Apple and LG plan Flash Laptops

Lucas123 writes "An article in Computerworld states that Apple and LG each plan to launch new laptops — one that's supposed to ship this month — with hybrid disk drives. The new drives are like hybrid cars in that the NAND flash memory works in conjunction with the spinning disk, kicking in data that can be cached like portions of the operating system, which can make for much faster boot up and resume times."

Comments

Re:Warranty?

[soft_guy]

I wonder if the hybrid drive warranty in Apple's laptop will conveniently last about as long as the iPod's? I'm willing to bet that the warranty will be Apple's standard 1 year warranty. If your iPod is breaking after a year, you are abusing it.

Re:What "resume" time?

[TheNetAvenger]

Windows and even linux machines can have such a wide variety of hardware and all it takes is one bad driver to make sleep or suspend not work.

Ok, you realize that maybe .05% of Windows users have issues like this? You could have a bad device driver on OSX and find the same issue arise. PS Vista, doesn't allow drivers to do this, so the .05% of the people with a bad driver no longer have issues.

Actually, OS X is superior when it comes to sleep
Why do people believe stuff like this? I know it is Mac lore, but it is not reality.

If you want to get technical, OSX has a lot of catching up to do with regard to modern sleep/suspend/hibernate features in other OSes.

OSX didn't even offer a full power off hibernate state until 2005, something the rest of the PC world has been using since the early 90s as a common feature.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302 477

And in comparison, the 'glorious' sleep state of OSX is like the old standard 'standby' feature PC users have been using the early 1990s. Even APM supported Standby.

OSX also lacks features that other OS users just take for granted. In 1999, my computer (using ACPI) would turn itself ON based on a scheduled task, check my email, etc, and then shut itself off. And this is with old Win2k back then. (And remember this from a FULLY POWERED OFF STATE, NOT JUST SLEEP/STANDBY.)

OSX has some really good stuff, but power management is truly not a strong point to argue. Especially when you also take into account device power saving features, CPU/GPU throttling, etc.

So to continue my previous comparison, my 2002 Toshiba Laptop has a legacy free BIOS, (meaning no BIOS delay), and it can turn itself back on from a NO POWER state in less than 2 seconds. Which is as fast as most OSX powerbooks can wake up from their 'powered' sleep state.

OSX is not superior in any regard, and still has catching up to do when it comes to no power sleep states, responding to tasks with all power off and any non-standby/sleep power saving modes.