Best Buy Guesses at a March MacBook Pro Release Date as Supplies Constrain

[KumaYama]

And that's something I've explained people aren't ready to accept. If they lose or scratch a CD, it's their fault. If they lose their content, it may be Apple's fault. Some people aren't willing to trust corporations like that.

I enjoy visiting independent record shops, choosing CD's by people I've never heard of and listening to them at a later date. If they are any good they make it onto my iPhone. I occasionally buy stuff through iTunes but it lacks soul for me.

Anyway, I lost my entire library on iTunes during an update and am yet to retrieve any of them. I'm pretty sure you can't back them up on an external drive other than iTunes on your computer, and it was during this backup they all disappeared! Any suggestions how I can get them back?

I was on my way to the apple store to buy a MBP today when a friend advised me to check this site out. Glad I did. Despite the jargon 90% of which I don't understand you guys seem very helpful and knowledgeable.

So, when is the new MBP going to come out?

 

[Cicatrix]

I have never used a Mac in my life. I have always used custom built PC's for audio work. Never really gave the Mac's much thought. I don't know what it was, but just the other day I must have caught some type of Mac fever, and now I really want one. I was almost ready to pull the trigger on a MBP 13" and then started reading here on the forums about an up and coming line up soon. So now I am planning on waiting for a new model instead of getting the older model. Since it will be used for audio, I figure I would be better off to get one with a higher spec'd processor, although I know the current model would do just fine.

Looks like it will be here very soon too! I have $1000.00 so by next month I should have enough dough to pick it up. Perfect!

 

[dime21]

The i7 2820QM is a mobile CPU. Apple should be designing laptops to fit this level of CPU like most other manufacturers are. Not designing some 'thin' thing so some trendy fool can look cool in Starbucks with their 'Pro' laptop.

Pro my arse.

Amen brother! I feel 100% the same way.

 

[dime21]

I have never used a Mac in my life. I have always used custom built PC's for audio work. Never really gave the Mac's much thought. I don't know what it was, but just the other day I must have caught some type of Mac fever, and now I really want one. I was almost ready to pull the trigger on a MBP 13" and then started reading here on the forums about an up and coming line up soon. So now I am planning on waiting for a new model instead of getting the older model. Since it will be used for audio, I figure I would be better off to get one with a higher spec'd processor, although I know the current model would do just fine.

Looks like it will be here very soon too! I have $1000.00 so by next month I should have enough dough to pick it up. Perfect!

Nice! Yes Macs are really the tool of choice for audio work. Once you get yours, it's like you've been eating soup with fork for all these years, and someone just handed you a spoon.

 

[Cicatrix]

Nice! Yes Macs are really the tool of choice for audio work. Once you get yours, it's like you've been eating soup with fork for all these years, and someone just handed you a spoon.

That's good analogy, lol. I sure hope so. I am so ready for a new work flow change from PC.

I'm sort of impatient on purchases, so this wait is going to kill me. Maybe I should make one of those paper chains like you do when you're a kid waiting for Christmas.

 

[orthorim]

The i7 2820QM is a mobile CPU. Apple should be designing laptops to fit this level of CPU like most other manufacturers are. Not designing some 'thin' thing so some trendy fool can look cool in Starbucks with their 'Pro' laptop.

Pro my arse.

It's a mobile CPU but show me a laptop with that CPU that lasts 7 hours on battery... Apple's just guessing that on a mobile machine, battery life is more important than raw CPU power.

In my case they're right on the money with that, too. I do all my programming on my 17" MacBook Pro. I have iPulse in my dock so I _always_ have an eye on CPU usage. And guess what - 100% CPU on this Core 2 Duo is extremely rare.

Moreover, if you were to use ALL the available CPU power - as in transcoding video - then battery life would drop to 2 hours or less. With a Core i7 the transcoding would go 2x as fast, but the battery life would drop even more.

In normal day to day work, I am never CPU constrained. If I am waiting for anything, its either the hard disk or memory constraints causing swapping to the hard disk. So I got more RAM and an SSD and now the system flies.

Sure a Core i7 quad would make things even faster, I'd love to have one. But actual impact that can be felt would be very small. The impact in battery life and also heat I'd be willing to accept for this small gain would need to be equally small.

 

[GarfieldH]

Looking forward to the new release in March (Hopefully) will be upgrading my laptop to the newer model. Don't you just love flipping laptops on Ebay

Thanks,

GarfieldH

 

[sagnier]

Nice! Yes Macs are really the tool of choice for audio work. Once you get yours, it's like you've been eating soup with fork for all these years, and someone just handed you a spoon.

personally, i use a spork. its to cutlery what a mac that triple-boots windows and linux is to laptops.

 

[OliverOSX93]

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I think apple will keep the optical drives. Job's doesn't kiss the ass of the members on here you know. Also as someone else said. Money does not grow on trees. I'm having to look for a second job that ups my work week to 6 days a week just to afford a baseline MacBook. I don't have the money to spare on external drives (optical or HDD)

 

[KuroranX]

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I think it's ridiculous people want an ssd standard in MBP's.

If you want an SSD, either pick it as a personal configuration or get a MBA.

I believe the MBP should have a better GPU rather then an Ssd.

 

[KuroranX]

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And about the optical drive, removing it would be the stupidest idea ever. Not everyone has a 1tb internet plan to replace a optical drive with downloads on the Internet.

 

[EazyWeazy3]

March can't come soon enough!

All these rumors!

 

[orthorim]

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And about the optical drive, removing it would be the stupidest idea ever. Not everyone has a 1tb internet plan to replace a optical drive with downloads on the Internet.

Why do you want a CD drive and a GPU?

I haven't needed either for ages. GPU IMO is only for gamers. The Pro is not a gaming machine. Other than games, what would you need a GPU for - even the game experience is kind of lame; I recently turned on the GPU in my MBP for the first time to play Dragon Age - OK, it works, and it looks nice, but the laptop gets super hot and the fans go crazy. I'd rather not play, to be honest, or get a game console or something that's actually made for gaming. The game experience on a laptop sucks.

And the drive? I don't know I live in a 3rd world country with bad internet yet I can download anything I want. Might take a few hours but it does arrive... since getting a DVD (games?) also takes a few hours it's no big difference IMO.

 

[dime21]

Because Apple may move to Flash storage as opposed to SSDs. If they just put a SSD in, it would be a conservative move - people could still BTO a HD. But if they move to Flash, as per the MacBook Air, they'd have additional weight and cost savings. It would be pretty radical for a pro device, I admit - but Apple is known for making radical changes at times... I'd say it's 50/50 between SSD / "Flash with no option to go to a HD".

lmao, no way. next mbp will be traditional platter hard drive. end of story. osx does not even have trim support to properly use an ssd today. plus they would not be foolish enough to put flash memory system drive in the mbp. i don't want a 15" or 17" macbook air - which is what you are proposing - and neither does anyone else.

Let's see who is right at the end of the day. I think I've made my case already, see above - I don't hear any counter arguments here. "No way" is not an argument, by the way.

"Lots of people need more" isn't either - what people, and why do they need more, more importantly, why do they need a HD? Nobody's answered yet.

"Let's see who is right" indeed. One of us definitely doesn't have their finger on the pulse of the industry.........Oh look, new MBP's today....... all with platter hard drives (and optical drives) as standard. I rest my case.

 

[cjjr72984]

"Let's see who is right" indeed. One of us definitely doesn't have their finger on the pulse of the industry.........Oh look, new MBP's today....... all with platter hard drives (and optical drives) as standard. I rest my case.

Lol, nothing like an "I told you so, now suck it!" post.

 

[dime21]

Lol, nothing like an "I told you so, now suck it!" post.

Isn't that what the internet is for?

You are ill informed on TRIM - it's not needed. It's what wannabe geeks talk about IMO. Sounds great. But it's a dead end technologically. Managing flash storage must be the duty of the controller, not the OS. OT here but SSD controllers already do, using a variety of approaches.

Um, no. You don't understand what TRIM is. Here, I'll explain.

If you write data to an SSD, later delete that data, and then want to write new data, the SSD first must erase the old memory locations before writing the new data. Just like an -RW optical disc, you can write to it again and again, but you have to erase it between each time. Because of how disk filesystems work, when you deleted the first set of data, you didn't actually remove the files - you just deleted the entry in the filesystem allocation table. The key word here being 'filesystem'. TRIM is implemented in the operating system, and during periods when the drive is idle, it goes in and clears out the deleted files - so it doesn't have to do that next time you want to write something. This improves write performance.....

....BUT here's the catch. It is filesystem dependent. HFS+ works differently from ext4 which works differently ZFS which is different from NTFS. The filesystem is a function of which operating system you are running. How can you possibly implement this functionality in the SSD controller? Are you going to program the SSD controller to understand every single filesystem out there? And what happens when a new version of the filesystem is released? Will you have to do a firmware update on the SSD so that it knows about it? That's a clunky and retarded solution. Implementing TRIM in the Operating System is the only way that makes sense.

Fin.

 

[orthorim]

Isn't that what the internet is for?


Um, no. You don't understand what TRIM is. Here, I'll explain.

If you write data to an SSD, later delete that data, and then want to write new data, the SSD first must erase the old memory locations before writing the new data. Just like an -RW optical disc, you can write to it again and again, but you have to erase it between each time. Because of how disk filesystems work, when you deleted the first set of data, you didn't actually remove the files - you just deleted the entry in the filesystem allocation table. The key word here being 'filesystem'. TRIM is implemented in the operating system, and during periods when the drive is idle, it goes in and clears out the deleted files - so it doesn't have to do that next time you want to write something. This improves write performance.....

....BUT here's the catch. It is filesystem dependent. HFS+ works differently from ext4 which works differently ZFS which is different from NTFS. The filesystem is a function of which operating system you are running. How can you possibly implement this functionality in the SSD controller? Are you going to program the SSD controller to understand every single filesystem out there? And what happens when a new version of the filesystem is released? Will you have to do a firmware update on the SSD so that it knows about it? That's a clunky and retarded solution. Implementing TRIM in the Operating System is the only way that makes sense.

Fin.

Thanks for the explanation - you have described the technical problem. Technical problems have technical solutions. TRIM is one possible solution, but a sub-optimal one because it places the burden of dealing with this SSD specific quirk on the OS. It would be equally bad to have the SSD controller know about OS specific filesystems, as you've pointed out.

So another solution needs to be found.

Just off the top of my head I can think of 2:

- Virtual blocks - the issue is only in writing to physical blocks that have already been used. The SSD controller knows which blocks are physically in use vs not so for every write that hits a block that's physically in use, it could write to one that's empty instead, and remember the mapping. It could later on when there's idle time go ahead and resolve the mappings - or remember them indefinitely.

- Cache (this may be how the mercury extreme works - it gives up 20% capacity - just an educated guess though). Imagine you have a portiion of the SSD that's always "kept free", where the blocks are always available. At every write that's a conflict, I write to the cache instead, and remember that fact somewhere. Since the cache is persistent, you can do write back caching, and clear it out when there's time. On every conflict you could even simultaneously (2 processes) store the data to the cache and start clearing out those dirty blocks in the main storage.

I figure that If I can think of 2 technical solutions for this problem right away, imagine how many different solutions smart people working on SSD controllers can think of.... there must be dozens more.