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Toshiba Introduces MacBook Air 'Blade-Type' SSDs to Mass Market
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This is highly doubtful. The main appeal of net books and the reason they've sold so well is not their size but their price. Adding these would price them right out of their current market.
No. The original air does not have the connector necessary for these.
He wasn't referencing video chat as Apple inventions. he was listing those items as Apple's implementation of said items that Apple then released to the community in one way or another. And for the record FaceTime is NOT iChat renamed. It is a much more bandwidth efficient form of video chat. iChat requires processors that are more than twice as fast as those contained in the iPhone.
Yes, but how much time? These parts are still premium priced and will remain so for a long time for the overwhelming majority of the PC laptop market. Because of that it will be a while before these become commonplace in PC laptops and even longer still for the net book market.
I doubt it will have USB 3.0 and light peak. Also, if they remove the optical and hard drives do you really think Apple won't go thinner and lighter before they add batteries? The current MBPs get 8-10 hours. I think Apple is satisfied with that. Look at the iPhone 4 and iPod touch as examples. Were the last models for all intents and purposes not thin enough? I given the choice don't you think most consumers would have chosen longer battery life over an even thinner design? That isn't what Apple chose.
I would not mind these going in the next MacBook Pro's as long as they replace the missing space with more batteries
It'll be interesting to see what Apple does with their 15" and 17" models. I don't see any reason why they simply couldn't scale the existing 13" design up to fit the appropriate screen. And, as is the case with the SD slot present on the 13 but absent on the 11, by making the case larger, there's more space on the sides for additional ports. I could see Apple adding back Firewire and Ethernet on the larger ones. But the big delta in the design as it is now is the optical drive.
Is Steve willing to make the optical drive an external add-on for all of the lineup? Optical drives will surely go the way of the floppy (2GB SD cards are $5, 8GB cards are $10. Not much more than the first generation DVD-R media, only SD cards are also reusable)... Is it time for that transition to start already?
I think offering a secondary HDD (or extra SDD(s)) in the place of the ODD makes more sense than outright eliminating the ODD.
Toshiba's controller is a lower-performance/lower-cost controller (it's the same one that the Kingston V-series SSDs use). Having one of those Kingston SSDs in my computer, I'd say the performance is just fine.
Memory is not the same as storage. The memory is soldered to the board. The storage (these sticks) is not.
With a desire to get an 11" MBA, I would get the 4gb RAM and 64gb storage model, with an eye to replacing the 64gb with a 256gb SSD module. Even if I had to live with the smaller storage for a few months, it would be worth it.
Hoping to see some pricing and availability on these soon.
Hoping to see some pricing and availability on these soon.
Whoops! I just took another look at the inside photos, and I can see the connector...
I realize memory is different... I just incorrectly remembered that the flash storage was soldered on as well.
My bad
I realize memory is different... I just incorrectly remembered that the flash storage was soldered on as well.
My bad
Dare we say - "BD"?
Much more practical with writeable Blu-ray Discs - especially if you use software so most backups are just the deltas since the last backup.
Since we "dial" a phone number on our cell phone "line" - I'll predict "never".
When "thin" is more important that "useful" to the design team, that's what you get.
Much more practical with writeable Blu-ray Discs - especially if you use software so most backups are just the deltas since the last backup.
Apropos of nothin': When do we officially stop calling it "disk" space?
Since we "dial" a phone number on our cell phone "line" - I'll predict "never".
When "thin" is more important that "useful" to the design team, that's what you get.
News sources report that 256GB modules are thicker than the smaller counterparts so this might not be possible.
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Hmm. Hope this is not the case, but if it is, then maybe will have to settle for the 128gb SSD. Which would be faster than the Apple installed version, from what I've read so far.
Doh! Thanks for the clarification. So I may just bite the bullet and buy the MBA 11" with the 128gb SSD. Still would be nice to have a 256gb option someday.
Who took it out of the case?
"Toshiba announced today the introduction of a "new form factor" in high capacity solid-state storage called the "Blade X-gale" series."
Everything is a trade off. When you have a laptop as thin as the MBA, then millimeters matter. It's a matter of what's important to you.
hmmmm?
Hmmm....this may have already been commented on, but wondering if these might perhaps be used in the next gen iPad?
M.
Hmmm....this may have already been commented on, but wondering if these might perhaps be used in the next gen iPad?
M.
How thick is 1.5 mm ?
Not very.
If Apple had asked customers (yes, I know that is an absurd thought)
"We can make the 11" Apple Air thinner by about the thickness of a plastic credit card - or we can leave enough space to fit in a 256 GB disk. Would you like the option of a 256 MB drive at the cost of it being thicker by the thickness of a MasterCard?
But, the turtlenecked one decides these questions - Apple customers don't count.
Lol, no sarcasm. That's what I want. I don't care how much it is, it would be worth it.
I doubt whether 4 64GB SSD's would cost all that much, and would likely run close to 4 times faster than a single 256GB SSD. Bandwidth allowing, of course.
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I'm going to stay away from OS X on SSDs until it gets TRIM support. And Apple, how about a decent SSD with TRIM + dual SandForce controllers?
Awesome. 4x the failure probability and next to no meaningful performance increase. Can't wait.
A vastly more useful addition to the iPad would be an SDHC slot - the omission of which in the first place is nearly as mystifying as the missing camera(s).
Awesome. 4x the failure probability and next to no meaningful performance increase. Can't wait.
I would think the failure rate would be less for SSD than HD. As for RAID, I like the idea of RAID mirroring. Built in time machine? That day will have to wait for prices to drop.
And yet that one dimension being decreased by 1.5mm is a significant percent decrease in volume.
I don't know the actual dimensions of the air but consider an 11" x 8" area with 1cm thickness. That is roughly 28.0cm x 20.3cm x 1.0cm = 568cm^3.
After reducing the thickness by 0.15cm the volume becomes: 28.0cm x 20.3cm x 0.85 = 483cm^3
A linear difference of 1.5mm is not so easy to perceive but the change in volume is. The new volume in the example I gave is 85% of the original; not trivial at all.
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