Teardown Confirms Apple Still Using Modular Solid-State Drive on New MacBook Air

[wizard]

You have no idea what you are talking about.

The only bad thing is that they do not come equipped with sand force controller.

Have you ever stopped to think that Apples primary concern is a reliable computer? I have faith that Apple has indeed did their home work and implemented what they believe is the best compromise in a flash controller. Yes I said compromise because in the end that is what engineers do, they trade off a number of factors to produce a machine at a given price point.

This laptop was not made as well as one would hope.

Everything indicates that AIR is one of the best built laptops out there.

They did not upgrade the GPU; Intel 3000 runs slightly better than the 320M and the SSD is not even running the latest SSD controller.

Well this I agree with. I have no love for the Intel GPU and especially am concerned about the lack of OpenCL support.

Which is a little disappointing, considering the fact that if you had to pay premium you would want the better one.

Now this is garbage. Find me a similar machine, like the AIR, that is priced as well.

Oh well, the next air will probably be what will finally convert me on over.

Well I'm holding off my self, as long as I can. The motivation is different though.

 

[MattInOz]

You both are right of course - both latency and bandwidth would be bottlenecks. So not right now but may be in future one can hope some connector will get it right and we can have hot plug laptop RAM!

That said couldn't you make a Thunderbolt Scratch disk with RAM modules?

Sure If it lost power you'd lose the data on there.
Still might be useful when dealing with large files that create a lot of temporary data. It should offer faster reads and writes than the SATA SDD and our not going to using up write cycles on the SSD modules for data that doesn't need to persist.

Sure not as good as real RAM by any stretch, and not sure their would be enough of a market anyway. Maybe as part of a TB Raid.

 

[MattInOz]

I've seen a ton of RAM fail (also decades of using computers). Granted, it's usually some idiot thinking its ok to vacuum the inside of their computers or put it on carpet (static electricity), or just touching the chips with their hands and not being properly grounded, etc. They are the most easy to damage components in computer. But you're right that they don't randomly fail on their own often, though, so in the case of MBA, where you shouldn't have a user sticking their hands in it, it's probably a non-issue or at least worth the trade-off of having to replace the whole board if it goes bad.

Every time I've had RAM go bad in a work machine it's generally gone bad again in a pretty short time then the repairer says "We thought it was probably a bad Motherboard that killed the RAM" So that gets replaced after.
Then they tell me RAM tends to be bad out of the box or something sends it bad. We've had machine go it to the shop and the issue was badly seated RAM.

I'm not sure it was that hard a choice for Apple to make. Bad RAM the board doesn't leave the Factory, Bad Motherboard they end up replacing the RAM as well. Plus they get the save the space of that big clunky RAM module connector.

SSD much smaller connector allows than to save Board space and double layer in the volume created by CPU and heatsink. I always thought the rumor of onboard SSD was strange.

 

[parapup]

That said couldn't you make a Thunderbolt Scratch disk with RAM modules?

Yeah that thought crossed my mind too - I mean not long ago memory bandwidth for DDR RAM was around that mark. So if there is OS level integration to use the slower RAM wisely I can see it working well.

 

[jackrv]

Yeah that thought crossed my mind too - I mean not long ago memory bandwidth for DDR RAM was around that mark. So if there is OS level integration to use the slower RAM wisely I can see it working well.

They are out there, but not for Thunderbolt yet.. Something like http://www.ramsan.com/products/rackmount-ram-storage-line , but a more prosumer-ish version.

Something like http://www.ramsan.com/products/pcie-storage/ramsan-70 , which is already based on a PCIe bus (theoretically could be Thunderbolted). And that is 2GB throughput (not Gb !). Maybe use DDR3 instead of flash, or have a decent DDR3 cache and you'd have one hell of a scratchdisk.

 

[Photics]

This is good news. I was feeling down about the White MacBook going bye-bye... and the new MacMini launching without an optical drive... but this is encouraging. I was concerned about the SSD. But if I can replace it, then that means I don't have to worry as much about the drive going bad.

The standard RAM in the base MacBook air is kinda low though. 2 GB is not a lot and that limit is more likely to trigger Virtual Memory. I was getting psyched to get a Pentalobe Screwdriver and a MacBook Air... but then I read this...

"the RAM is not user-serviceable"​

...what?!

 

[John.B]

What exactly is the technical difference between 2.1 and 4.0? I'd like to think that 4.0 is better as it is more recent, but a quick go on google is showing something about use on low power devices.

If it is better than 2.1, then why is the iMac and MBP still using it?

http://www.appleinsider.com/article..._4_0_support_to_new_macbook_air_mac_mini.html

Bluetooth 4.0 includes "Classic Bluetooth," "Bluetooth High Speed," and "Bluetooth Low Energy" protocols. The high-speed mode is based on Wi-Fi, while the classic mode supports legacy protocols.

The iMac and MBP will probably get Bluetooth 4.0 at the next refresh.

 

[powerbooks]

Keyboard switch?

Not sure if you can buy the new lighted keyboard and replace the 2010 model one. But on second thought, the LED needs new plug in power source, so probably no!

 

[MattInOz]

Yeah that thought crossed my mind too - I mean not long ago memory bandwidth for DDR RAM was around that mark. So if there is OS level integration to use the slower RAM wisely I can see it working well.

Pretty sure I'd have a stick or two of DDR RAM spare might be hard to buy new these days.

 

[ZipZap]

I've seen a ton of RAM fail (also decades of using computers). Granted, it's usually some idiot thinking its ok to vacuum the inside of their computers or put it on carpet (static electricity), or just touching the chips with their hands and not being properly grounded, etc. They are the most easy to damage components in computer. But you're right that they don't randomly fail on their own often, though, so in the case of MBA, where you shouldn't have a user sticking their hands in it, it's probably a non-issue or at least worth the trade-off of having to replace the whole board if it goes bad.

Maybe the SSDs in the MBA have less failures, but SSDs are failing. I don't know if this is more or less than HDD, but it's happening. I don't really like to reference Jeff Atwood, but he talks about it here with an anecdote of someone having 8 different SSDs fail on them in 2 years: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

I would not classify these as failures:

vacuum the inside of their computers or put it on carpet (static electricity), or just touching the chips with their hands and not being properly grounded

 

[Clive At Five]

A true step forward in innovation would be to make this "SSD card" easily-accessible and user-upgradeable like RAM.

...wait, the MBA's RAM is soldered, isn't it?

 

[KnightWRX]

Nobody noted this little interesting tidbit ?

Intel E78296 01PB10 / E116A746 SLJ4K Platform Controller Hub. We're guessing this includes an integrated Thunderbolt controller. It's not this part, but it's similar.

There is no Thunderbolt controller otherwise in the MacBook Air. It seems Intel are already shipping chipsets with integrated Thunderbolt.

 

[Hellhammer]

Nobody noted this little interesting tidbit ?



There is no Thunderbolt controller otherwise in the MacBook Air. It seems Intel are already shipping chipsets with integrated Thunderbolt.

Yeah, I saw that. It is indeed interesting but it also makes a lot sense, given the space issue in MBA.

 

[Eidorian]

Nobody noted this little interesting tidbit ?



There is no Thunderbolt controller otherwise in the MacBook Air. It seems Intel are already shipping chipsets with integrated Thunderbolt.

Time to fight for bandwidth over DMI 2.0 then.