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Apple SuperDrive Gets Faster....For Free

Posted by timothy on from the good-upgrade dept.

garaxiel writes "Just made a punch over to apple's website to notice a link detailing an update to all SuperDrives (or most; they provide a way to check if you're up to date) so that the superdrive can use the newer, faster media. Heck, if this is all I had to do to get a faster burner back in the day, I would have gladly switched to Apple!"

5 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. No, it doesn't by RalphBNumbers · · Score: 4, Informative
    From the FAQ on the linked site:
    Will this update enable my 2x SuperDrive to write at a higher speed?
    This update enables you to read from and write to the new media, but it does not increase the speed of the drive. In fact, the updated 2x SuperDrive writes to this new media at 1x. So to obtain the highest performance from your 2x SuperDrive, we recommend that you continue using 2x DVD-R media just as you do today.

    So, your drive doesn't get faster. In fact, if you buy the wrong kind of media, it gets slower.
    --
    "The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
    1. Re:No, it doesn't by Drakino · · Score: 4, Informative

      And Mac users can't seem to understand why everyone else thinks they're stupid.

      Ironicially, this proves the point in the other direction. The person who submitted the article said "I would have gladly switched to Apple" indicating he is currently not a Mac user.

      It's also a duplicate story, posted here on Slashdot months ago

  2. RTFA. by mikedaisey · · Score: 4, Informative


    You do not get a faster SuperDrive than you currently have. You'd know that if you had actually read the page you linked to rather than spasmodically sending it straight to Slashdot. From the same page:

    "Will this update enable my 2x SuperDrive to write at a higher speed?
    This update enables you to read from and write to the new media, but it does not increase the speed of the drive."

    As I said the other day, I thought that previewing was supposed to help improve accuracy?

  3. No it doesn't by moosesocks · · Score: 4, Informative

    The update doesn't make the drives write faster. The article, says that the update allows 4x media to be written to at 1x or 2x speeds on the SuperDrive. I believe it has something to do with the new 4x media being slightly different (I seem to recall that this also effects PC DVD-R drives as well, and similar updates are availible for those drives)

    To quote directly from the FAQ:

    Will this update enable my 2x SuperDrive to write at a higher speed?
    This update enables you to read from and write to the new media, but it does not increase the speed of the drive. In fact, the updated 2x SuperDrive writes to this new media at 1x. So to obtain the highest performance from your 2x SuperDrive, we recommend that you continue using 2x DVD-R media just as you do today.

    --
    -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
  4. What's the big deal? by commodoresloat · · Score: 4, Funny

    Superdrive, so what? I had one of these plugged into my Mac Plus. It let me burn 800K floppies and 1.4M floppies. Big deal, so they made a faster one; who uses floppies anymore anyway?