Slimmer 13-Inch and 15-Inch MacBook Pros Reportedly in Production

[Santabean2000]

Ah. You mean those things which can't be write protected, labeled, are easily lost and easily corruptible, for a per-GB backup cost over an order of magnitude higher than optical disks? Yeah - I use them for sneakernet and the occasional boot stick -- They aren't suitable for long term backups. You might have actually noticed that opinion already being posted here if you had actually bothered to read the conversation taking place here, instead of simply making a snarky comment which contributes nothing useful to the discussion.

As for your comment about using a laptop on a plane -- I use mine on a plane. It *can* be an issue if the person in front of me reclines too much, but I haven't had much trouble. That might change if I go for the 17" with my next machine, which is a possibility - and one of the reasons I've considered *not* going for the 17".

I don't get DVDs being a good choice for 'long term storage' - someone earlier mentioned 20-30 years.

Do you honestly believe that ODDs will still be around to be able to read these backups? Or even still be readable in their format in the future OS?

I would have thought a secure, yet easily transferable medium would be a much more reliable way to go.

 

[Cubytus]

Actually... The time to do that was many months ago. It takes a LONG lead time to develop new hardware, so if the new MBPs are going to have/not have certain features, that decision was made ages ago and there's no real changing it now. We might be able to have some influence on the 2013 MBPs - but that will generally come from Apple's actual sales and feedback from the new generation. (For example, if the new MBP drops the ODD, and sales of the new machine are lower because of it, or there's a large enough outcry about it, they could then respond with a higher end machine with an ODD as a build option...)

There's one recent example: when the unibody came in 13" form factor, it lost the FireWire port, that was standard on both consumer-grade and professional laptop.

How the FW port crept back in the unibody 13" (re-gaining its "Pro" moniker in the process) is unclear: was there a backlash ? I sure did send a feedback, but how many people did?

I rarely worry about cross platform reading of backups so it's not been an issue for me so far. Segmenting can be as easy as using split to segment and cat to join - works on Linux or Mac. (And I've written trivial command line tools for Windows to do the same...) I've also used a variety of tools (burners, disk utilities, drive imaging tools, etc.) which do the job automatically for me over the years. I *thought* that DiskUtility had something for automatically breaking up DMG files, but maybe I'm misremembering or I used another tool for that (Toast?).

It's not Disk Utility, for sure.

On Windows, such archives can be created with WinRAR or 7zip, but not on Mac or Linux.

Over the last two years, I haven't needed anything so elaborate, though, and most of my backups are of the fits-on-one-DVD variety.

iTunes retaining the burn-to-DVD support of music files seems like an anachronism to me, in that context.

I'll go one farther - trying to use a laptop at all on an airplane these days is at best futile and at worst dangerous. Last time I tried, the carnie in front of me damn near snapped my display by reclining without notice. Unless one's in organized crime and thus can afford first class, there simply isn't room to reasonably use a display with today's seat spacing anyway. An iPad is perhaps tolerable depending on one's size - it works great for keeping my [autistic] 3.5 year old occupied.

+1.

I'm not anywhere near tall or large by US standards (5'5", 150lbs), yet have the knees in the seet forward. Transatlantic flights have better spacing than domestic, but I often find myself surreptitiously blocking the forward recliner seat when I want to breath something else than the guy's hair.

Time to rip your DVD/CD Collection! I seldom use the drive anyway. I hope it doesn't bring over heating and fan noise issues cramming a quad core bad boy into an even smaller case

platter drive prices are still very high now, even more so in 2.5" format. It's not the best moment to buy a HDD.

 

[msalman]

I was hoping for dual HD in new MPB. Why do we have to rely on 3rd party solutions to get dual HDs?

 

[Cubytus]

Because it sucks so much power the battery life takes quite a hit?

 

[macmacgoose]

I really hope they don't turn the 13-inch into a wimpy machine. There's a reason why I don't want an Air. I want power. In fact, I want the 15- and 17-inch specs. However, I don't want to lug a giant screen around with me. 13 is more than large enough for my purposes, but I want high computing. I will not be persuaded to buy the 15-inch no matter the specs. I'd just settle for the 13 but then buy a top-of-the-line PC desktop. I can understand if the casing might be too tiny to house better chips, but if the reason is just to force people to buy the larger Macs, that's a bad idea.

I hope they also keep the optical drive. I make lots of use of it, more than I do with a USB stick.

 

[zgwortz]

I don't get DVDs being a good choice for 'long term storage' - someone earlier mentioned 20-30 years.

Do you honestly believe that ODDs will still be around to be able to read these backups? Or even still be readable in their format in the future OS?

I would have thought a secure, yet easily transferable medium would be a much more reliable way to go.

I don't see the optical disk format going away any time in the next 20+ years, and possibly not for 40 or more. It's all based on the CD physical format, and CDs are *still* a major distribution channel for music 30 years after the format was first made widely available. As long as content, be it software, movies, or music, is still being produced on optical discs, there will be computer drives which will be able to read them, and many computers will still contain them. And as long as there are computer drives which can read them, they will be able to read ALL formats which have gone before.

For that matter, optical drives will probably still be produced long after most new content isn't produced on it. (You can still buy floppy disk drives, after all...)

I honestly can't say that other media will be as easily readable in the future without going to a specialty service. *Hardware Interfaces* go obsolete far quicker than media formats. SCSI and ADB are long gone from almost any machine out there. ISA/EISA are non-existent anymore. PS/2 is mostly gone. PCI is slowly being made obsolete by PCI Express and Thunderbolt. The writing is on the wall for Firewire. IDE/EIDE/ATA/ATAPI has been mostly replaced with SATA. Nothing has threatened USB much yet, but it's only a matter of time.

This history suggests that any backup format which is dependent on a hardware interface (ie. USB Flash Drives and external HDDs) will become obsolete much sooner than any removable media format (ie. optical disks).

Even when the ODD format does eventually fall by the wayside, services will exist to recover data from it. Heck, services STILL exist to recover data from punched cards - and there is a WHOLE lot more data stored on optical disks than punched cards.

When you consider this, it should be no surprise that manufacturers are producing more and more blank optical media rated for long term storage. I even saw some Blu-ray media recently advertising a 100 to 200 year lifespan. I personally have no use for that, but I know companies who do.

On Windows, such archives can be created with WinRAR or 7zip, but not on Mac or Linux.

RAR exists for Mac and Linux as well. As do split/cat.

 

[djrod]

I don't get DVDs being a good choice for 'long term storage' - someone earlier mentioned 20-30 years.

Do you honestly believe that ODDs will still be around to be able to read these backups? Or even still be readable in their format in the future OS?

I would have thought a secure, yet easily transferable medium would be a much more reliable way to go.

Long life to the old mediums!

 

[portishead]

I don't see the optical disk format going away any time in the next 20+ years, and possibly not for 40 or more. It's all based on the CD physical format, and CDs are *still* a major distribution channel for music 30 years after the format was first made widely available.

hah. Are you serious? Physical media is dead. Blu-ray is pretty much the last one. Of course the media will hang around a few more years, but not in any 'major distribution channel' as you mention.

 

[danny_w]

hah. Are you serious? Physical media is dead. Blu-ray is pretty much the last one. Of course the media will hang around a few more years, but not in any 'major distribution channel' as you mention.

I don't know if I would go quite so far as to say it will be around for 20+ years but I think the whole notion of "physical media is dead" is extremely premature, despite what Steve Jobs would have liked. Perhaps more rational minds will prevail at Apple now.

 

[bronksy]

No optical drive?

I'm a videographer whose clients almost always request a DVD of a video.

I also have a large collection of CDs I'd like to import into iTunes.

No optical drive will make both these points a problem.

Apple gets too far ahead of itself for the sake of a slim design.

Really? I run a production company and I edit and shoot. I can't even remember the last time a client has requested a disk, let alone on site straight after an edit.

Everything we do is uploaded to FTP. Clients send us footage
via yousendit or ftp. If the client can't deal with that then an 8 gig USB flash drive is pretty cheap and you can just factor it into your costs.

I may well get 50/100 thumb drives printed up with our logo and details on. I think they would be much more useful and clients would either keep them loaded with your stuff or save the file and keep the stick.

Just my thoughts.

 

[toke lahti]

MAybe to differentiate it as "highly mobile", where one could reasonably expect not to use it on a table? I agree that's slim evidence.

I think that adding a cell modem to MBP would end up with same problems than they have with new iPad.
Same model wouldn't work globally, so this would lead to many more models and this is what they are trying to avoid as much as possible. So IMHO, this won't happen.

Perhaps they figured out that, even in the pro field, there were much more photographs than people requiring any Expresscard-dependant peripheral.

That was just plain stupid. Even if 90% would use EC only for reading SD cards, 10% of cutomers were hurt. For SD card users could have just bought cheap reader to put inside EC and 100% of customers would have been happy.
I guess more likely reasons for removing EC was to manufacture MBP's more cheaply and to shorten their life span by removing upgradeability. Just to sell them more with higher profits.

Unless they get FW into the 15" Air body, I can't use it as much for audio production like I use my MBP

How about tb2fw dongle?
What is really missing is a TB hub. Now when you have 2 TB gadgets with each only one TB port, you're out of luck.

hah. Are you serious? Physical media is dead. Blu-ray is pretty much the last one.

No it wasn't. I already have bdxl burner. So it's 100GB per disc now.
And you surely gave no reason why bd(xl) would be the last.
Because cd's have been most used distribution format in history for 30 years?
Because there won't be enough bandwidth for the most people on this planet to watch content as VOD for a long time with increasing amounts of data used (3D, 2k, 4k, HDR, wideGamut, etc.)?

AFAIK, nobody has mentioned Hybrid drives in this thread:
http://hlds.co.kr/product/e_HybridDrive.php
This could be best choice for lots of us, since we almost all carry some external storage with us. This would be just that...

 

[tivoboy]

60 days

I think we're currently less than 60 days out for new MB/MBPs. Sales are starting to take off with third party sites, clearing out inventory. I'm seeing very large discounts lately on MBP 15" i7 and others, 300-500$ off.

 

[Cubytus]

(...)(You can still buy floppy disk drives, after all...)

Really? Where? NCIX, surely one retailer that has almost everything computer-related, doesn't carry media. Only drives.

This history suggests that any backup format which is dependent on a hardware interface (ie. USB Flash Drives and external HDDs) will become obsolete much sooner than any removable media format (ie. optical disks).

I don't quite understand. You have to have a hardware interface to connect your removable media reader, don't you?

Heck, services STILL exist to recover data from punched cards - and there is a WHOLE lot more data stored on optical disks than punched cards.

Again, where have you seen that???

RAR exists for Mac and Linux as well. As do split/cat.

split/cat have to be called for manually. Not so many people are even basically comfortable with command-line, and even those who are occasionally forget the exact syntax. And RAR has to be bought.

I think that adding a cell modem to MBP would end up with same problems than they have with new iPad.
Same model wouldn't work globally, so this would lead to many more models and this is what they are trying to avoid as much as possible. So IMHO, this won't happen.

I didn't knew that people with the appropriate power to do otherwise still fell in the same trap they did back then with GSM, when US and a few others clung onto world-incompatible technology when the rest of the workd went with GSM.

That was just plain stupid. Even if 90% would use EC only for reading SD cards, 10% of cutomers were hurt. For SD card users could have just bought cheap reader to put inside EC and 100% of customers would have been happy.
I guess more likely reasons for removing EC was to manufacture MBP's more cheaply and to shorten their life span by removing upgradeability. Just to sell them more with higher profits.

the 90% would have been happier since they would save a $30 from an EC-based card reader. But your hypothesis seems reasonable, but I still don'T understand. Would upgraders really go for a more cumbersome 17" if they wanted upgradeability? Because if the newer models still don't sport thenecessary port.. What would be the point in upgrading?

No it wasn't. I already have bdxl burner. So it's 100GB per disc now.
And you surely gave no reason why bd(xl) would be the last.
Because cd's have been most used distribution format in history for 30 years?
Because there won't be enough bandwidth for the most people on this planet to watch content as VOD for a long time with increasing amounts of data used (3D, 2k, 4k, HDR, wideGamut, etc.)?

WHERE can you actually buy 100GB Blu Rays? Even in large stores I could never find one above 50GB, as I could also never find DVD+RW.

AFAIK, nobody has mentioned Hybrid drives in this thread:
http://hlds.co.kr/product/e_HybridDrive.php
This could be best choice for lots of us, since we almost all carry some external storage with us. This would be just that...

Looks interesting, but what about reliability? Having three points of failure in the same drive doesn't even provide redundancy in case one drive fails. For some time I was still able to run a PC without a HDD out of a live Linux distribution and a USB key. Even my current Mac setup can be run without an internal HDD, without the ODD, or without the external clone.

 

[zgwortz]

Really? Where? NCIX, surely one retailer that has almost everything computer-related, doesn't carry media. Only drives.

I'm more thinking about getting a floppy drive to read existing media (which is the only real important part - being able to read your old media...), but if you google, you'll find places you can still buy blank floppies. For that matter, I probably have a stack of blank floppies around somewhere - if I really needed them.

I don't quite understand. You have to have a hardware interface to connect your removable media reader, don't you?

A media reader can use ANY hardware interface. Today there are USB optical drives. In the past optical drives used different interfaces (SCSI, for example...). Removable media survives the hardware interface change, because there are readers for new hardware interfaces, but if you have some kind of media which is inherent to a hardware interfaces (such as a SCSI HDD, for example), it's a great deal harder to find something which will read it in the future without going to a restoration service.

I actually ran into that very problem recently - I wanted to recover data from an external SCSI HDD, but I don't have any working machines anymore with an external SCSI port, or the cables needed. However, CDs I wrote at the same time (about 10-15 years ago) on an external SCSI CD-R drive were perfectly readable.

Again, where have you seen that???

Google is your friend: http://punchcardreader.com/

split/cat have to be called for manually. Not so many people are even basically comfortable with command-line, and even those who are occasionally forget the exact syntax. And RAR has to be bought.

Yes, you can do it manually. I've done it automated in the past -- Toast can be set up to do disk spanning automatically. (Just looked it up to remind myself of how I did it -- it's been a while.)

 

[Liquinn]

Still no new Macbook Pro rumors and it's early April

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

hah. Are you serious? Physical media is dead. Blu-ray is pretty much the last one.

I doubt that. Japan is already moving forward with a new Super Blu-Ray that has 4x the resolution of BD. You could call it an extension, but it's going to prolong the life of the product indefinitely. The files will be way too large to stream at a reasonable rate for most people, but if you want life-like images on a really large projector screen, it'd be truly awesome. I'd love to have an IMAX-like experience at home (i.e. entire wall of cinema room being used at a 10 foot viewing distance). That's the kind of thing that will be possible soon. I'm sure movie theaters will adopt it if no one else.

Of course the media will hang around a few more years, but not in any 'major distribution channel' as you mention.

Media 'hanging around' is one of the best reasons to keep a drive in a Mac for years to come. If I buy a CD at Best Buy, I can forget dumping it onto my computer if I have no optical drive. If I want to use older software (100x worse if I'm running Windows on my Mac since I have hundreds of games from the past 10 years that are still fun and they're all on CD-Rom or DVD-Rom, many of which require the disk to be in the drive. So I'd have to create virtual discs with ANOTHER computer or buy an external drive (hassle). I say Apple should have kept the drive-less Mac limited to the Macbook Air rather than try to make ALL Macs into Macbook-Airs. That kind of thin can limit the choices for fast video GPUs, etc. since there is a lot less airflow with ultra-thin designs, etc.

 

[Cubytus]

I'm more thinking about getting a floppy drive to read existing media (which is the only real important part - being able to read your old media...), but if you google, you'll find places you can still buy blank floppies. For that matter, I probably have a stack of blank floppies around somewhere - if I really needed them.

Reminds me when I was looking for an external floppy reader to know what was on old diskettes I had back when I started university. Turns out it was a buggy C software I wrote for a course. I trashed (recycled for all eco-junkies out there ) my dieskettes at the same time I brought my trusty old Celeron to the electronics recycling centre. Was still working, but not enough power to do something useful anymore, not the the point I wanted to keep a noisy, heavy box runnign 24/7 in my small appartment.

A media reader can use ANY hardware interface. Today there are USB optical drives. In the past optical drives used different interfaces (SCSI, for example...). Removable media survives the hardware interface change, because there are readers for new hardware interfaces, but if you have some kind of media which is inherent to a hardware interfaces (such as a SCSI HDD, for example), it's a great deal harder to find something which will read it in the future without going to a restoration service.

I actually ran into that very problem recently - I wanted to recover data from an external SCSI HDD, but I don't have any working machines anymore with an external SCSI port, or the cables needed. However, CDs I wrote at the same time (about 10-15 years ago) on an external SCSI CD-R drive were perfectly readable.

I have yet to see an external burner with a fast FireWire interface. And I thought streaming performance was necessary for a successful burn. How have you solved the SCSI issue? I haven't found any converter.

At least it proves that media quality was better "back then"

Yes, you can do it manually. I've done it automated in the past -- Toast can be set up to do disk spanning automatically. (Just looked it up to remind myself of how I did it -- it's been a while.)

I'm just not comfortable anymore using proprietary and expensive applications to do basic stuff. But it's always good to know. Thanx

I doubt that. Japan is already moving forward with a new Super Blu-Ray that has 4x the resolution of BD. You could call it an extension, but it's going to prolong the life of the product indefinitely.

I wouldn't take Japan as an example. They are using different technologies than the rest of the world; sometimes what has been seen odd in the West was widely adopted in Japan; or they enhanced and still use what we consider 'outdated'

The files will be way too large to stream at a reasonable rate for most people, but if you want life-like images on a really large projector screen, it'd be truly awesome. I'd love to have an IMAX-like experience at home (i.e. entire wall of cinema room being used at a 10 foot viewing distance). That's the kind of thing that will be possible soon. I'm sure movie theaters will adopt it if no one else.

Well, it's a fact that ISP in North America seem very unwilling to upgrade their network to 2010's standards. Only a few, isolated projects have been installed with fiber-like speeds, and most still keep 1990's-like caps.

Media 'hanging around' is one of the best reasons to keep a drive in a Mac for years to come. If I buy a CD at Best Buy, I can forget dumping it onto my computer if I have no optical drive. If I want to use older software (100x worse if I'm running Windows on my Mac since I have hundreds of games from the past 10 years that are still fun and they're all on CD-Rom or DVD-Rom, many of which require the disk to be in the drive. So I'd have to create virtual discs with ANOTHER computer or buy an external drive (hassle). I say Apple should have kept the drive-less Mac limited to the Macbook Air rather than try to make ALL Macs into Macbook-Airs. That kind of thin can limit the choices for fast video GPUs, etc. since there is a lot less airflow with ultra-thin designs, etc.

Ah, reminds me of those ubiquitous 'NoCD' cracks from the early 2000's.

I still find that running Windows on a Mac is heresy. I'm an heretic, too. Perhaps they would say that, for those kind of software, you'd better off simply keeping an old Windows box running?

 

[toke lahti]

I didn't knew that people with the appropriate power to do otherwise still fell in the same trap they did back then with GSM, when US and a few others clung onto world-incompatible technology when the rest of the workd went with GSM.

Well, those people act just like Apple, they don't want to co-operate and have standards...
Seriously, using bandwidths is that old global super power politics and somehow US has to always use different frequencies than the rest of the world. LTE is LTE everywhere, but you need additional things to that modem than that baseband chip.

the 90% would have been happier since they would save a $30 from an EC-based card reader. But your hypothesis seems reasonable, but I still don'T understand. Would upgraders really go for a more cumbersome 17" if they wanted upgradeability? Because if the newer models still don't sport the necessary port.. What would be the point in upgrading?

I went for the 17", but also to have hi res matte screen. Maybe things now change when cheapest new ipad have more resolution than the most expensive MBP.
But I think most of upgraders just bit their lip and either kept their old hardware and didn't upgrade, went to the world of "other PC's" or bought used hardware like me.
Or they did what Apple wanted to do; not to buy a 3rd party card or adapter, but a whole new computer.
Eg. "I need to have 2 fw ports. I used to have 1 mbp with 1 fw port and 1 fw EC card. Now I use 2 mbp's."
Or "I used to have my AJA sdi-card plugged to my EC slot, but then I had to buy MP. Then they released mbp with tb! I instantly bought one and new AJA sdi-card with tb port! Only $10k and I'm back where I started and smiling happily!"
Hmmm, btw, could I have tb controller EC card to my mbp? Nope, of course...

I'd guess that very few would have complained that they had to buy $30 card reader. Most of us had already bought a lot of them (you know, sd isn't the only standard in memory cards and especially not in "pro" world..).

WHERE can you actually buy 100GB Blu Rays? Even in large stores I could never find one above 50GB, as I could also never find DVD+RW.

Maybe you aren't looking very hard?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...&N=100007591 600010537&IsNodeId=1&name=DVD+RW
I don't need 100GB bd's now, but I will use them in the lifespan of my burner.
I usually think about the future when I buy something. Not just what I need today.

Looks interesting, but what about reliability? Having three points of failure in the same drive doesn't even provide redundancy in case one drive fails. For some time I was still able to run a PC without a HDD out of a live Linux distribution and a USB key. Even my current Mac setup can be run without an internal HDD, without the ODD, or without the external clone.

3 points of failure if you put ssd inside ODD?
How come?
And if you put all those combined with hdd and card reader and usb port inside your laptop how many points of failure you are carrying?

Hybrid drive is just an idea how to make things more compact. You can always buy separate ODD & ssd, if you like.

 

[zigzagg321]

no disk drive in a PRO model better mean a retina display and SSD's

 

[xxBURT0Nxx]

i love how people are saying "there better be SSD's"

...as if you can't order a mbp with an ssd today

 

[MR1324]

i love how people are saying "there better be SSD's"

...as if you can't order a mbp with an ssd today

they want them for free

 

[zgwortz]

I have yet to see an external burner with a fast FireWire interface. And I thought streaming performance was necessary for a successful burn. How have you solved the SCSI issue? I haven't found any converter.

I've had a burner with firewire in the past, but not a firewire 800 burner.

I never did solve the SCSI issue -- those disks were a personal project and not worth the money or effort I'd need to use a (very expensive) disk recovery service. (Services exist - they can recover the data even if the drive is broken, but at a price...)

Nor was it worth the money and effort it would take for me to re-setup one of my old machines, buy appropriate cables if needed, and try and get the data off it that way. I may eventually troll around to a couple of friends who are machine packrats like me and see if anyone has something capable of reading it already up and running, but it's a low priority item.

At least it proves that media quality was better "back then"

Alas, if only that were true. "Back then", optical media never documented the type of dye used, and some used color additives so you couldn't tell if it was the highly degradable stuff just by the color. If you wanted archival quality, you *really* paid through the nose, and there weren't many vendors. Anything else was a total crapshoot -- you never knew what you were getting, even from some of the more reputable brands. (You still have that to some extent today, but archival quality is more readily available today...)

Still, I've had a 100% recovery from stuff which was on archival, and been fairly lucky with the rest, so it's not too bad. Most of the data I've lost over the last twenty years were things only stored on those SCSI HDDs, and some larger data and executable files, but nothing really important. All the important work related data has been recovered - but I've lost a lot of personal stuff over the years.

 

[Cubytus]

Well, those people act just like Apple, they don't want to co-operate and have standards...
Seriously, using bandwidths is that old global super power politics and somehow US has to always use different frequencies than the rest of the world. LTE is LTE everywhere, but you need additional things to that modem than that baseband chip.

Apple is standards-observant.

I went for the 17", but also to have hi res matte screen. Maybe things now change when cheapest new ipad have more resolution than the most expensive MBP.
But I think most of upgraders just bit their lip and either kept their old hardware and didn't upgrade, went to the world of "other PC's" or bought used hardware like me.
Or they did what Apple wanted to do; not to buy a 3rd party card or adapter, but a whole new computer.
Eg. "I need to have 2 fw ports. I used to have 1 mbp with 1 fw port and 1 fw EC card. Now I use 2 mbp's."
Or "I used to have my AJA sdi-card plugged to my EC slot, but then I had to buy MP. Then they released mbp with tb! I instantly bought one and new AJA sdi-card with tb port! Only $10k and I'm back where I started and smiling happily!"
Hmmm, btw, could I have tb controller EC card to my mbp? Nope, of course...

Hi Res matte screen is also available on the 15". It's the model I would have bought if I needed the additional power.
Supplies of used Macs are by definition unreliable, and some people (me being among them) just can't use refurbished models.

Even buying a second MBP if you keep the previous one is more an inconvenience than anything else. There's only one EC adapter on the market for TB interface, and it still doesn't provide all the functionalities the native EC slot did

I'd guess that very few would have complained that they had to buy $30 card reader. Most of us had already bought a lot of them (you know, sd isn't the only standard in memory cards and especially not in "pro" world..).

I know CF is slowly but surely disappearing... What other memory card formats are in common use?

Maybe you aren't looking very hard?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...&N=100007591 600010537&IsNodeId=1&name=DVD+RW
I don't need 100GB bd's now, but I will use them in the lifespan of my burner.
I usually think about the future when I buy something. Not just what I need today.

I usually think about what I reasonably expect to need within the next year or two when buying something. Any longer, and chances are I would be mistaken, or a significantly different technology comes out that would better suit my needs. Exactly the reason why I decided not to go 15". Admittedly, considering where Macs seem to be headed since 2008, it may not be the right decision.

I was talking about large brick&mortar stores: http://www.futureshop.ca/fr-CA/category/disques-dvdr/12501.aspx?path=12aef36e390459bbc651421b532fb38cfr01No 12cm DVD+RW. No 50GB Blu Rays, either: http://www.futureshop.ca/fr-CA/category/disques-blu-ray/25894.aspx?path=1813dae28a38d8dfb6c484de6487affcfr01

3 points of failure if you put ssd inside ODD?
How come?
And if you put all those combined with hdd and card reader and usb port inside your laptop how many points of failure you are carrying?

If the hybrid drive craps, you can't use the laptop anymore until the expectedly hard-to-find part is repaired. If discrete media readers or drives fail, you still have some sort of failover, not least because replacements are easier to find.

I've had a burner with firewire in the past, but not a firewire 800 burner.

Save it as a museum piece. I can't lay my hands on a (reliable) external FW-based interface..

I never did solve the SCSI issue -- those disks were a personal project and not worth the money or effort I'd need to use a (very expensive) disk recovery service. (Services exist - they can recover the data even if the drive is broken, but at a price...)

Nor was it worth the money and effort it would take for me to re-setup one of my old machines, buy appropriate cables if needed, and try and get the data off it that way. I may eventually troll around to a couple of friends who are machine packrats like me and see if anyone has something capable of reading it already up and running, but it's a low priority item.

Have I knew you and this issue two years ago... I found a perfectly-working iMac G3 with SCSI inside. Gladly would have helped.

[/quote]Still, I've had a 100% recovery from stuff which was on archival, and been fairly lucky with the rest, so it's not too bad. Most of the data I've lost over the last twenty years were things only stored on those SCSI HDDs, and some larger data and executable files, but nothing really important. All the important work related data has been recovered - but I've lost a lot of personal stuff over the years.[/QUOTE]So, except from those proprietary burner-needed Milleniata discs, what would you advise to save boatloads of data in archival quality? Obviously, we will only know when time is over, and we can't verify what manufacturers claim.

 

[sk58781111]

15" retina display, 256gb ssd, thinner, lighter, no optical and a $1,499 price point and i'm all-in. apple, you can do it!!

 

[zgwortz]

Have I knew you and this issue two years ago... I found a perfectly-working iMac G3 with SCSI inside. Gladly would have helped.

Somewhere I still have a B&W PowerMac G3, and a grey PowerMac G4 (which I used regularly right up until 2009 - now *that* was a solid machine -- and probably *still* works if I bother to dig it out and set it up...), both of which have SCSI inside, but I don't have the right cables, and some of the SCSI HDDs I want to recover data from are not Mac formats - and not all of them actually power up anymore. (I have some PC, some Linux, some Mac, and several Amiga drives, including 4 Syquest removable platters -- all of which I want to recover stuff off of eventually... ) But as I said, I'm not sure it's worth the time and effort to get them working again, or the money to find the right cables.

So, except from those proprietary burner-needed Milleniata discs, what would you advise to save boatloads of data in archival quality? Obviously, we will only know when time is over, and we can't verify what manufacturers claim.

Well, I'm mostly concerned with 10-20 year timeframes, so for work, I've been using Archival Gold discs in normal burners - and I tend to make multiple copies, and store them in different physical locations.

For longer term stuff, if you need it, as you pointed out, 50-100 year manufacturer claims simply aren't testable, so I'd make even more copies, and set up a review and renew program - where you set up a plan to review the media after a period of time, and recopy it to new, more modern, media periodically. You can never have too many copies of data, IMHO.

(There will always be some kind of archival media being produced despite people who think everything will be stored on the net - because there will always be a need to archive huge amounts of data. Our ability to produce large quantities of data is increasing just as fast, if not faster, than media capacities, and definitely faster than network speed increases, and I honestly don't see that changing any time soon...)