Intel's Upcoming Ultra-Fast Optane SSD May Come to MacBooks

[throAU]

How do u bust up a keyboard in one year?

You buy a 2016 onwards macbook pro and type on it?

 

[-BigMac-]

You buy a 2016 onwards macbook pro and type on it?

Oh shocker. So every single person in the world who has the aforementioned 2016 onwards keyboard has a busted up keyboard a year later?

Weird.
Has Apple issued a 100% product recall i haven’t heard of?

 

[Makosuke]

RESURRECTION: Was hoping NVM would be an option this year. Guess my 2017 MBP with busted keyboard will have to do for a bit longer.

You are aware that unless you broke it by spilling water in it or something, Apple will repair your keyboard for free?

I'm also confused by your hope for NVM--did you mean an NVMe interface (in which case your MBP already has it, and extremely fast flash attached to it), or Intel Optane? Optane is certainly fast, but this thread is several years old and now that it's been out in the wild for a while it hasn't proven to be quite the holy grail promised--it's not that fast in real-world designs, is extremely expensive, and to my knowledge has thermal requirements that make it impractical for a laptop at this point. It doesn't look like any of those things will be changing in the near future, either--non-Optane flash has gotten faster as well, as has RAM.

Leaving aside tiny little 16GB cache drives, the only laptop-sized (M.2 form factor) Optane SSD Intel makes right now is the 380GB 905P, which runs close to $500 and explicitly is designed only for use in desktops due to heat and power consumption. It's write-rated at 2200 MB/s and 550K iOPS. The 1TB Samsung 970 Pro is usable in a laptop, costs $100 less, and is write-rated for 2700 MB/s and 500K iOPS.

For anything approaching consumer use the primary advantage of Optane is that it's got way more endurance--for the above example, 10 DWPD for the Optane drive and 0.6 DWPD for the flash drive. For cache that's great, but for anything else it's of any real concern for the vast majority of even pro users (not going to say it can't happen, but I have yet to hear of a MBP user whose SSD wore out).

Maybe someday Optane will replace RAM as semi-volatile storage, but it doesn't look like we're anywhere near that point yet, and even if we were, how much does the power consumption of your RAM really impact long-term battery life in a modern laptop? Things like Power Nap are likely to eat more battery while sleeping than the RAM anyway.