 1.8" drives exist, they use double-platter designs which result in an 8mm height. This extra 3mm explains why the 80GB drive is the only HDD option available for the MacBook Air.

Technology, of course, marches forward, but the last we've heard about higher capacity single-platter HDDs came from Toshiba in September 2007 (http://www.macrumors.com/2007/09/10/toshiba-prototypes-120-gb-1-8-single-platter-drive/). At the time, Toshiba had prototyped a 1.8" HDD that fits 120GB on a single platter, but this drive is not expected to come to market until 2009.

Those who can afford the Solid State Drive (SSD) may be in in some luck, as Samsung did announce (in Jan 2008) (http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/index.jsp?epi_menuItemID=887566059a3aedb6efaaa9e27a808a0c&ndmViewId=news_view&ndmConfigId=1000017&newsId=20080106005126&newsLang=en) that a 128GB SSD drive coming in the "first half of 2008". This 1.8" drive multi-level cell flash drive will be produced in 1.8" 5mm high size, although the announced interface (SATA) is not the same as that used in the MacBook Air (PATA). Pricing has not yet been announced on the 128GB SSD drive, but will certainly carry a significant premium.

Article Link (http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/30/maximum-macbook-air-drive-80gb-for-now/)

[BioChron]

I wonder how many people are actually going to order the SSDs at this point, seeing as they are so expensive.

[syklee26]

by 2009 there will be something like 80gb thumb drive and 200gb SSD anyway.

[jciapara]

128GB SSD?? How much $$$ do you think it would add to the MBA price? As the current one 64GB adds $999.00

[MarkMS]

Hopefully, the 12" MacBook Pro will be out by 2009. :p

http://mbp12.com/

[drdan]

One would think that an army of extremely well-paid engineers would be able to find a way to get another 3mm out of that design.

The good news is that the price of flash memory is continuing to plummet, and will probably be in the reasonably-affordable range within a couple years. Just in time for the first major rev of the MBA, I reckon.

[honeycrisp]

Seems to me that 80 GB shouldn't be too bad for what most people will use this computer for. I'm currently only using about 60 GB, and I do lots of stuff...

[stoutboy1]

this computer just seems like a hard sale with the lack of ports and a drive. Im sure in the beginning itll sale well but I can see sales dyeing off in the future.

[nagromme]

I don't care too much what options there are now: I'm getting the base HD for starters... then in 12-18 months I'll grab whatever SSD I can afford to drop in. Hopefully 128!

Meanwhile, if I hit 80, I'll offload some things to a portable USB drive, iPod, or Time Capsule. I may come to need more than 80 GB, but I bet I won't need all that stuff all at one time.

[frijole]

"...although the announced interface (SATA) is not the same as that used in the MacBook Air (PATA)."

I haven't seen (and couldn't find) any mention of the connection bus of the SSD, whereas its pointed out in a few places the that hard drive option is PATA. I'm betting that SSD-equipped MacBook Airs have a different connector on the MLB, and are SATA.

[zlinger]

Does anyone know whether we will be able to replace the 80HDD with a 128SSD in a year or so? I would hope that the connectors are the same. Open up, remove, and drop in a new one... then format, install OSX.

[drdan]

this computer just seems like a hard sale with the lack of ports and a drive. Im sure in the beginning itll sale well but I can see sales dyeing off in the future.

I certainly understand that this computer appears somewhat quirky and impractical today. However, the future of computers is less wires, less drives, more internet and interconnectivity. The "quirks" of this computer are a window into the future of personal computing.

I'd bet that sales of this computer are tepid (reasonable for today's "niche" market) for awhile, and take off in a few years.

[numbsafari]

"...although the announced interface (SATA) is not the same as that used in the MacBook Air (PATA)."

I haven't seen (and couldn't find) any mention of the connection bus of the SSD, whereas its pointed out in a few places the that hard drive option is PATA. I'm betting that SSD-equipped MacBook Airs have a different connector on the MLB, and are SATA.

And I bet you that even if the current drive is (for some strange reason) PATA, Apple won't be hard pressed to get a SATA connector in there.

[flinch13]

The Macbook Air is certainly an awkward product when it comes to storage. However, it seems that this is just another technology hurtle that good old supply and demand will sort out with time. In 2001, people poo-pooed the iPod because of the high price ($400 for 5gb). Now, that same $400 will get you 160gb AND applecare, along with a much thinner package and a larger color screen. What happened? The technology improved and got much cheaper to make because of market support. If the Air sells in reasonable numbers, we'll see more, better, and cheaper technology like it. Even if it doesn't sell too well it's likely that we'll see similar alterations to other lines or portables by Apple (Read: the slimming of the iMac is in the same vein... slim+small=sexy and (theoretically) efficient).

I'm convinced that Apple is committed to pushing the industry forward. They have to be, otherwise their loyal customer base would not want to buy more of their toys every 2-3 years. We're hooked, and thus, we're subsidizing their research and indirectly producing more products to drool over. Vicious cycle, eh?

[numbsafari]

One would think that an army of extremely well-paid engineers would be able to find a way to get another 3mm out of that design.

The good news is that the price of flash memory is continuing to plummet, and will probably be in the reasonably-affordable range within a couple years. Just in time for the first major rev of the MBA, I reckon.

My guess is that by the time that extra 3mm is engineered out SSD prices will be such that it'll be an afterthought.

SSD is high-end stuff at this point. But as more products make use of it and as production scales up, prices are going to drop. It's just a matter of time. The benefits and the market potential are just too huge.

My only worry is that the drive manufacturers will collude on prices. They've done this in the past with RAM, and it wouldn't surprise me if they do the same here. They know that people are going to eat up SSD. This is a monumental, fundamental shift in the current system design. It's huge. It's going to be BIG money.

[zlinger]

I don't care too much what options there are now: I'm getting the base HD for starters... then in 12-18 months I'll grab whatever SSD I can afford to drop in. Hopefully 128!

Meanwhile, if I hit 80, I'll offload some things to a portable USB drive, iPod, or Time Capsule. I may come to need more than 80 GB, but I bet I won't need all that stuff all at one time.


This might be a useful application to help improve performance and disk efficiency. But I don't know how much though.

"Xslimmer (http://www.xslimmer.com/) not only frees space wasted by unused code, it can even increase your Mac's performance. Some of our users have reported applications loading in almost half the time, because OS X does not need to analyze Xslimmed applications in search for the most suitable version of the code."

[Ha ze]

128GB for what, like $1499 upgrade?
This is still going to take a few years, but I think that perhaps the 1.8 HDD platers are finally coming to an end (I hope)
SSD will be here, but like all technology, it comes out in small, expensive, packages, and the size goes up, and eventually the price falls.

[JesterJJZ]

If you need more space get a real laptop. :rolleyes:

[weezer160]

Basically anybody who tells you, "It doesn't have x, y, or z" is saying, "It's not for me, but I'm making this statement relevant to everybody else." Nobody can tell anybody what they may or may not use an optical drive for, much less firewire or mundane things that not every body uses.

Besides that, in its form and function, it blurs the line between a MB and MBP design: the MBA has an aluminum case, but a 13" LED display; It has a MB keyboard but is backlit just like the MBP. It's not like Apple is selling a 10" Laptop, with a tiny display and keyboard, wireless G, non-LED display, a video output and a 1.2 Ultra Low Voltage processor for $2,000 plus.

I may not buy one, but I'm not gonna trash it.

[Doctor Q]

To keep up with this cutting-edge technology, Apple is going to continue charging premium prices for these drives. But would we want Apple anywhere but at the head of the pack? Not really.

[joefinan]

Why are hard drives always in 80GB, 120GB etc., where as solid state memory comes in slightly more obscure 32GB, 64GB, 128GB etc?

[JesterJJZ]

Why are hard drives always in 80GB, 120GB etc., where as solid state memory comes in slightly more obscure 32GB, 64GB, 128GB etc?

Platters vs chips...some else can explain more.

[shadowfax]

Why are hard drives always in 80GB, 120GB etc., where as solid state memory comes in slightly more obscure 32GB, 64GB, 128GB etc?

Well, a hard drive is just a platter that can contain a certain density of individual bits, with hardware that reads the platters. They can be of arbitrary size. a lot of different "20 GB" drives aren't even actually the same size as each other. SSD is a lot more like the RAM in your computer, embedded in chips. it's made from collections of chips stamped onto electronics boards, and in such an architecture it is extremely important to have parallelism, symmetry, simplicity, etc. so that collections of chips can be scaled and addressed easily. Does that make sense?

[pesc]

Bleh. I have 80GB in my three year old 12" PB G4. And it has a smaller footprint than the MBA. And I could upgrade the HD to 160GB if I wanted. Hmmm... maybe I should since Apple doesn't seem to be interested in releasing a laptop I can replace my 12" PB with...

I have $3800 waiting for a suitable PB replacement. If my PB would die today I would buy a used 12" PB tomorrow. :mad:

[gnasher729]

Why are hard drives always in 80GB, 120GB etc., where as solid state memory comes in slightly more obscure 32GB, 64GB, 128GB etc?

About the hard drives: As an example, when Toshiba shipped its 80 GB drive (and the 160 GB, which is basically two 80 GB in a bigger package), the marketing department decided what would be the next size. They decided on 120 GB. They could as well have said 108 GB, or 135 GB, or whatever.

For the engineers it means everything in the 80 GB drive has to be improved: Tracks have to be closer together, bits on a track have to be closer, sometimes this is a gradual improvement, sometimes it is completely new technology. Whatever marketing wants, they will produce, except bigger size takes longer to achieve.

If everybody tried to make 120 GB drives, and you are the only one making 110 GB, you won't sell any. If you are the only one making 130 GB, you will be on the market two months later, so you lose a lot of sales, and once it is out people will think it is an odd size because it is different from anyone else, so people are suspicious (maybe you just count your GBytes differently, and your 130 GB isn't really bigger? That is a risk, I'd rather buy a real 120 GB disk. People make decisions for strange reasons).

[joefinan]

Well, a hard drive is just a platter that can contain a certain density of individual bits, with hardware that reads the platters. They can be of arbitrary size. a lot of different "20 GB" drives aren't even actually the same size as each other. SSD is a lot more like the RAM in your computer, embedded in chips. it's made from collections of chips stamped onto electronics boards, and in such an architecture it is extremely important to have parallelism, symmetry, simplicity, etc. so that collections of chips can be scaled and addressed easily. Does that make sense?

I don't think I explained myself properly! What I meant was that all memory that 'moves' is a rounded number (10GB, 30GB, 500GB, 1TB etc.) whereas all solid state memory (be it SSD, Compact Flash, SD Card etc.) seems to be anything but rounded (32GB, 64GB, 128GB etc.).

I appreciate manufacturers can choose whatever amount of data they wish to attempt to cram onto a medium, but I was wondering if there is some historic reason why they are not all rounded amounts.

Does that make sense??

[aswitcher]

64GB is plenty. Its the price that needs to plummet to make the MBA more tempting.

[tony-in-japan]

Since SSDs are still expensive, what would have been a good third option for the Macbook Air (in my opinion) would be for a 32GB SSD option which would make it $500-$600 cheaper -- therefore creating a third MBA for around $2400-$2500. (It still seems ridiculous that the high-end MBA is more expensive that the 17" MBP :eek:)

Since it is suppose to be a travel-light laptop, you are not going to want to carry all your files with you, but use it in conjunction with the 500GB Time Capsule when I home/office. So you can just make room and exchange files easily on your 32GB SSD wirelessly. This way, I think 32GB is plenty.

So you could have enjoyed the benefits of SSD performance for the whole of 2008, and then in the future, once SSDs become cheaper in 2009-2010 (and your warranty passes its 12 months) you can simply open it up and exchange your low 32GB SSD into a new higher-capacity SSD of your own choice and price-range.

Any thoughts?

[johnnyjibbs]

I don't think I explained myself properly! What I meant was that all memory that 'moves' is a rounded number (10GB, 30GB, 500GB, 1TB etc.) whereas all solid state memory (be it SSD, Compact Flash, SD Card etc.) seems to be anything but rounded (32GB, 64GB, 128GB etc.).

I appreciate manufacturers can choose whatever amount of data they wish to attempt to cram onto a medium, but I was wondering if there is some historic reason why they are not all rounded amounts.

Does that make sense??
Arguably, the 32/64/128 etc is the more 'rounded' number because they are all powers of 2.

Hopefully, the 12" MacBook Pro will be out by 2009. :p

http://mbp12.com/

Bleh. I have 80GB in my three year old 12" PB G4. And it has a smaller footprint than the MBA. And I could upgrade the HD to 160GB if I wanted. Hmmm... maybe I should since Apple doesn't seem to be interested in releasing a laptop I can replace my 12" PB with...

I have $3800 waiting for a suitable PB replacement. If my PB would die today I would buy a used 12" PB tomorrow. :mad:
It is true that the 12" PB has no replacement - I'm also in that league, although I'm going to move up to the 15" MBP whenever the damn update appears.

The hard drive issue, more than the form factor of the MacBook Air (which, although thinner, has a larger footprint than the 12"), seems to be the sticking point. It is a given that updates will happen as soon as the technology is available at a reasonable price (if you could call $999 reasonable!). I still believe that the 80GB HD option was not what Apple really wanted, but had to deliver purely because flash memory is still a little too expensive. Had they waited 6-12 months before unleashing the MBA, it may have lost its impact and people would still be moaning about Apple not having a 'sub-notebook'. (Of course, whether the MBA actually is a sub-notebook is another debate entirely :p)

I wouldn't get your hopes up on being able to swap out the HD for an SDD when they become available, however; when Steve showed us the guts of each of them during the keynote, they looked pretty different...

Overall, however, the MBA is not intended to be the long-awaited replacement for the 12" PB. It is intended for a different market. Therefore, those of you moaning about the lack of HD space should look elsewhere - at the MacBook or MacBook Pro. Or PC. Too bad, Apple hasn't yet filled the void that the 12" left behind... :(

[phelix_da_kat]

Apple is thinking out of the box.. they did the same with the original iPods.. people were poo'ing it for not having x, y and z. Like it didn't have a a fm radio, a display on the remote etc

The MBA is the same.. people want to "tick box" a list of things that they expect because other manufacturers are offering it...

I know there is a need to furureproof your purchase, but we have to realistic about what we will be doing with it in 2 or 3 years time. I actually had my PBTi 800Mhz for 5 years (at year 2 i maxed out the RAM, year 3 upgraded to a Seagate Momentus 5400).

Personally I would not buy the MBA as I already have more than 60Gb of music and photos. But given the 3 lines (MBA, MB and MBP) as a consumer we have a choice.

Still.. kudos to Apple for "thinking different".. :-)

[macbeep]

This might be a useful application to help improve performance and disk efficiency. But I don't know how much though.

"Xslimmer (http://www.xslimmer.com/) not only frees space wasted by unused code, it can even increase your Mac's performance. Some of our users have reported applications loading in almost half the time, because OS X does not need to analyze Xslimmed applications in search for the most suitable version of the code."

God. Would you like some water for that PLANT? Astroturf somewhere else.:mad:

[Darkroom]

i'll never pay $1000 for 64GB of ANYTHING!

[deadkenny]

I certainly understand that this computer appears somewhat quirky and impractical today. However, the future of computers is less wires, less drives, more internet and interconnectivity. The "quirks" of this computer are a window into the future of personal computing.

I'd bet that sales of this computer are tepid (reasonable for today's "niche" market) for awhile, and take off in a few years.


The day after the MBA was announced my company got two new theatres for presentations all equipt with the newest and most advanced stuff. In these rooms everything is wireless, including the beamers. Before I was in these rooms I dislike the MBA but after I came into these rooms it suddenly made sense. Way to go Apple. Tad bit smaller Footprint (1cm on each side of the keyboard wasted space) would have been nice tho'

[jhesse]

I don't think I explained myself properly! What I meant was that all memory that 'moves' is a rounded number (10GB, 30GB, 500GB, 1TB etc.) whereas all solid state memory (be it SSD, Compact Flash, SD Card etc.) seems to be anything but rounded (32GB, 64GB, 128GB etc.).


For memory:

1 GB = 2^30 (two to the power of 30, or 2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2) = 1,073,741,824 Bytes

32 GB = 2^5 * 2^30
64 GB = 2^6 * 2^30
128 GB = 2^7 * 2^30

The controller circuitry is simple

For hard drives:

Depends on the number of platters times the number of tracks (circles on the disk surface, imagine songs on a record) times the number of sectors (imagine spokes on a wheel) times the number of clusters times cluster size (usually a power of 2), all of which can be pretty arbitrary. Then it depends on what definition of a GigaByte the manufacture uses (1,000,000,000 vs 2^30 or wierder(there have been lawsuits over this)), space consumed by formatting(like how 3.5 inch floppies are 1.44MB formatted, or 2MB unformatted),etc.

The controller circuitry is a bit more complex.

[Roller]

With SSD prices falling over the next year or so, it'll be interesting to see how much effort manufacturers put into developing 1.8" single-platter HDDs with higher capacity.

I haven't seen anyone describe how difficult it is to exchange the HDD in a MBA, though. If it's not too bad, I'd consider the 80GB version now and upgrade to something more next year.

[Booga]

Does anyone else get the impression that the Air was really engineered around the SSD drives, but they just didn't get cheap enough fast enough, and the engineers backpedaled to a small HD relatively late in the design cycle?

[ehpedro]

Can someone please enlighten me... So this SSD RAM, what's the point in it? OK, so no moving parts, much quicker read/write speads blah blah blah... But seriously, are ppl gona pay the extra $1000 (or whatever it is), especially in a machine that is supposed to be for less intensive apps (ie Office/iLife/Safari/iWork) as opposed to top end photoshop/video editing apps - surely those are the kind of apps where you will notice the benefit of having flash-based RAM. Or am I completely wrong? And also, how can some ppl say optical drives are gona die out like the floppy did... BluRay/HDDVD is on its way in... Lack of optical drive is the sole reason I'm not buying me a MBA...

[Hattig]

I don't think I explained myself properly! What I meant was that all memory that 'moves' is a rounded number (10GB, 30GB, 500GB, 1TB etc.) whereas all solid state memory (be it SSD, Compact Flash, SD Card etc.) seems to be anything but rounded (32GB, 64GB, 128GB etc.).

I appreciate manufacturers can choose whatever amount of data they wish to attempt to cram onto a medium, but I was wondering if there is some historic reason why they are not all rounded amounts.

Does that make sense??

Learn your powers of two. The understanding will follow when you consider that memory chips have capacities that are a power of two (e.g., 2^30 = 1GB), and that memory (RAM, Flash) has a collection of these chips (usually a power of two number as well, e.g., 2^3 = 8 chips = 8GB).

Why is the memory a power of two? Because it's a 2D array of memory cells, each cell holding 1 bit (actually some flash can store 2 or 4 bits per cell, at a speed trade-off, and vice versa really-fast static RAM uses 6 cells per bit) computers like powers of two so there could be 2^12 rows of 2^21 cells = 2^33 bits = 2^30 bytes = 1GB.

[33scottie33]

:apple:Apple 17:36 - "He giveth thinness and taketh power". :D

[tadunne]

I'm wondering how reliable the 1.8' drives will be?

Back in the day I used to use my ipod (with a 1.8") hard drive to install and test new versions of mac os x.

That drive used to get mega hot. Are they even designed to be used like a normal drive?

[Hattig]

Can someone please enlighten me... So this SSD RAM, what's the point in it? OK, so no moving parts, much quicker read/write speads blah blah blah... But seriously, are ppl gona pay the extra $1000 (or whatever it is), especially in a machine that is supposed to be for less intensive apps (ie Office/iLife/Safari/iWork) as opposed to top end photoshop/video editing apps - surely those are the kind of apps where you will notice the benefit of having flash-based RAM. Or am I completely wrong? And also, how can some ppl say optical drives are gona die out like the floppy did... BluRay/HDDVD is on its way in... Lack of optical drive is the sole reason I'm not buying me a MBA...

SSD has very low latency, so it's very fast for booting up, for example - not that anyone does this often with their Macs given that sleep works so well. Also no moving parts is less room for failure although Flash memory does wear out (time to wear out depends on price of memory - cheap 4GB USB keys might only do 10k writes, expensive 64GB SSDs can do millions).

However I agree, for most people the 80GB hard drive will be sufficient. Of course 1.8" hard drives are quite slow, even compared to their 2.5" brethren, but I doubt it will be a big deal to most users.

BluRay is on the way in, and it's scalable in terms of layers, burning was a core design feature so there are burners, and the price is dropping quickly. It truly is the proper next generation optical media. At least with the MacBook Air there's a chance that Apple will create an external BluRay drive. However I suspect that it might require more power than even Apple's hacked up USB port can supply (why didn't they have a Firewire port! They have so much more power available...). However for file backup and transportation USB keys could be seen as just about the simplest and widely supported option in a year or two.

[krye]

Would it have killed Apple to make the MBA 3mm thicker?

[johnnyjibbs]

BluRay is on the way in, and it's scalable in terms of layers, burning was a core design feature so there are burners, and the price is dropping quickly. It truly is the proper next generation optical media. At least with the MacBook Air there's a chance that Apple will create an external BluRay drive. However I suspect that it might require more power than even Apple's hacked up USB port can supply (why didn't they have a Firewire port! They have so much more power available...). However for file backup and transportation USB keys could be seen as just about the simplest and widely supported option in a year or two.
A little off-topic, but the lack of optical drive does give flexibility for Apple to add a BluRay external drive later on. That said, I personally do not think BluRay (assuming it does kick HD-DVD out for good as is looking likely) will be anywhere near as big as DVD has become.

At the end of the day, it simply holds more space, while still having all the limitations of an optical disc. Although I do believe that even Apple knows that the optical drive still has long to go yet, I think the MacBook Air is Apple's ever-so-subtle way of saying the writing is on the wall for optical media, even if there is plenty of time yet left.

In fact, when, in his keynote this year, Steve pointed out how to get around the lack of an optical drive for watching movies (iTunes rentals), backup (Time Capsule), installing software (remotely), etc, he might as well have got the famous coffin that he put Mac OS 9 into all those years ago. Even though we are not ready for that stage yet, he was showing us how little we will actually need our discs in the future.

[gotohamish]

One would think that an army of extremely well-paid engineers would be able to find a way to get another 3mm out of that design.

The good news is that the price of flash memory is continuing to plummet, and will probably be in the reasonably-affordable range within a couple years. Just in time for the first major rev of the MBA, I reckon.

I'm sure it's not that easy, however I still wish Apple had strived to make the "best" travel notebook in the world rather than have the "thinnest" seemingly for the sake of holding that title.

[Di9it8]

Does anyone else get the impression that the Air was really engineered around the SSD drives, but they just didn't get cheap enough fast enough, and the engineers backpedaled to a small HD relatively late in the design cycle?

I think you are right there, the Sony Vaio VGN-UX1XN is one of its nearest competitors and is still running only 32GB. A friend of mine bought one, but it is too small to read!!
It is still only available with 32 GB, at about the same price as the 64gb MBA

[gotohamish]

Does anyone else get the impression that the Air was really engineered around the SSD drives, but they just didn't get cheap enough fast enough, and the engineers backpedaled to a small HD relatively late in the design cycle?

You're probably right, it could be a $3,000 laptop, which they're offering cheaper now.

[FireArse]

If my PB would die today I would buy a used 12" PB tomorrow. :mad:

I couldn't agree more. 802.11n is no match for FW400. There's an organisation somewhere that'd upgrade a 12PB G4 to the 1.67GHz speed. It's be very hot, but damn quick :)

F

[BornAgainMac]

I think a better design would have been to shrink the keyboard and display. If it only has 1 USB and forced to use the smallest version of the Core 2 and flattest drive possible, it makes sense to shrink it to a pound and just have a nice ultra portable.

It is like having a Mac Pro case to hold a Macbook motherboard and drive.

[goosnarrggh]

Learn your powers of two. The understanding will follow when you consider that memory chips have capacities that are a power of two (e.g., 2^30 = 1GB), and that memory (RAM, Flash) has a collection of these chips (usually a power of two number as well, e.g., 2^3 = 8 chips = 8GB).

Why is the memory a power of two? Because it's a 2D array of memory cells, each cell holding 1 bit (actually some flash can store 2 or 4 bits per cell, at a speed trade-off, and vice versa really-fast static RAM uses 6 cells per bit) computers like powers of two so there could be 2^12 rows of 2^21 cells = 2^33 bits = 2^30 bytes = 1GB.

To add to the confusion, though, most of those SSDs (like other Flash storage devices such as SD cards) are also advertised in terms of a base-10 gigabyte.

To be sure, it would be very unlikely to find a 64 GB SSD that contains exactly 64,000,000,000 bytes, just as it would be extremely unlikely to find a 120 GB hard drive containing exactly 120,000,000,000 bytes. It would undeniably be false advertising (no matter what your position on the "definition of giga" debate) for it to contain fewer bytes than that, but in most cases it almost certainly has more.

Note that Flash memory, unlike RAM, is physically arranged and written to in equal-sized blocks, very much akin to sectors on a traditional hard drive. Just as in hard drives, these blocks are often laid out in powers-of-two (or slightly-larger-than powers-of-two) sizes, which don't lend themselves very well to hard cut-offs at exact powers-of-10 drive sizes.

Of course, the actual drive capacity available to hold data after formatting will be diminished from the advertised physical capacity due to filesystem overhead. That is true regardless of whether the size is advertised in base-2 gigabytes or base-10 gigabytes.

There is also another place where some memory may go - the SSD, like hard drives, likely has some additional blocks set aside to act as stand-ins in the event of other blocks wearing out. These blocks are set aside by the drive controller circuitry, are invisible even on an unformatted drive, and are above and beyond any relocatable blocks that may be set aside as spares during drive formatting.

[cshale210]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)

How much of the aesthetics of the MBA will carry over? I feel like whenever Apple spends a lot of time on a certain technology ( ie touch) we see it become a part of more than just the first product to utilize the technology.

Now the touch is in the MBA and will be in the mbp, but will they utilize the thinness factor they used in the air with tapered edges and everything?

[InLikeALion]

Would it have killed Apple to make the MBA 3mm thicker?

Yes. It would not have been the world's thinnest laptop. That was one of their primary design goals.

[tveric]

Yah, really. If you need more HD space, buy a different laptop! Sheesh.

[gnasher729]

For hard drives:

Depends on the number of platters times the number of tracks (circles on the disk surface, imagine songs on a record) times the number of sectors (imagine spokes on a wheel) times the number of clusters times cluster size (usually a power of 2), all of which can be pretty arbitrary.

On modern hard drives, the tracks on the outside contain significantly more data than the ones on the inside. As a result, reading tracks that are the outside transfers more megabyte per second (the disk rotates at constant speed), and your disk gets slower as it gets full, because the inner, slower tracks must be used.

[ifonline]

God. Would you like some water for that PLANT? Astroturf somewhere else.:mad:

What in the world is that supposed to mean?

[TPALTony]

I think the MacBook Air is Apple's ever-so-subtle way of saying the writing is on the wall for optical media, even if there is plenty of time yet left.


Particularly when you consider that he was only saying that this LAPTOP doesn't need it. For installing software, he IS using an optical drive, just not one installed in the machine in question. He borrowed someone else's.

What he was saying is that you install software fairly infrequently, and for that you can borrow the drive on some other machine. For all the other stuff, which you do a lot more often, well Apple has a better way to do that...

be well

t

[MacMyDay]

If you need more space get a real laptop. :rolleyes:

I agree with you. And I've bought a Macbook Air 64GB SSD.

[numbsafari]

To keep up with this cutting-edge technology, Apple is going to continue charging premium prices for these drives. But would we want Apple anywhere but at the head of the pack? Not really.

I agree... my biggest concern with SSD was that Apple was going to wait for prices to come down. But now that I think about it, SSD is perfect for them. It is a premium, cutting edge technology. It's just ultra expensive.

For now... SSD is relegated to luxury devices or devices that need to operate in the most extreme conditions.

It's kinda like a Hummer or a Ferrari. It's designed for extreme conditions, but owning one for every day use is a total, almost unnecessary Luxury.

The nice thing about SSD is that it more environmentally friendly than a Hummer or Ferrari... so it plays even better for Apple :)

[numbsafari]

Bleh. I have 80GB in my three year old 12" PB G4. And it has a smaller footprint than the MBA. And I could upgrade the HD to 160GB if I wanted. Hmmm... maybe I should since Apple doesn't seem to be interested in releasing a laptop I can replace my 12" PB with...

I have $3800 waiting for a suitable PB replacement. If my PB would die today I would buy a used 12" PB tomorrow. :mad:

You're a luddite. Good for you.

My girlfriend still drives an '84 Westphalia Camper Van. She won't buy a new car, only new engines to put in her old one.

She happens to be a market segment nobody cares about any more. Kinda like you.

[numbsafari]

Since SSDs are still expensive, what would have been a good third option for the Macbook Air (in my opinion) would be for a 32GB SSD option which would make it $500-$600 cheaper -- therefore creating a third MBA for around $2400-$2500. (It still seems ridiculous that the high-end MBA is more expensive that the 17" MBP :eek:)

Since it is suppose to be a travel-light laptop, you are not going to want to carry all your files with you, but use it in conjunction with the 500GB Time Capsule when I home/office. So you can just make room and exchange files easily on your 32GB SSD wirelessly. This way, I think 32GB is plenty.

So you could have enjoyed the benefits of SSD performance for the whole of 2008, and then in the future, once SSDs become cheaper in 2009-2010 (and your warranty passes its 12 months) you can simply open it up and exchange your low 32GB SSD into a new higher-capacity SSD of your own choice and price-range.

Any thoughts?

Someone finally speaking sense!

I completely agree with this. I have a laptop that I use for work that has a 60GB HDD in it. I am currently using... 30GB of it... and of that... I could probably ditch about 15GB because it is just backups of software downloads and things like that I should probably move to my NAS instead of keeping my laptop.

Anyhow... If you factor out media (games, videos, music, etc.) and look just at your applications and such, how much space do you really need? I mean... in those 15GB of real stuff I have multiple Oracle AS installs, an Oracle DB install, IntelliJ, NetBeans, Office and a bunch of other stuff that typical user's won't need.

If I'm a mobile user, I'll carry a 160GB iPOD with all my media (video, music, etc.) and would LOVE to have a 16 or 32GB SSD drive in my laptop.

If they had made that an option I would probably be putting my bank account on lockdown to keep myself from rushing to by an MBA. Honest.

I think Apple should have realized they were going to get beat up on the HDD front by people who don't understand and just offered these choices. They're getting the flack anyway, so sticking to the more expensive options only isn't winning them anything.

That said... if the iPhone 4GB option is any indication, people seem to be willing to spend $$$ for their GBs... although in this case I think it's a little more extreme than just a $200 difference.

[numbsafari]

Can someone please enlighten me... So this SSD RAM, what's the point in it? OK, so no moving parts, much quicker read/write speads blah blah blah... But seriously, are ppl gona pay the extra $1000 (or whatever it is), especially in a machine that is supposed to be for less intensive apps (ie Office/iLife/Safari/iWork) as opposed to top end photoshop/video editing apps - surely those are the kind of apps where you will notice the benefit of having flash-based RAM. Or am I completely wrong? And also, how can some ppl say optical drives are gona die out like the floppy did... BluRay/HDDVD is on its way in... Lack of optical drive is the sole reason I'm not buying me a MBA...

Why buy BluRay/HDDVD? Because you can't just download it due to the size.

Disc-based media is for shipping bits in larger volumes than customers can download them.

Use BluRay/HDDVD in your living room with your big screen. Use BluRay/HDDVD to RIP a video to your computer and then downconvert to play on your iPod Touch (in theory).

Again, Apple is a little ahead of itself on the optical media front. But if you look at trends across the industry, digital delivery is going to the network and not to physical media.

iTunes store is booming while BestBuy is cutting floorspace for media. Netflix is beating the pants off of Blockbuster. Amazon kicked the pants off of Borders and BN.

Think about the long term trend there.

Will physical delivery disappear completely? Not likely. It'll just become a niche in the future and things like the MBA will become mass market devices instead of niche devices.

Go read some F.A. Hayek and understand the idea of Progress in capitalism... Rich people spend money on this crap to help fund its development so that it becomes cheaper to produce and then eventually gets adopted by the masses.

It's Econ 101....

[numbsafari]

The day after the MBA was announced my company got two new theatres for presentations all equipt with the newest and most advanced stuff. In these rooms everything is wireless, including the beamers. Before I was in these rooms I dislike the MBA but after I came into these rooms it suddenly made sense. Way to go Apple. Tad bit smaller Footprint (1cm on each side of the keyboard wasted space) would have been nice tho'

Exactly... I've got an iMac with wireless keyboard and mouse. There are now exactly 4 wires on my desk:

1 - the plug for the iMac
2 - the plug for my speakers
3 - the audio out to speaker R
4 - the line over to speaker L

I wish there were some quality wireless speakers. I have no problem expanding my investment in rechargeable AA batteries to rid myself of wires.

Oh... and I use a WiFi network with a wired NAS (where speed counts) and a wireless printer (where speed doesn't). But I keep that stuff on a separate table in the other room.

I can't wait to be freed from the tyranny of wires.

[numbsafari]

Would it have killed Apple to make the MBA 3mm thicker?

Yes

[numbsafari]

Apparently I need to get back to work :)

[NYCMacFan]

Since SSDs are still expensive, what would have been a good third option for the Macbook Air (in my opinion) would be for a 32GB SSD option which would make it $500-$600 cheaper -- therefore creating a third MBA for around $2400-$2500. (It still seems ridiculous that the high-end MBA is more expensive that the 17" MBP :eek:)

Since it is suppose to be a travel-light laptop, you are not going to want to carry all your files with you, but use it in conjunction with the 500GB Time Capsule when I home/office

Any thoughts?

Always nice to have more options. This is a desktop replacement for me though. I already have 2 external burner, don't use many USB devices and have wireless internet at home and office. So the machine doesn't involve sacrifice in my case.

[BornAgainMac]

I wish there were some quality wireless speakers. I have no problem expanding my investment in rechargeable AA batteries to rid myself of wires

I can't wait to be freed from the tyranny of wires.

Can't you just use the iMac speakers.

[numbsafari]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)

How much of the aesthetics of the MBA will carry over? I feel like whenever Apple spends a lot of time on a certain technology ( ie touch) we see it become a part of more than just the first product to utilize the technology.

Now the touch is in the MBA and will be in the mbp, but will they utilize the thinness factor they used in the air with tapered edges and everything?

Okay... one last thing...

I doubt it.. like everyone here has been saying... if you need more RAM, bigger drive, built-in optical, FW, USB, Ethernet, kitchen sink, hotter CPU... you are going to need a different laptop.

So...all those things that make the Pro the "Pro" are necessarily going to make it thicker. And people who want all those things are less concerned about the thickness. Sure, they wouldn't mind 3mm less, but what matters more is all those other numbers. So they'll buy the "Pro".

I'm sure Apple will want to make it thinner if they can (just to say they can if nothing else), but the focus will be more on getting all the components in instead of on the size.

Can't you just use the iMac speakers.

They're a little tinny for me.

You know what... I forgot... I have an iPhone docking station... so... add 1 more wire (total of 5).

It'd be nice if they had that cool wireless power thing going... so the iMac could power the iPhone and external speakers through induction (and wirelessly sync with the iPhone and send audio to the speakers).

Now that'd be HOT. Unless the inductive power would cause me to die or get horrible cancer or cause the screen to act funny (in decreasing order of seriousness).

[yzp]

Those who can afford the Solid State Drive (SSD) may be in in some luck, as Samsung did announce (in Jan 2008) (http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/index.jsp?epi_menuItemID=887566059a3aedb6efaaa9e27a808a0c&ndmViewId=news_view&ndmConfigId=1000017&newsId=20080106005126&newsLang=en) that a 128GB SSD drive coming in the "first half of 2008". This 1.8" drive multi-level cell flash drive will be produced in 1.8" 5mm high size, although the announced interface (SATA) is not the same as that used in the MacBook Air (PATA). Pricing has not yet been announced on the 128GB SSD drive, but will certainly carry a significant premium.

Article Link (http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/30/maximum-macbook-air-drive-80gb-for-now/)[/QUOTE]

would be crazy as **** if SDD get larger than HDD!!!

[InLikeALion]

iTunes store is booming while BestBuy is cutting floorspace for media. Netflix is beating the pants off of Blockbuster. Amazon kicked the pants off of Borders and BN.


While I'm not disagreeing that network/downloads are eventually going to be the conduit for our media, I think the part about Amazon doesn't support your point. In fact, it shows why bluray will be valid for a while. Amazon does beat B&N and Borders, but because it is an online retailer with low overhead and mass ordering.

They still ship physical books, and that is where their money is being made right now - not e-books. Amazon would love e-books to take off so they wouldn't have to spend money on shipping or for physical copies of material. But people still want physical books, and similarly bluray is a physical distribution method people currently still want/need.

My wife and I rented a movie from iTunes for the first time monday night. It was on her PowerBook, so it was just the SD version, not the :apple:TV HiDef version. It still took about 45 min's to download. It also lacked special features and was jumpy in some places. I don't think US broadband is near the maturity for 50+ GB files to become mainstream downloads.

[numbsafari]

While I'm not disagreeing that network/downloads are eventually going to be the conduit for our media, I think the part about Amazon doesn't support your point. In fact, it shows why bluray will be valid for a while. Amazon does beat B&N and Borders, but because it is an online retailer with low overhead and mass ordering.

They still ship physical books, and that is where their money is being made right now - not e-books. Amazon would love e-books to take off so they wouldn't have to spend money on shipping or for physical copies of material. But people still want physical books, and similarly bluray is a physical distribution method people currently still want/need.


I agree with you about Amazon... I guess Amazon's entry into the eBook space with the Kindle is more of an "Amazon vs. Amazon" (not a wrestling match) story than Amazon vs. BN and Borders.

They clearly see digital distribution as the future. Physical books will always be important, and there's a lot of value in the "bookstore culture" and the "cafe culture" that will keep places like BN and Borders alive (perhaps if only so people can download media over their highspeed pipe... why they haven't gone into this more aggressively, I'll never know). I mean... we still have movie theaters even though everyone has HD at home now, right?

[twoodcc]

yeah, sounds like 80 GB will be the highest for a while. but it seems 80 should be enough for what people will be doing with these things

[cameronjpu]

I wonder how many people are actually going to order the SSDs at this point, seeing as they are so expensive.

100% of the people I've helped (that's 1).

[Breckenridge]

Thin is nice, when practical. 80G is really small, I have over 80Gs of photos on my current macbook pro. And by the way, I love how thin my macbook pro is :)

[menschect]

Regarding SSDs and people saying the price points are too high for an major adoption, especially the 64GB and 128GB. The 128GB SSD being introduced by Samsung in the first half of this year will be based on MLC which will cut the price in half. Couple this with the transition to 43nm technology and you get a price decline of well over 50%.

The problem with this is that when Samsung says "first half of 2008" it means they will begin sampling then and then they can ship in the second half of 2008. Additionally SSDs based on MLC have very slow write times compared to hard drives and SLC SSDs. So even if Samsung begins sampling, OEMs will be hesitant to promote or even use them due to poor performance in standardized benchmarks.

What needs to happen is the controller technology needs to be perfected in order to get decent speeds on these SSDs and in this area there are very few specialists. Samsung is not one of them. So if Samsungs MLC SSDs are not up to par (which is likely) dont expect Apple to offer them as an option and you probably wouldnt want them anyway. Better performance with SLC at the moment although the prices at the moment are prohibative.

[numbsafari]

Thin is nice, when practical. 80G is really small, I have over 80Gs of photos on my current macbook pro. And by the way, I love how thin my macbook pro is :)

Do you need all 80Gs on your laptop at all times? Can you post them on-line and also keep the ones you don't need at all times to something like TimeCapsule or a USB disk off of an AEBS?

Why do you need all your media on one disk at all times? I mean... isn't that kinda risky if that drive fails?

Also... couldn't you put most of those photos onto an iPod instead of your main HDD?


--- EDIT ---
If anything.... this is where Apple is dropping the ball... Failing to help their customers understand the range of storage options they have at their disposal and providing the tools to make managing that storage easy so that they don't have to think about it as storage with multiple tiers and access points.

[Island Dog]

Do you need all 80Gs on your laptop at all times? Can you post them on-line and also keep the ones you don't need at all times to something like TimeCapsule or a USB disk off of an AEBS?

Also... couldn't you put most of those photos onto an iPod instead of your main HDD?
.

Yes, actually I do need 80gigs on my laptop possibly. Applications, photos, music, etc. If I'm paying thousands of dollars for this thing then I shouldn't have to worry about transferring stuff back and forth just to make space.

[compuguy1088]

On modern hard drives, the tracks on the outside contain significantly more data than the ones on the inside. As a result, reading tracks that are the outside transfers more megabyte per second (the disk rotates at constant speed), and your disk gets slower as it gets full, because the inner, slower tracks must be used.

That reminds me of the similar speed/position setup that cd's and dvd's have.

[numbsafari]

Yes, actually I do need 80gigs on my laptop possibly. Applications, photos, music, etc. If I'm paying thousands of dollars for this thing then I shouldn't have to worry about transferring stuff back and forth just to make space.

I agree with you. Apple should be providing tools make this not such a concern.

However, as your media library grows... I think a few thousand dollars isn't going to be sufficient to prevent you from having to worry about this issue.

If you have 80gigs of just photos... do you have music and movies on there as well? How much space are they taking?

I have a music library that is larger than the largest iPod available. I have a video library that is even larger than that (just in terms of GB). Plus I likes me some pod casts and audio books. Oh... and I am currently playing Myst IV... That cannot all possibly fit on a single laptop disk.

It does, however, all currently fit on my 1.5TB NAS. But the prospect of ripping all my DVDs onto the NAS means that I am going to need more than that 1.5 TB at some point... so even there I'll be having to deal with multiple NAS...

I think that's when I'm going to start looking at multiple storage arrays and possibly using ZFS to manage it all.

Our digital libraries are set to explode. Tiered storage is going to be a fact of life unless you want to rent everything (no thanks!).

[johnnyjibbs]

Does anyone else get the impression that the Air was really engineered around the SSD drives, but they just didn't get cheap enough fast enough, and the engineers backpedaled to a small HD relatively late in the design cycle?
Exactlty what I have been saying! I absolutely think so. Unfortunately, it's still too expensive, so they had to add the 'standard' HD 80GB as a stop-gap.

I would expect to see the HD version disappear in the next year or so.

[johnnyjibbs]

Do you need all 80Gs on your laptop at all times? Can you post them on-line and also keep the ones you don't need at all times to something like TimeCapsule or a USB disk off of an AEBS?

Why do you need all your media on one disk at all times? I mean... isn't that kinda risky if that drive fails?

Also... couldn't you put most of those photos onto an iPod instead of your main HDD?


--- EDIT ---
If anything.... this is where Apple is dropping the ball... Failing to help their customers understand the range of storage options they have at their disposal and providing the tools to make managing that storage easy so that they don't have to think about it as storage with multiple tiers and access points.

Actually, my iTunes and iPhoto libraries top 40GB combined and they are small compared to some people. The fact is that you can't split an iTunes/iPhoto library out of the box, so it has to be all or nothing. And music and photos are the sort of thing that people want to take with them. We're not talking about an iPod Shuffle here...

Bear in mind that when you open that shiny MacBook Air box with its 80GB HD in it, remember that the 80GB "actual formatted less" is actually 74.5 GB, then there's OS X and the rest so you're looking at only 60-65GB free to begin with. Then remember you need to keep at least 5GB free for scratch-pad disk swapping, unless you're a fan of the beach ball...

[Aside: The one good thing to come out of this is hopefully Apple will realise that it has to be more space-consious. At the moment, most of its apps eat through disk space like nobody's business. My biggest pet hate is that every time you rotate a photo in iPhoto (or in any other way modify it), the unaltered original is copied to a folder called 'original'. Sometimes it would be nice to delete the originals but you can't because the file structure makes it very difficult to tell which photos you've altered and which ones you haven't.]

[numbsafari]

Actually, my iTunes and iPhoto libraries top 40GB combined and they are small compared to some people. The fact is that you can't split an iTunes/iPhoto library out of the box, so it has to be all or nothing. And music and photos are the sort of thing that people want to take with them. We're not talking about an iPod Shuffle here...


I agree with you about the limitations of iTunes/iPhoto. That's exactly what I'm talking about when I say that Apple is dropping the ball in terms of delivering a product that makes this sort of thing easy.

The same goes for iWeb and the web sites that it produces. Zero collaboration capabilities unless you start to hack at it.

Apple needs to help people understand that they don't need to take all their photos with them. I mean... did you used to carry around all your photo albums?? It doesn't make sense... unless you are using tools like iTunes and iPhoto that make it impossible to do anything else.

[ncbill]

I'm still very skeptical that SSD prices will drop as fast as everyone seem to think.

SSD's biggest advantage remains shock resistance, not speed or power consumption.

That makes it ideal for military-style applications, not exactly a price-sensitive market.

Right now, a 2.5" 128GB SSD costs well over $3,000 retail.

Cramming that 128GB into a smaller form factor (1.8", 5mm high) isn't going to make it any cheaper.

Meanwhile, I expect we'll be able to buy 500GB 2.5" SATA drives for $150 by the end of the year.

[johnnyjibbs]

I'm still very skeptical that SSD prices will drop as fast as everyone seem to think.

SSD's biggest advantage remains shock resistance, not speed or power consumption.

That makes it ideal for military-style applications, not exactly a price-sensitive market.

Right now, a 2.5" 128GB SSD costs well over $3,000 retail.

Cramming that 128GB into a smaller form factor (1.8", 5mm high) isn't going to make it any cheaper.

Meanwhile, I expect we'll be able to buy 500GB 2.5" SATA drives for $150 by the end of the year.
We're expecting it because 3-4 years ago, a 256MB card would cost £40 ($80). Now I'm not sure how much memory £40 would get you now but I know that it's a hell of a lot more - 4-8 GB probably. Again 3-4 years ago, a 4GB card (if it existed) would have cost several hundreds of pounds.

So the price does drop considerably with time.

[tuneman07]

Can someone please explain to me why Apple offers so few options with their computers in general? I want a new laptop, I want to try Mac, but they make it sooooo hard. There are just a million more options from PC manufacturers, why is Apple unable to offer these options? I'm buying a Mac regardless (thats how fed up I am with this Mother#$%#$##%##$##$#$#$#$ Windows BS). Just curious why Apple can't offer more customizable features. I mean how hard would it be to come up with a 15 inch laptop under 1500? Everyone else does it- they start at a grand usually.

[ncbill]

There's a big difference between how you use a flash card vs. a SSD.

8GB flash cards may be cheap, but slow (unless you pay $$$ for the turbo model) - you're not usually booting off a SD card, so most people buy by price, not speed.

And the capacity of cheap flash (8GB, 16GB) is still nowhere near 128GB SSD territory - the demand doesn't exist for cheap SSD as it does for cheap flash cards for your digital camera.

As another posted noted, the only quick way to lower prices in a SSD is to go with the _much_ slower MLC process.

We're expecting it because 3-4 years ago, a 256MB card would cost £40 ($80). Now I'm not sure how much memory £40 would get you now but I know that it's a hell of a lot more - 4-8 GB probably. Again 3-4 years ago, a 4GB card (if it existed) would have cost several hundreds of pounds.

So the price does drop considerably with time.

[tirerim]

Can someone please explain to me why Apple offers so few options with their computers in general? I want a new laptop, I want to try Mac, but they make it sooooo hard. There are just a million more options from PC manufacturers, why is Apple unable to offer these options? I'm buying a Mac regardless (thats how fed up I am with this Mother#$%#$##%##$##$#$#$#$ Windows BS). Just curious why Apple can't offer more customizable features. I mean how hard would it be to come up with a 15 inch laptop under 1500? Everyone else does it- they start at a grand usually.

Apple used to offer more options. At some point (in the late 90s), they decided that the number of choices was too confusing, and they would have better sales with a smaller number of easily differentiated products, and better marketing to convince you that one of them was the one you wanted.

Of course, the more cynical view is that this lets them convince you to buy something more expensive than you might otherwise need in order to get certain features, like some cars require you to buy the more expensive trim package just to get anti-lock brakes.

Regardless, part of it is also the premium on Apple hardware -- even for a system fairly comparable to one from another manufacturer, you're going to pay more, which is going to pay for the design, engineering, and marketing.

If you're really on a budget, your best bet is to buy a decent PC laptop from a company that won't force you to buy Windows with it, and put Linux on it (probably Ubuntu). But Apple has the advantage that it Just Works right out of the box on a lot of levels, and most people don't want to deal with futzing with their operating system just to get sound working, for example. (Ubuntu is actually getting pretty good in this respect, but it's not all the way there yet. Apple has a huge advantage here, in only having to test a limited number of known configurations.)

[tuneman07]

Apple used to offer more options. At some point (in the late 90s), they decided that the number of choices was too confusing, and they would have better sales with a smaller number of easily differentiated products, and better marketing to convince you that one of them was the one you wanted.

Of course, the more cynical view is that this lets them convince you to buy something more expensive than you might otherwise need in order to get certain features, like some cars require you to buy the more expensive trim package just to get anti-lock brakes.

Regardless, part of it is also the premium on Apple hardware -- even for a system fairly comparable to one from another manufacturer, you're going to pay more, which is going to pay for the design, engineering, and marketing.

If you're really on a budget, your best bet is to buy a decent PC laptop from a company that won't force you to buy Windows with it, and put Linux on it (probably Ubuntu). But Apple has the advantage that it Just Works right out of the box on a lot of levels, and most people don't want to deal with futzing with their operating system just to get sound working, for example. (Ubuntu is actually getting pretty good in this respect, but it's not all the way there yet. Apple has a huge advantage here, in only having to test a limited number of known configurations.)

This makes sense, but I would think Apple would be focusing on increasing their overall market share. More people using their products means more money. I mean isn't that what every company is trying to do?

[tirerim]

There's a big difference between how you use a flash card vs. a SSD.

8GB flash cards may be cheap, but slow (unless you pay $$$ for the turbo model) - you're not usually booting off a SD card, so most people buy by price, not speed.

And the capacity of cheap flash (8GB, 16GB) is still nowhere near 128GB SSD territory - the demand doesn't exist for cheap SSD as it does for cheap flash cards for your digital camera.

As another posted noted, the only quick way to lower prices in a SSD is to go with the _much_ slower MLC process.

In a digital camera, speed can be pretty important (at least if you're shooting RAW with a big sensor). And you can get a high speed (Secure Digital Extreme III, 20+ MB/s) 8 GB SDHC card for less than $80 retail these days, which isn't bad at all. There's a bit more miniaturization that goes into fitting 64 or 128 GB into a package the size of a 1.8" HDD, but not a huge amount, so I really do think we'll see dramatically cheaper SSDs of reasonable size in a couple of years, or at least reasonable size if you don't have a huge amount of media. And demand will rise as they get cheap enough that more people can afford them -- I suspect that a lot of people would pay a $200 premium for an SSD over a comparably sized HDD, for the improved hardiness, speed, and battery life (the last two of which are likely to improve further, which I think is less true of HDDs). For now, though, you're right, and it will be a little while before they become really viable for most folks.

[tirerim]

This makes sense, but I would think Apple would be focusing on increasing their overall market share. More people using their products means more money. I mean isn't that what every company is trying to do?

Almost -- more people buying their products means more money, which is not quite the same thing. For one thing, if they can convince existing Apple users to buy Apple products more often, that's at least as good as getting people to switch.

The main thing, though, is that regardless of whether they're selling to switchers or to established users, they've decided that the best way to do that is to focus their energies on a smaller number of products. Now, I can't begin to guess at the actual analyses that went into this decision, but some of the advantages are obvious: they get to focus their engineering on making the few products better than they could if their efforts were spread out, and it probably makes marketing much easier as well.

[eddietr]

Hmm,

Can anyone confirm if the 64GB SSD is PATA?

Because if that's the case, then I might not be able to upgrade to 128GB in 2009, which was my plan. I think by then most SSDs will be SATA. Which would mean an Air Rev. B. with SATA.

That might be make me cancel my order.

[ViperrepiV]

[Aside: The one good thing to come out of this is hopefully Apple will realise that it has to be more space-consious. At the moment, most of its apps eat through disk space like nobody's business. My biggest pet hate is that every time you rotate a photo in iPhoto (or in any other way modify it), the unaltered original is copied to a folder called 'original'. Sometimes it would be nice to delete the originals but you can't because the file structure makes it very difficult to tell which photos you've altered and which ones you haven't.]

OMG yes! this is the STUPIDEST thing ever! I wonder if disabling "manage my photos for me" disables this feature....

this is why i will not be using iphoto in my new mac.

[AidenShaw]

Hmm,

Can anyone confirm if the 64GB SSD is PATA?

Because if that's the case, then I might not be able to upgrade to 128GB in 2009, which was my plan. I think by then most SSDs will be SATA. Which would mean an Air Rev. B. with SATA.

That might be make me cancel my order.

The standard drive is PATA

http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/swissfrstore.woa/91374047/wa/PSLID?nnmm=browse&mco=3622F273&node=home/shop_mac/family/macbook_air&tg_tabcontroller=tg_tabcontroller_3&wosid=6p5XK9WGFL2c3fRrJhBhsDJklRC
Disque dur PATA de 80 Go à 4 200 tr/min1

so if anyone confirms that it's a simple swap then the SSD would PATA as well.

Or if someone with the SSD could look up the model number...

[dual64bit]

Hmm,

Can anyone confirm if the 64GB SSD is PATA?

Because if that's the case, then I might not be able to upgrade to 128GB in 2009, which was my plan. I think by then most SSDs will be SATA. Which would mean an Air Rev. B. with SATA.

That might be make me cancel my order.

According to AppleCare documentation, the 80Gb is PATA, the SSD is unmentioned, however the logic board only has 1 connector for the HDD, the logic boards are the same. Therefore the SSD must be a PATA like the 80Gb plater.

[dual64bit]

Also of note, the 1.8" 32GB Samsung PATA sells for just under $500 retail.

[Catonow]

Hmm,

Can anyone confirm if the 64GB SSD is PATA?

Because if that's the case, then I might not be able to upgrade to 128GB in 2009, which was my plan. I think by then most SSDs will be SATA. Which would mean an Air Rev. B. with SATA.

That might be make me cancel my order.

The whole swapability (is there such a word?) issue is important to a lot of us potential MBA buyers, I think.

Will it be possible to swap out the 80GB HDD for an SSD in the future? Can anybody confirm this?

And if the new SSDs are all SATA, does that mean it cannot be swapped with the MBA's HDD (because of the PATA vs. SATA interface issue)?

[eddietr]

The whole swapability (is there such a word?) issue is important to a lot of us potential MBA buyers, I think.

Will it be possible to swap out the 80GB HDD for an SSD in the future? Can anybody confirm this?

And if the new SSDs are all SATA, does that mean it cannot be swapped with the MBA's HDD (because of the PATA vs. SATA interface issue)?

Yep, this changes my plans a bit. I think it is most likely that the SSD is PATA.

So my plan was to live with the 64GB drive until the 128GB got down to $1000-$1200. Then I was going to upgrade the drive, I figured that was about a year out.

But if the current MBA is PATA, then I would have to sell it and by a new one when the 128GB drive is at that price. Assuming the 128 drive is SATA.

I can live with the 64GB for a while. But I was hoping not to have to live with that for more than a year.

Ah, decision, decisions...

[C-Dubs]

Hopefully, the 12" MacBook Pro will be out by 2009. :p

http://mbp12.com/

Very well designed hopeful site, my friend! And I like what I see... although the latch button won't make it into the design. Not sure if 4.2 pounds will hit it, maybe close to 5 lbs, but the form factor and speed would certainly make it a hit (if Ive's decides to design it)

[C-Dubs]

The whole swapability (is there such a word?) issue is important to a lot of us potential MBA buyers, I think.

Will it be possible to swap out the 80GB HDD for an SSD in the future? Can anybody confirm this?

And if the new SSDs are all SATA, does that mean it cannot be swapped with the MBA's HDD (because of the PATA vs. SATA interface issue)?


True. But with anything in portable electronics, I look at it as it is NOW, not what it can be in the future, since upgrading isnt always possible (formats, connectors, operating systems...)

If you are buying in order to upgrade it later, then maybe you shouldnt buy it- because like everything else in life, nothing's for sure.

[Catonow]

True. But with anything in portable electronics, I look at it as it is NOW, not what it can be in the future, since upgrading isnt always possible (formats, connectors, operating systems...)

If you are buying in order to upgrade it later, then maybe you shouldnt buy it- because like everything else in life, nothing's for sure.

Upgradability is a perfectly valid criterion in deciding whether to purchase a given computer. One of the reasons people buy Mac Pros is because they are relatively easy to upgrade.

I'm not saying it is my sole criterion. But it's information to factor into the decision-making process.

I realize that a definitive answer may not be available right now. But if there is an answer, or even just somebody's educated guess, I'd appreciate a substantive response. Thanks.

[AidenShaw]

The whole swapability (is there such a word?) issue is important to a lot of us potential MBA buyers, I think.

Will it be possible to swap out the 80GB HDD for an SSD in the future? Can anybody confirm this?

And if the new SSDs are all SATA, does that mean it cannot be swapped with the MBA's HDD (because of the PATA vs. SATA interface issue)?

I assume that your issue is availability of PATA drives, not a preference for SATA.

Samsung is currently making the range of drives in both SATA and PATA. Of course, no guarantees that the bigger ones will be both interfaces.

Note that the current SATA uses an IDE-SATA I bridge chip, and a native SATA II is coming.

The Samsung brochure is http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/flash/downloads/ssd_datasheet_200710.pdf

[PolarIced]

Bleh. I have 80GB in my three year old 12" PB G4. And it has a smaller footprint than the MBA. And I could upgrade the HD to 160GB if I wanted. Hmmm... maybe I should since Apple doesn't seem to be interested in releasing a laptop I can replace my 12" PB with...

I have $3800 waiting for a suitable PB replacement. If my PB would die today I would buy a used 12" PB tomorrow. :mad:

I've got the 160GB drive in my 12" PB G4. Maxed out the RAM, too. It's still a very usable machine. Now I don't have Leopard (yet), and don't do things like video editing on it, but as a tool for a consultant, web developer, and network technician it is very hard to beat. AND it has the optical drive and a removable battery. AND ethernet, and firewire - plus a modem for Pete's sake! Fairly light and about an inch thick. It still gets comments about everywhere I show up with it, including the latest, "Is that the new Mac laptop?"

So what happened? :confused: I think the Air is pretty cool, but it seems we're just regaining something that was lost long ago. I agree completely that if it died tomorrow (knock on wood) I'd just be scouring eBay for a similar one (and save about $1.3K in the process).

[ageha]

I wonder how many people are actually going to order the SSDs at this point, seeing as they are so expensive.

Apple could offer a 2GB SSD drive: http://geizhals.at/deutschland/a240155.html
:D