This is to the guy who's wondering why people are freaking about about the SATA 1.5 cap:
Before I wanted a 2.4 uMB, since the refresh, the 2.26 uMBP is slightly slower, and 3 or 400 dollars cheaper.
With my original SSD Budget of 350, I can now mess with the idea of buying a much larger 256GB SSD, and even the further thought of selling it down the road for a fair chunk of change.
Now if my 250 Read, 200 +/- Write SSD is now slowed down because of a stupid SATA cap, this means that the $800 that I would've spent on the SSD is now pretty much wasted, because I could've bought a slow (now they are junk in comparison to today's speeds) Samsung or Toshiba SSD that doesn't even saturate the SATA 1.5 Bus.
If I'm spending all this money on a laptop, I want to get the most for the money, I want to future prrof it for as long as I feel that I can still get my use out of it.
(Don't give me any of that 'in 2 days it will be obselete crap", When Moble Quad gets going, it will be awhile before they have good low TDP processors, and even then for my uses, I will not need to upgrade for a long time, C2D is more than enough, better if it was 3+GHz with a super low TDP.)
Processor wise, I couldn't ask for more in the P8600 @2.4, or whatever P series is used in the 2.26 (8400 maby) I just went from a 2.1 AMD POS to a 2.4 whatever is in the blackbook, and honestly the speed dosen't matter since the bottle neck is always the HDD.
I see the uMBP with a fast SSD being good for atleasr 36-48 months. Then something cool, like a huge awesome battery, or a 2.8GHz SLXXX series C2D chip will be out, SSDs will be saturating the SATA 3 bus, and DDR3 will have super low latency and be running at 2GHz. (whatever). Then I will upgrade.
Right now the pinnacle of easily available technology in a super-awesome package is the MBPs, I want a SSD because they seem awesome, not many people have one, and I spend all my time on a computer, just like a lawyer spends all his time at his desk, or wearing suits. Or an accountant sitting in her chair, with a calculator, or Excel. I want the best my money can buy, and I want it to remain the best for a little while at least. Not having SATA 3, means that in 6 months, when the round of 512GB SSDs debut, when write speeds are hovering in excess of 250MBps, I can't get the ost out of the 800 dollars that I will spend on one, because someone decided to limit my Mac to SATA 1.5 instead of the regular, mainstream faster SATA 3.
This means I'll have to pick up a 2.4 uMB, add my own SD reader to the optibay, and pray that I get a semi decent screen.
And to the Panhandle that keeps touting the power advantages of SATA 1.5 over SATA 3, What exactly are those numbers?
The P8600 sucks down 25w TDP of juice, let's just assume that it's at 25W all the time for simplicity. The chipset will take XX more, as will everything else in the system.
Now I don't doubt that there may be power savings using 1.5 over 3. But how significant are those savings? What does it translate to in the real world.
It surely can't be much. The netbooks use 1.5 because half of them are using the crappy Intel chipsets, GMA950 IIRC. That's understandable they need it to be cheap, and modern GM45 ect chipsets cost extra cash, or simply wern't around during the design phase (EEE PC 1000H for instance).
If it's anything under 2% of the total chipset's power usage, then it's not worth it. That'd be like 1-2watts without counting the HDD or anything else )wifi, screen, ect.)
Which would then translate into a 1 or 2% power savings.
No where near a 10% as someone gave a quick example of. (to which 30 people then justified the changes and accepted the limitation, assuming that the new bigger battery had nothing to do with the difference in runtime compared with the last Macbook Iteration.)
Something as small as SATA isn't going to contribute much to the overall power usage. This is a computer, not a wrist watch. If you are going for a super super power efficient computer, that will run off watch batteries, then sure, slow the heck out of it. Put in a super slow slow processor, and use flash memory, do whatever. But we don't exactly have those constraints.
Manufacturers lie about the battery life. They do the No OS, HDD unplugged, Screen off, everything off, computer is inside of a freezer-battery test. Yeah sure, that might get 7 hours, but I'm realistically going to expect 6 since Apple usually isn't that far off from their claims.
and cry my head off....
