Replacing the MacBook RAM, Hard Drive (Video) and Benchmarks

[xli_ne]

Ok the answers were in the other thread...

I may have missed something out here, but:

This is what I waned to know, not hard drive prices.

Does the MacBook Pro allow you to easily upgrade it's hard drive too? (Does it have a similar setup?)

 

[Dark Horse]

This is what I waned to know, not hard drive prices.

Sorry, quoted wrong person. No, you can't. hence the fuss over it with the MBs.

 

[Dark Horse]

OK now the end of this post is confusing me. Is the whole post a joke? Or if not could you see the key legends on the aluminum keys underneith the sticky black stuff? This is very serious if you aren't kidding.

I thought you were joking til I saw you'd cross posted. No dude - it's a joke.

 

[dongmin]

I sure hope Adobe get's it's crap together and starts optimizing Photoshop for Macs better in the CS3 release...It just seems to keep getting further and further behind, while video apps just keep getting better and better...

Adobe's approach is that people can just buy newer hardware if they want better performance. Speed is much more difficult to sell than a laundry list of new features, even if those features are for the most part pointless. (This would apply to Microsoft as well.)

For me, 99% of what I need Photoshop to do was in Photoshop 5x. I can't remember anything new in the recent versions that I've come to use on a daily basis. And the only reason I'll upgrade to CS3 is to get universal binaries. Adobe knows this is the case for most users. So, even if they already have universal versions of Photoshop working, they're not gonna release it. If they did, not that many people would have an incentive to upgrade to CS3. All that talk about these apps being difficult to upgrade may just be a smokescreen, for all we know."

 

[dagger01]

They give very similar results in several tests. The only difference between them, aside from hard drive speed, is that the MacBook has integrated graphics, while the iMac has a dedicated card.

The Speedmark and Compressor numbers are anything but very similar. They should be identical is my point; same hardware config down to the bus. And, thanks for reiterating what I already said about the hard drive and graphics. Duh!

 

[dagger01]

Are you kidding me? Those benchmarks convinced me once and for all just how unbelievably horrible the integrated graphics are. A 2.0 core duo edges out a 1.42 Ghz G4 (which itself only has a 32 MB card!) and loses to a 1.67 G4?? Absolutely disgusting. Look at what the core duo can do with a decent chip (imac and mbp)... the integrated graphics are totally hamstringing a fantastic processor.

Oh for crying out loud! It's a baseline consumer laptop. It's built for utility not gaming! How many people do you know that play high-end, graphic intensive games on a laptop?!?! I know ZERO, and have many, many friends that are intense gamers. Gaming is not the intended market for this product. Besides, all this whining and griping is going to be moot if the rumors of a gamer's edition MacBook turn out to be true.

There is nothing wrong with the MacBook. Very capable machine, with a competitive price in the target market.

 

[joechimy]

WoW

anyone know how World of Warcraft runs on the MacBook??? average FPS?

 

[milo]

Wow. Non-gamers really don't need to go pro. Or does the integrated noticeably affect the responsiveness of the GUI ?

Not at all. I think the GUI might even be a little snappier on my mini than on my G5.

Are you kidding me? Those benchmarks convinced me once and for all just how unbelievably horrible the integrated graphics are.

It just tells us what we already knew: it's a fairly weak gaming machine, but it smokes at everything else. If you don't plan on playing demanding 3d gaming, these are great machines, especially for the price.

i repeated this for Excel, Photoshop, and GarageBand. all were within a few seconds of each other.

operating the programs on both machines, i noticed very little difference in operating speed and snappiness.

up to five times faster than my G4? bull.

It's not bull, the five times number is for UNIVERSAL apps. Except for GB, all the rest are PPC only and take a big performance hit with rosetta. With universal apps it's a different story, apps like Logic absolutely get a boost that big on the intel macs.

anyone know how World of Warcraft runs on the MacBook??? average FPS?

Considering it runs on the mini, it should run slightly better on the MB.

 

[Multimedia]

Confirmed: Seagate SATA 160GB 2.5" 9.5mm MacBook Compatible Thick Ships In July

Yep: From ViperLair.com's review: "A SATA version will be forthcoming, but the ETA is unknown at this point."
(added from silentpcreview.com "A SATA version of the drive will be available 'later this year'."

Seagate SATA 160GB 2.5" 9.5mm MacBook Compatible Thick Ships In July

According to Seagate's specsheet (PDF), the Momentus 160 is no thicker than the 120. Am I missing something?

You are correct that the 160 is only 9.5mm thick. So I'm getting very excited. 160GB inside a MacBook will be AWESOME. SATA version ships in JULY.

On phone with Seagate Corporate Communications now. Have confirmation from them that the SATA Version of the Momentus 160GB 9.5mm thick HD ships in JULY. So if you can hold off two months or so the Seagate Momentus 5400 160 SATA should be out by end of July at the latest.

 

[Dark Horse]

On phone with Seagate Corporate Communications now. Have confirmation from them that the SATA Version of the Momentus 160GB 9.5mm thick HD ships in JULY. So if you can hold off two months or so the Seagate Momentus 5400 160 SATA should be out by end of July at the latest.

That would be awesome. truly awesome. any sign of expected cost?

 

[sam10685]

i thought the hard drive had to be plugged into some wires or something like that.

 

[faintember]

i thought the hard drive had to be plugged into some wires or something like that.

I think the metal carriage around the HD allows for the HD to slide into fixed connectors for power and data.

 

[Multimedia]

$240 Sale Price of 160GB Seagate SATA Notebook Guess

That would be awesome. truly awesome. any sign of expected cost?

I called him back to ask but he's in a meeting right now. I would imagine around $300 list and $240 Fry's introductory sale price. Around what Apple wants for a 120 without the 60 white or 80 black.

 

[jne381]

MacBook Ram

With the ease of replacing the Ram and Hard Drive in the new MacBook, does any one know what Apple's policy is with regards to the warranty, if non-Apple Ram or Hard Drive is used?

 

[ejl10]

Its nice to see that Apple is making it easier to perform some basic upgrades; maybe I'll get rid of my Thinkpad someday. Still, I don't understand why they'd want to put screws in the way of the hard disk and memory. People may strip the screw heads, the screwdriver may slip and damage the machine, and its a bit pedestrian to require any tools at all. I guess I'm just trying to say it could have been a bit more user friendly without much effort. Same with the iMacs.

Oh well, still a definite improvement.

 

[gloss]

Its nice to see that Apple is making it easier to perform some basic upgrades; maybe I'll get rid of my Thinkpad someday. Still, I don't understand why they'd want to put screws in the way of the hard disk and memory. People may strip the screw heads, the screwdriver may slip and damage the machine, and its a bit pedestrian to require any tools at all. I guess I'm just trying to say it could have been a bit more user friendly without much effort. Same with the iMacs.

Oh well, still a definite improvement.

An improvement to be sure. Honestly, the little L-bracket wasn't any trouble at all when I did my RAM. It seems to exist mostly to seperate the battery compartment from the actual hardware.

Not quite dummy-safe, but better than most notebooks I've dealt with.

 

[milo]

With the ease of replacing the Ram and Hard Drive in the new MacBook, does any one know what Apple's policy is with regards to the warranty, if non-Apple Ram or Hard Drive is used?

I don't think replacing ram has ever voided the warranty. And in general, doing upgrades only voids the warranty if the user causes damage during the replacement. Also, I think consumer protection laws don't allow for voiding the entire warranty by third party servicing the machine, including user servicing. Worst case, it just voids the warranty on the specific part that was replaced (so you'd just be voiding the HD warranty).

 

[jayb2000]

...On phone with Seagate Corporate Communications now. Have confirmation from them that the SATA Version of the Momentus 160GB 9.5mm thick HD ships in JULY. So if you can hold off two months or so the Seagate Momentus 5400 160 SATA should be out by end of July at the latest.

That should also mean the other's drop in price a bit, so a 120GB might be around $125. That would be nice.

 

[nem3015]

Quotes

Where did you get your hard drive?

The best price I have seen so far is here:

http://www.fadfusion.com/selection.php?product_item_number=10060604527

 

[nem3015]

Prices and speeds

That should also mean the other's drop in price a bit, so a 120GB might be around $125. That would be nice.

Would be nice, but not necessarily tru.. the 160 when will come out will be more expensive I think. I a very new line the Momentus so I don't see the reason for Seagate to drop the prices, to me the new 160 will be on the top of the price scale.

On another issue, those disks are 5400rpm, while the new Fujitsu (160 and 200) they are 4200rpm.
The Momentus 7200rpm on their datasheet only go up to 100Gb so far.

 

[sehix]

thanks for the "advice". the problem with it, however, is that Apple marketed the new laptop as 4-5 times faster NOW --hat's right, even with non-Intel CPU-native apps.

No, they said that it would run *up to* x times faster.

Some things would be close to that much speedup (some things are actually faster), some not. Universal applications that are CPU-limited should be faster; PowerPC applications, which have to be run under Rosetta won't be faster on and intel Mac, and Apple never claimed that they would be.

Drive speed limited things certainly wouldn't be expected to sped up much, if at all, and application start up is strongly affected by hard drive speed.

This may call for a switch to decaf, by the way.

 

[nem3015]

SATA, PATA and all that mess

Having seen all the confusion about SATA, PATA, ATA-6 etc... here is a bit of educational info:

ATA stands for Advanced Technology Attachment aka IDE and EIDE in some ambients. Their interface is the widely known 40 pines connector that has been around for ages.
Through the times there has been several version conventionally named ATA-1 to ATA-8 being:
ATA-4 --> ATA/33
ATA-5 --> ATA/66
ATA-6 --> ATA/100
ATA-7 --> ATA/133

When Serial ATA came out all those "old" ATAs has been renamed as Parallel ATA aka PATA therefore you may now see in someplaces PATA/33, PATA/66 and so forth...

SATA connectors are totally different both in size and shape from PATA

SATA already comes in different versions as SATA/150, SATA/300 (internal drives usually) and eSATA (external drives)

To end this issue for the record:
Some disks found online (ebay) are labeled ATA-6 which are not compatible with MacBook
MacBook uses SATA disks and their thickness have to be a maximum of 9.5 mm, therefore not "all" SATA disks for notebooks around on the market can be used, so when you buy one check very carefully the dimension specifications more than anything else.
Stock disks inside the MacBook are 5400rpm, but on the market you can find 7200rpm too (so far I seen only up to 100Gb, I guess the increase of speed have some limitation due the increase heating too).

Hope this help clarify all the confusion for some people that plan to upgrade their disk.

Fro more technical info go to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Technology_Attachment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

Have fun...

 

[Mainyehc]

thanks for the "advice". the problem with it, however, is that Apple marketed the new laptop as 4-5 times faster NOW --hat's right, even with non-Intel CPU-native apps.

or weren't you paying attention, flamer?

and even if you want to argue that point, the fact is--i have to weigh my current Powerbook against what's available NOW. not "sometime soon" IF i want to pay $$ and upgrade all my apps.

in other words, it's not that simple, hater.

I know that, and I'm not a hater... A flamer, maybe (just a bit... sorry for that then), but not a hater. It's just that you seemed a little too gullible, since you probably didn't read the fine print, as an informed consumer should always do (Hey, I know how Apple works, and marketing-wise they are no better than their competition, so the same rules apply to them: never trust a corporation, period).

So, there's the fine print:

Testing conducted by Apple in May 2006 using preproduction 2GHz MacBook units and shipping 1.42GHz PowerPC G4-based iBook G4 units. SPEC® is a registered trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC); see www.spec.org for more information. Benchmarks were compiled using the IBM compiler and a beta version of the Intel compiler for Mac OS.

I don't see real-world applications mentioned nowhere on those Apple-endorsed benchmarks, and I'm as sorry as you are for M$ and Adobe being the lazy software developers they are (if only they had switched to XCode earlier, duh! They actually had some 5 years to do so ), and for Apple being the money hungry corporation it is... However, that doesn't mean they can't really claim their new hardware is really up to 5x faster. In fact, I think this claim may be more accurate than that "World's Fastest Personal Computer" claim on the PowerMac G5 from a few years ago. /rant

 

[Multimedia]

160 Will Cost More But Store More Too

Would be nice, but not necessarily tru.. the 160 when will come out will be more expensive I think. I a very new line the Momentus so I don't see the reason for Seagate to drop the prices, to me the new 160 will be on the top of the price scale.

On another issue, those disks are 5400rpm, while the new Fujitsu (160 and 200) they are 4200rpm.
The Momentus 7200rpm on their datasheet only go up to 100Gb so far.

But Seagate @5400 is claiming same power usage as 4200 with twice the performance so Momentus.3 are best for battery conservation and good performance compromise. The Fujitsu are out because they are 12mm thick and won't fit in MacBook.

 

[nem3015]

But Seagate @5400 is claiming same power usage as 4200 with twice the performance so Momentus.3 are best for battery conservation and good performance compromise. The Fujitsu are out because they are 12mm thick and won't fit in MacBook.

Well all that matter is how desperate people are to upgrade the MacBook... How many will wait until July to get the new disk? But definitely once more, Apple Store is too expensive when it comes to the upgrades.
Btw, going off topic a bit, I will buy it with the spanish keyboard too since I work a lot with european languages. Having all the accents and foreign characters on hand is really cool.