13" and 15" MacBook Pros Have a Slower SATA Interface

[Unprocessed1]

I don't know you guys but i feel there's gonna be a firmware update soon.

I'm crossing my fingers, but Apple usually doesn't admit these lapses until months or years later.

 

[Tompkinson]

What are the chances an Apple Store would accept a return and either not charge you a restocking fee or reduce it due to being upset that the SATA was downgraded and it was impossible to discover it unless you looked in the system profiler, and was information not on Apple's website?

hello again,
I just checked with Apple here in Germany, they said they had no info on this matter yet. But anything bought here can be returned and fully refunded. I hope it's the same for you where every you are writing from! - good luck!

Take Care,

 

[bytethese]

Why wouldn't it work just fine? It doesn't break max SATA I speeds. Only SSD speeds are affected by the downgrade....

I didn't think it wouldn't work fine.

Personally I'm out of the loop on theoretical maximum throughputs of a 7200rpm drive but I was hoping that 1.5Gb/s wouldn't be a bottleneck.

 

[ChrisA]

sorry for the noob question, but is it cheaper for apple to go back to 1,5 ? i guess....

Likely they did it to conserve battery power. Almost certainly that's the reason.

This is a case where engineers will think it's reasonable, not effect on disk performance but fanboys and spec readers will be upset.

BTW this is the interface that connects the CPU to the disk drives internal cache. It does not mean the disk itself is slower

 

[Dreamail]

Is it true that you get SATAII if you purchase with Apples SSD?

No apparently not.


There were a few users who reported that their 13" MBPs, which were ordered with SSD, also reported slower SATA I speeds.
Which kind of sucks.

 

[Unprocessed1]

hello again,
I just checked with Apple here in Germany, they said they had no info on this matter yet. But anything bought here can be returned and fully refunded. I hope it's the same for you where every you are writing from! - good luck!

Take Care,

The thing is I LOVE the MBP. The screen and battery life are amazing, but I intend to put in a nice SSD soon, so if Apple doesn't intend to fix it, I should just return/sell it now, and buy a SATA II MBP.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Yup, gizmodo is reporting on it too...

http://gizmodo.com/5291042/did-apple-downgrade-the-hard-drive-controller-in-the-new-macbook-pros

One the biggest ones yet.

Fantastic. Hopefully Engadget and the other major electronics blogs will cover this too enough to force Apple to respond either w/ a fix or explanation.

 

[Unprocessed1]

Likely they did it to conserve battery power. Almost certainly that's the reason.

This is a case where engineers will think it's reasonable, not effect on disk performance but fanboys and spec readers will be upset.

BTW this is the interface that connects the CPU to the disk drives internal cache. It does not mean the disk itself is slower

The consensus is that it doesn't affect battery life. Also the MBp 17" has SATA II and as as long battery life as the smaller MBP line. People are saying battery life would extend by 5-10 minutes, if at all.

 

[Carl Abudephane]

If one orders a new MacBook Pro from the UK and you want to have an SSD put in, with the 13 & 15" there is a two week estimate put on the shipping time, as opposed to the usual 24hr if one orders the 17".

So what is the reason for the delay with the 13&15? There is obviously something slowing Apple up when it comes to those two models, but not the 17".
Surely this is linked to this SATA issue. So are we just going to have to wait until somebody takes delivery of their SSD-equipped 13"/15" to get any further with this?

Basically, if the SSD'd 13&15 were also going to also have the 1.5, wouldn't they have simply the same delivery estimate as the 17"? And if not - if they are delaying those being sent out until they fix 'something', does that mean the fix, whatever it may be, will be firmware(so that all the current owners will be okay)or not, in which case the current owners are buggered?

 

[GodWhomIsMike]

Sigh... It is not so much that I can't complain as 3 Gb/s doesn't seem really necessary at the moment but being future proof is something and I am sure the last word on the speed of SSDs had not been spoken yet. I easily could imagine that in a year or two SSDs speeds might starting to hitting the roof of even SATA II.

There are a handful of SSD drives that already hit the roof of SATA II, and a few upcoming SSD drives in the pipeline, which will hit speeds of 5.0Gbps.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Likely they did it to conserve battery power. Almost certainly that's the reason.

This is a case where engineers will think it's reasonable, not effect on disk performance but fanboys and spec readers will be upset.

BTW this is the interface that connects the CPU to the disk drives internal cache. It does not mean the disk itself is slower

If that turns out to be the case then so much for Apple new "revolutionary" battery. If you toss out all the luggage, passengers, and seats from an airplane it will get better fuel economy too. The USAF has been doing that since the 50's starting with the C-133 cargo plane. So hardly a "revolutionary" concept.

And to say no effect on disk performance isn't totally correct. HDDs maybe, but not the current high-end SSDs (take a look at the benchmarks) and certainly not the lower cost SSDs of next year. (2010 is on target to be the year of the SSD and the beginning of the end of the 2.5" HDD). So from a value perspective SATA II missing is a big deal, especially if you have a high end 15".

 

[Unprocessed1]

If one orders a new MacBook Pro from the UK and you want to have an SSD put in, with the 13 & 15" there is a two week estimate put on the shipping time, as opposed to the usual 24hr if one orders the 17".

So what is the reason for the delay with the 13&15? There is obviously something slowing Apple up when it comes to those two models, but not the 17".
Surely this is linked to this SATA issue. So are we just going to have to wait until somebody takes delivery of their SSD-equipped 13"/15" to get any further with this?

Basically, if the SSD'd 13&15 were also going to also have the 1.5, wouldn't they have simply the same delivery estimate as the 17"? And if not - if they are delaying those being sent out until they fix 'something', does that mean the fix, whatever it may be, will be firmware(so that all the current owners will be okay)or not, in which case the current owners are buggered?

In the states, shipping time for the SSD 13" and 15" is now only 1-3 days. They must have had a shortage in SSD's or something to delay it. It shouldn't be related to SATA I/II

 

[Tompkinson]

Maybe when these college students/teenagers spend 2 summers saving up for a top of the line notebook, only to see that it isn't the powerhouse as originally advertised, I think they should a little upset.

well, sorry for repeating myself, but this is the reason i just do not understand why people - especially people who have spent much effort to accumulate the money - buy the d*mn thing right after it's announced. Do you? does not experience tell us to "wait and see"? Unless I got free tickets I would not go to the first night of a theatre show until i read reviews, heard some feedback. do these people have money to burn? in a recession? Honestly, it is well known that the computer industry treats the consumer like a beta tester. if the car industry did the same there'd be millions more dead on the roads around the world. remember when apple released a new version of OSX - panther I think it was - and early adopters lost the data on their external harddrives in the first hours after release? Who the hell installs a new OS hours after release????? and the whines and gets upset. Most so-called ProUSers wait till there have been some updates before installing the new OS versions. I wait at least 6 months before updating and after reading every tech forum i can find.

And stop making assumptions, it's not fair to evaluate people's life experiences based on a message board.

ok, accepted.

BTW: the real "fans" of Apple are the ones who are defending the SATA downgrade. Blind fanboys wouldn't be fazed by downgrades.

I guess you are having a laugh, don't quite understand, but either way. by fans i did not mean the ever present slander Fanboy (not even sure what that is) I meant the mind set of one who follows a football team, identifiying with them and defending them blindly. Which is stupid behaviour, but costs you a few drinks in the pub when you watch the game. What i fail to understand is when this mindset is applied to a manufacturer of hard and sofware, and which costs you literally thousands of dollars, euros, pounds whatever. We must be careful before we buy. didn't anybody tell the upset people on this forum? good luck to anybody who bought and is worried by the sata situation!

 

[iMacmatician]

Ok, look:

1. You see a 2.66 Ghz MBP and it sots XYZ
2. Apple kenote; happily announce "We've cut the price"
3. You go to Apple Store and see 2.66 Ghz MBP for $300 or whatever less.

4. You read the fine print and you realize that it has LESS GPU MEMORY, HALF THE CACHE, now the SATA thingy and so on and so on.

Is that not dodgy? The price difference on the CPU itself is 100usd. No wonder they can sell it cheaper; it is cheaper!

So, they didn't cut the price; they've got cheaper stuff to put into so the price is lower.

That's quite different thing from cutting the price!

The 2.67 GHz MBP is $500 less than before. The specs point to Apple updating the individual models rather than lowering the price based on GHz, the price reductions are from the new $1699 model.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

thanks for pointing this out, but I am not confusing anything, I am very clear about it. I am only interested in the buyer's power, the seller's marketing logic is of absolutely no interest to me. That's their 'problem', (by all accounts they're pretty good at it. not doing too badly despite recession i seem to remember) Why would we convene here to talk about Apple marketing logic? I come here to inform myself of upcoming products/rumors etc, and - as in today's case - to learn of problems before i buy. i certainly do not come here to criticize or improve apple's marketing logic. I don't care about it. do you? (serious question)



Ok, (to speak of marketing logic for a change ) --> I have never used this slot, most of the people I know who did use it (music & video production) moved to firewire a long time ago. and I really doubt that apple would save the cost of said slot, (perhaps max 1$?) at the expense of losing a lot of customers. Strategically they are not that dumb, I'm sure they make mistakes, I guess they think it's not worth including anymore. and this is part of the computer game.

I do understand if people are upset, if people move to another platform that suits them better. That's fine. What I find preposterous is the whining and shouting. Instead of a rational approach to the tools we need to get our jobs done, (eg, avalaunching apple's feedback page, coordinated jamming of their phone lines, refusing to buy, returning if unsatisfied, etc) I see a crowd of squawking cry-babies, who seem to think there is some point in making even cooler disparaging remarks about the new laptops. Upset is fine, but coming here to vent the rage is pointless and pretty infantile

take care,

Again you miss the point of my original post in order to make your own. My comment went to the seller's marketing because the poster's comment I was commenting on was about the seller's marketing. I agree the buyer has the ultimate power here. I certainly have delayed my purchase until more info is available.

As for the ExpressCard slot...again. Should Apple design laptops based on your or my own personal use, exclusively? The fact is the ExpressCard slot is used by a lot of people -- for eSATA, for SD Cards, for RAID, etc. Maybe not everyday, but it's used and by people who don't want a 17". So unless Apple wants to make it's survey data public for independent verification I think they are puffing.

Now it's interesting that you claim to be a proponent of buyer's power, but then call potential buyers "whiners," and "cry babies," when Apple removes features they liked and use. So which position do you hold? Is the customer right or should they just suck up whatever slop Apple gives us and be happy with it -- praised be Apple?

 

[Tompkinson]

The thing is I LOVE the MBP. The screen and battery life are amazing, but I intend to put in a nice SSD soon, so if Apple doesn't intend to fix it, I should just return/sell it now, and buy a SATA II MBP.

If you have bought it and like it so much, i would wait till either apple explain, or fixes, or both, or it becomes apparent they will stay stumm on the matter.

i understand the arguments about faster SSD in the future etc, but if you like the screen, battery etc so much --> wait for a few days before taking reflex action.

you'd feel really angry if you return it, lose some money, buy a sataII MBP and then the problem gets fixed in the near future, right?
hang in there a few more days!
S

 

[ammonialime]

10 bucks says this gets rectified in the next month or two.
in addition, I have another 10 bucks that says rectified is one of the best words in the english language.

 

[Barney0]

10 bucks says this gets rectified in the next month or two.
in addition, I have another 10 bucks that says rectified is one of the best words in the english language.

I'm not betting you, that is one mighty fine word you got there....

 

[Chupa Chupa]

10 bucks says this gets rectified in the next month or two.
in addition, I have another 10 bucks that says rectified is one of the best words in the english language.

Yeah, probably a couple weeks before announcement of the the mobile i7 MBPs.

 

[budfoot]

10 bucks says this gets rectified in the next month or two.
in addition, I have another 10 bucks that says rectified is one of the best words in the english language.

you win the internets!

Wrecked 'em? I hardly know 'em!

 

[windywoo]

in addition, I have another 10 bucks that says rectified is one of the best words in the english language.

Is that because you can have a cheeky chuckle at the fact that it sounds like "rectum", and whenever something is being "rectified" it sound like something is being done to its bottom?

 

[Poirot818]

Not really. If some other component goes up 0.5 Watts and the 9400M goes down 0.5 Watts than you have simply just made an even trade off.
The only folks presenting that this represents some massive megawatt change are the ones trying to knock down the change.

Clocking things slower saves power. Deny that till the cows come home you are not going to change to the laws of physics.

The warrant off the design trade-off is if you are actually taking something away that was actually being leveraged. The SATA bus speed is more so driven by having multiple devices on the shared network. Someone may have had an Aha! moment and noticed there is only one drive here.
No one will be motivated until somebody gets out a sharp pencil and says "we've got to cut power somewhere. Where can do that and have minimal impact elsewhere."





Because :

i. It is the lemming thing to do. Just follow the herd. Extremely likely was harder to do this somewhat custom mode than the run things at the canonical settings that chip is geared toward. You take chipsets that are designed to work with multiple hard drives and SATA bus saturation issues and just apply them to your laptop. If don't run into any power/thermal constraints just use them just like used in iMac or similar desktop.


ii. Megahertz Myth works. Better means faster , bigger number. When folks don't know anything about the technologies real utilization and are technologically ignorant then bigger numbers always sound better. Never mind the motivating design trade-offs involved.

It isn't like nobody has introduce faster tech which really didn't pan out of the long run ... Oh yeah that's right, Intel has completely canned their P4 design track at this point. How many Megawatts of power has gone up folks HVAC units on P4 that consumed tons of no-op cycles not really getting anything done.


iii. It is cheaper to just use a common set of components if you can get away with it. Chip vendors give you bigger discounts if buy in bigger bulk.







Again a false hypothesis of dramatic power improvements (as opposed to trade-offs and/or thermal ) being the motivating factor. Keep clinging to that; it is your lifeline.


Dramatically improving the time you can run on batteries is rather straightforwardly done by just using bigger batteries. That is one metric of battery life. (time till out of charge). If you swap out inert plastic parts ( battery case , latches , etc.) for components that consume power (e.g., batteries ) then the amount of heat you need to dissipate will go up. Not down.


Dramatically improving the lifetime can use a batteries comes from not power cycling it as much. Lower power draws lead to longer drain cycles which lead to longer useful lifetimes.

If you have other technical proofs otherwise, lets hear them.



You have EE and physics principles to back that up? Or just putting it in italics makes it true?
If you clock transitors slower they consume less power. That is what the overwhelming majority of the technical literature leads to. I'm waiting with baited breath on this dazzling proof that isn't true.

Thanks for proving my point. You posted this statement without any proof:

Gee Apple you made a reasonable design choice to probably save on power... slower but no real impact on my work.

And now you're asking me to prove why it's wrong? You even agreed with me that the power savings are minimal, so what the hell are you even babbling about in that long winded post?

edit: To summarize your "points":

1. Capping the connection provides minimal improvements in battery life.

2. Capping the connection is hard to do, and that's why other laptop companies didn't do it.

So why exactly did Apple do it? Here's your idiotic quote again:

Gee Apple you made a reasonable design choice to probably save on power... slower but no real impact on my work.

If English isn't your first language then sorry, but if it is, what the hell are you babbling on about?

 

[radek42]

This is strange to say the least

Howdy,

I spent last 30-40 minutes reading posts here ...

I do not own Mac, but I was considering it for couple months now since my 6-year-old Dell latitude (which still works btw) is getting a bit sluggish. I got really excited about 13'' MB, now MBP, but than ... spending more on adapters, SD card reader rather that Express Card or PCMCIA, now SATA I ... what is next?

I do understand that current machines will be way better that what I have (although my latitude has PCMCIA expansion slot which I use). It's just very upsetting to see Apple cutting corners here and there just to save couple cents or dollars. Since I did not consider getting SSD at this moment it does not mean I would not get on in future.

It is not, at least for me, about specs and performance it is more about the attitude and approach to customers that bothers me to the point that I do not feel like supporting such company.

I expect number of people jumping up saying that other companies are even worse and that Mac OS X is worth it, but that is not the point. It is not OK to cripple your hardware just because you have an excellent software and you can get away with it.

For now, I'll keep looking for a decent laptop to sink my cash. Meanwhile, I will happily use my ancient laptop.

Cheers,
R>

 

[smadder]

take it easy, huh?

I can't believe so many people are this pissed off. Mac is using the exact same chipset that comprises the previous uMBs, MBPs and the white MBs (not to mention the iMacs and Minis). The specs on the Nvidia site state the SATA bus is 3.0 on the 9400M chipset. This performance discrepancy will be addressed by Apple through a firmware/software update patch. Hardware-wise, nothing has changed in the new MBs/MBPs except the processors and a couple of ports. I think you can get one of the new uMBPs without worry that you are somehow signing up for a slower machine on a permanent basis.

That being said, I honestly have no idea why Apple would have dialed back the SATA bus, but they'll hear about it and get it fixed. Everyone must chill! This isn't a change in hardware - it's just a typical configuration limitation that shows up in Mac products. Remember the 144MB system RAM allocation to video in the Intel X3100 chipset MacBooks and Mac Minis had? If you went into Windows through boot camp, the system could dynamically allocate up to 384MB of system RAM.

This is going to be fixed through a patch. I know it's irritating to have it happen to begin with, but Apple almost always comes through - I think everyone should have a bit of faith. You aren't going to notice a difference in performance unless you are using a SSD, and even then it's going to be a negligible difference. Just be patient! This isn't worth the aneurysm some folks are throwing....

 

[HFU]

When Apple downgraded a wide range of 13"/15" (standard or BTO) models, investors will also downgrade AAPL! Watch it nosedive!