New MacBook Pros To Sport Light Peak Technology

An anonymous reader writes "Over the past few years, Apple has systematically upgraded the base level MacBook to a level where the difference between the Pro and consumer models were arguably becoming negligible. That's about to change. Apple will reportedly introduce a completely re-designed MacBook Pro this April that will borrow features from the recently released MacBook Air. The new Pros will reportedly come with an SSD and Light Peak technology, a transfer protocol capable of 10 Gbps both up and down. Light Peak, jointly developed by Intel and Apple, will reportedly be an Apple exclusive at first."

Comments

Fantastic

[binarylarry]

Apple customers will subsidize the adoption of this technology, so I can buy a similar laptop in 6 mos for much cheaper.

Thank you Steven Q Jobs! :)

Re:Fantastic

[aliquis]

Mac people ...

Now as for light peak, here's why you should get excited. Really excited. Light Peak is an emerging technology capable of transferring huge chunks of data with blazing speed. We're talking about 10 Gbps both up and down. So yeah, we're talking about a huge technological leap here.

So what is it? A connectivity alternative? Network replacement? 10 Gbps? Really? And I should be impressed why?

Or is it wireless? Somewhat better. But still? Yawn?

That make it "pro"?

Yawn twice.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

yah and they'll be able to use it with absolutely nothing else since nothing else will support it. how often do apple users link up over a cable anyway? that wouldn't make them look cool on the coffee shop circuit.

Re:Fantastic

[Samalie]

Light Peak is a design that is intended to replace the myriad of bus technologies present in the average computer.

For example...in my current rig, I have IDE, SATA (both 1.5 and 3gb versions, no SATA/6Gb),eSATA, USB & Firewire.

Light Peak is an optical technology eventually destined to replace all these different specifications into one 10GB/s-capable-today bus, with speeds expected to reach 100GB/s+ by 2020.

(All this info, and more, from TFA)

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be excited because it allows protocols over LightPeak transport and is fast enough to actually handle it. That means we may finally have one connector type for network, display, peripheral, whatever...

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll harder:

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/imac?aid=AIC-WWW-NAUS-K2-STARTING-IMAC-INDEX&cp=STARTING-IMAC-INDEX

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook?aid=AIC-NAUS-K2-BUYNOW-MACBOOK-INDEX&cp=BUYNOW-MACBOOK-INDEX

$1300 dollars too high in price on the desktop
$1000 too high on the laptop.
$200 too high on the phone

Re:Fantastic

[MightyMartian]

Or, alternatively another dead end like Firewire.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell me you aren't trying to argue that integrated graphics, a Core 2 Duo, and 2GB of RAM in a cheap plastic case with soldered-in battery for $1000 is anything approaching a good deal.

Re:Fantastic

[bennomatic]

Hm. I like apple products, and some here have accused me of being a fanatic. But looking at my history, it's more like this:

Year 1: buy $1100 laptop. Give old laptop to wife.
Year 2: remain happy with laptop.
Year 3: remain happy with laptop.
Year 4: remain happy with laptop.
Year 5: Wife spills coffee on her laptop. Give "new" laptop to wife, buy $1100 laptop.
All years: Consider phone, put it off for a year because work pays for crappy blackberry.
This past year: Consider iPad, put it off for the time being.

I guess I'm just not enough of a zealot.

Re:Fantastic

[an00bis]

Sounds like another bag of hurt

Re:Fantastic

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Being optical, and Mac exclusive, it should manage to be even more expensive than Firewire! Progress!

Re:Fantastic

[Totenglocke]

Apple customers will subsidize the adoption of this technology, so I can buy a similar laptop in 6 mos for much cheaper.

Thank you Steven Q Jobs! :)

Quite true, and based on Apple's advertising and my own person experiences with Mac users, they won't even know / care about the new technology. I'm not bashing Mac users here, just pointing out that (with the exception of two people I know who are IT consultants), all the Mac users I know have little understanding about hardware, nor do they care to know about the hardware.

Re:Fantastic

[Macrat]

So what is it? A connectivity alternative? Network replacement? 10 Gbps? Really? And I should be impressed why?

If LightPeak had USB in the name, you would probably be posting how great it will be.

Re:Fantastic

[Knuckles]

Imagine this ... hold your breath ... they may care what they can *do* with the hardware.

Re:Fantastic

[bonch]

So what is it? A connectivity alternative? Network replacement? 10 Gbps? Really? And I should be impressed why?

Here you go.

Yawn twice.

Don't worry. Like USB in the 90s, this technology will eventually become standard on PCs thanks to Apple forcing device manufacturers to support it for the Mac. And, like before, PC users won't acknowledge yet another one of Apple's contributions to computing standards. Instead, like always, there will be more outdated one-button mouse jokes.

Re:Fantastic

[Firehed]

Firewire is dead? Really? I wonder how my 5TB or so of external storage is accessible... I must look into that.

Re:Fantastic

[History's Coming To]

My girlfriend (yes, really! ;) ) was asking me this morning if I knew where she could buy an as-new MacBook from circa 2007. She wants a Mac but can't afford the latest model, whereas I quite happily pootle along on a £200 netbook. Seriously, Apple could make a killing by producing a really budget level MacBook rather than ever more expensive ones with...er....well I'm not entirely sure what they've introduced, but it's not as useful as, you know, a cheap portable Mac that people can afford to get them out of the Windows cycle....

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess if I made my living begging my mom for enough my money to stuff my fat basement-dwelling face with McDonald's cheeseburgers, actually spending money on a computer would bug me.

Also you got the prices wrong, but don't worry, it didn't weaken your point since you didn't have one anyway.

Re:Fantastic

[93 Escort Wagon]

Apple customers will subsidize the adoption of this technology, so I can buy a similar* laptop in 6 mos for much cheaper.

* For sufficiently loose definitions of "similar".

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Gigabits not Bytes - http://techresearch.intel.com/ProjectDetails.aspx?Id=143

Re:Fantastic

[mitgib]

Firewire is dead? Really? I wonder how my 5TB or so of external storage is accessible... I must look into that.

I vote telepathy.

Re:Fantastic

[hobo sapiens]

"all the Mac users I know have little understanding about hardware, nor do they care to know about the hardware."

Not having to care is liberating.

I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it. Today, you really don't have to know what kind of spark system your car has, or what kind of plugs it uses, or what kind of fuel delivery system it has. You don't have to clean varnish out of the carbuerator every year, or have the piston rings done at 60k miles. You don't have to replace the plugs and points every 10k miles. Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to.

I am a software developer. I use a macbook pro. It's great. I need something that works. I do not want to fuss with the OS, because I gain nothing from doing this and I honestly don't really care about it much. I want a powerful (i.e. *nix) CLI. I'd like to be able to play some music on it while I work. The mac does this and more better than any other computer I have used, regardless of OS. I can use it to accomplish work and not have to always figure out why it's acting weird now like I have had to do with every windows computer I have ever used since the dawn of time. I also don't have to spend time tweaking it out to make it behave like I have had to do with every linux desktop I have had for the last five or so years of using linux.

I don't know what the hardware internals are. All I know is that the display looks great, the aluminum case feels really solid (not some glued together plastic crap), it has crashed only once in a year (and this was due to the square turd known as java), every time I go to open it up it just works, and the trackpad is so awesome I don't even miss a mouse. By comparison, every other trackpad I have used to date has been so far inferior that it might as well have been an old broken NES controller hacked into the USB port, or even a couple of sticks tied together and plugged into the headphone jack. Apple got it right.

I dislike the Apple "cool factor" because it causes people to overlook the fact that Apple is making awesome computers with an OS waaaay superior to Windows because it has a *nix CLI under it and way better than linux distro X because it has the polish you'd expect from commercial software. Most people who dislike Apple, I find, have never actually gotten their hands on any of their products and dislike Apple based on principle. Apple has their flaws (iPhone 4 comes to mind + Jobs denial of said flaws), but let's not pretend that some dell laptop running windows 7 is even on the same level as a macbook pro.

Re:Fantastic

[h4rr4r]

Hopefully iscsi, 10GigE iscsi would be even better.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Showered]

Amen.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

He says while listening to music that was most likely either recorded or enhanced at the studio using Firewire audio devices.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone didn't get enough turkey this Thanksgiving, did he now...

Side Note: Coronaries are not a fun way to die. Relax a bit, or you'll keep steering yourself in that general direction.

Re:Fantastic

[pherthyl]

Well said. Similar situation for me. I used Linux for years, and eventually just got tired of fixing shit. The first time fixing every single problem is a challenge, and as a student I enjoyed picking the system apart and troubleshooting. It was a good experience. But when the wireless breaks again and again. When the video is crappy again and again, eventually it wears you down.

Up until last year I didn't own any mac products and didn't see a need to. Now I have an iMac at home and my faster Windows machine gets turned on maybe once a month. I have a Windows desktop machine at work, but use the Macbook whenever I can. Now I have an iPhone 4 for work, and it is fantastic. The thought that went into every detail is quite extraordinary. We tested the latest Android phones, and while they do most of the same things, they aren't anywhere close to the iPhone. I see it the same as for MP3 players and the iPod. When the iPod was released all the other mp3 players were arguably better from a features perspective. And yet the iPod dominated very quickly. Ease of use and thoughtful design beats raw features every time.

Re:Fantastic

[failedlogic]

I don't have a MBP but I'm seriously considering buying one. I agee on all your points.

I only wonder, on a tangent, if Apple will eventually replace all of what we know of OSX (incl *nix CLI) with some form of iOS without the *nix for the desktop - so its one OS for Desktop, iPad, iPhone etc. It seems to be directed this way with the emphasis and plans for the App Store for desktop.

The hardware still kicks but, I'm just wondering how much longer the desktop OS will.

Re:Fantastic

[D Ninja]

I do not typically use Apple products - mostly due to their cost factor. (I do like to tinker with my OS, too. To give you an idea, I use Gentoo. And, no, I don't use it so I can rice it. I actually like to learn what it's doing...) Anyway, a friend of mine showed me his new Macbook Pro this weekend. Wow...I am seriously impressed. What a well-designed product. Of course, to get the specs he wanted, he had to pay $2500...I can't afford that. Either way, I definitely see the appeal of the product from a technical standpoint.

Re:Fantastic

[CAIMLAS]

What pisses me off about this is that it's "Apple exclusive" at this point. Why the hell?

In doing so, they are pissing off many other vendors - HP, Lenovo/IBM, and Dell, to name a few, but certainly LSI would like the ability to license the technology.

I have been anxiously waiting for over a year for Intel to release this technology. It appears to be the one, great hope for a truly fast, inexpensive, and universal device interconnect.

Right now, we've got a handful of transport interconnects in the 8-12Gb/s range, all of which suck for one reason or another:

* 10Gb Ethernet - not such a bad option, as it can utilize older infrastructure fabric and can be used for networking topology, as well. Your storage can be easily transported over it using traditional network software.
* Fiberchannel - Expensive and very single-purpose, but still a better option than
* Infiniband - cheapest, but horrible support.
* Firewire - hitting a bandwidth limitation and hasn't really improved much in a while.
* USB 3.0 - bound by the host/guest model and host-oriented. Horribly CPU bound, still. Decent 'general purpose' when you don't need a decent inter-host transport.
* SAS - holds too much legacy crap in it from SCSI. Relatively cost, but you're still (usually) requiring one or more of the other device interconnects for a storage system.

The fact that Apple is holding onto the reigns of a single bus design which could change

The supreme irony is that Apple doesn't actually make anything which will be well suited to utilize Light Peak. Internetworking? Fast server storage? SAN? Nada: none of their platforms are suited for it, and pretty much anything you could do with Apple platforms can already be done using existing buses. (If anyone wonders why it might be said that Apple doesn't innovate, this is one good example: take something awesome and wrap it in pretty white plastic, doing nothing new with it.)

Talk about a disappointing "gimmick". Hopefully it'll reach mainstream within the next year or two, or it'll likely see an unfortunate demise similar to Firewire (low adoption rates, fringe technology), making Infiniband look all the more attractive.

Re:Fantastic

[BitHive]

Intel gets to work out the kinks on relatively uniform hardware configurations and Apple users are guaranteed to jump all over the first generation of something if it's marketed as "exclusive". It's win-win.

Re:Fantastic

[CAIMLAS]

I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it.

Yeah? Except that's not true. The same thing still holds true today as it did then: the biggest change has that material science has improved (in most regards) our fuels, oils, and filters to the point where the same problems do not occur.

It was slightly different in the 50s, because we were at the epoch of engine design while other components (body construction, suspension, etc.) had not yet caught up. Consider, however, a 20-30 year old vehicle.

Those same old vehicles will operate just as reliably today as your newer vehicles (in many cases, more reliably. Vehicles today are plagued by the same problems as vehicles 20-30 years ago: there are still lemons and less reliable vehicles. (For instance, a friend just got rid of her 2007 Toyota (IIRC) because there was an engine defect which led to a shorter engine life.)

Today, you really don't have to know what kind of spark system your car has, or what kind of plugs it uses, or what kind of fuel delivery system it has.

Sure you do. You also still need to replace your fuel filters regularly (but I'm guessing most cars made in the last decade have never had it done). not doing so makes your finely tuned modern vehicle last a mere 100k or so miles before needing an overhaul (or, as is the case today due to the expense involved, scrapping it and getting a new one). Likewise, people don't replace their shocks, struts, etc. - but it should still be done.

You don't have to clean varnish out of the carbuerator every year, or have the piston rings done at 60k miles.

You don't have to replace the plugs and points every 10k miles.

You don't have to do that with older vehicles with modern plugs and "points", either. Again, material science has made them more reliable, and the actual damage done is less due to improvements in fuel.

Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to.

Have you driven in one of the land yachts from the 50s? Talk about an incredible ride. (Subjective value assessments are just that - subjective.)

I don't know what the hardware internals are. All I know is that the display looks great, the aluminum case feels really solid (not some glued together plastic crap), it has crashed only once in a year (and this was due to the square turd known as java), every time I go to open it up it just works, and the trackpad is so awesome I don't even miss a mouse. By comparison, every other trackpad I have used to date has been so far inferior that it might as well have been an old broken NES controller hacked into the USB port, or even a couple of sticks tied together and plugged into the headphone jack. Apple got it right.

I suspect that something like, say, your average SharePoint site, gets designed with the above demonstrated principles in mind. Who cares about the hardware, as long as it looks nice! It is very, very important to developers to know how the hardware works. I'd not want one who does not anywhere near my systems - it's that mentality that leads to (to use your earlier analogy of automobiles) people who always drive their vehicle redlining and then wonder why their breaks give out after 5k miles and the engine gives out after 20k miles.

Re:Fantastic

[shelterpaw]

Not if intel has anything to say about it and remember that Apple was the first to adopt USB and Intel is partnering with Apple on this one, so I doubt it'll go the way of firewire. FireWire would have been much better than HDMI in the home audio word. Now we all live in HDMI hell.

Re:Fantastic

[jscotta44]

So true! I mean, look at the high profit margins and over all profits being made by the other manufacturers! I mean look there's, uh,um, well...there's hmm.

Okay, so maybe that approach won't work out because no one else is making the profit that Apple is making.

Re:Fantastic

[jscotta44]

iOS is still *nix. It is basically the same as the desktop OS, until you get to some layers like the user interface. That is why you use Xcode and the Cocoa frameworks to develop for the iOS stuff.

Re:Fantastic

[__aaqvdr516]

I couldn't write any response to your post that didn't come off sounding like I was trolling so all I can say is...
I'm one of those people that dislike Apple on principle and that I disagree with you about your last statement. In a banana to banana (because you know I hate Apples) comparison I wouldn't pretend to say that Win 7 is on the same level, I'd just flat out say that Win 7 is well above it.

Re:Fantastic

[Totenglocke]

I never said that they didn't - but everyone's too busy flaming to think about what I actually said. I merely pointed out that they don't know or care about the hardware and thus pay more (the person I replied to mentioned how Mac users are subsidizing the development of this technology). Just like how people who know nothing about cars end up paying more at a car dealer - those who are knowledgeable will know when they're getting a fair deal or not.

But yes, I'm a "troll" for pointing out that people who don't know much about what they're buying end up paying more money.

Re:Fantastic

[quacking duck]

Firewire isn't exactly dead-end, but it is one of Apple's biggest mistakes after Jobs returned. Not for developing it or promoting it, but for charging licensing fees to include it in your hardware. It was fairly cheap--IIRC it was $1 at first, but if you were Dell or HP and moving millions of machines, that added up.

That provided all the boost USB2 needed. Inferior in every way to Firewire except for price (480 Mbps is the theoretical maximum burst speed, sustained speed is far less), USB2 quickly overtook Firewire until even Apple switched their portable devices to USB2-only. My first iDevice with USB2 only, it was painful how much slower it was to sync music compared to Firewire.

Some might compare this to Mac vs PC, or iPhone vs Android, but there's a key difference. Apple charges a minor premium on these and doesn't compete on the extreme low-end, but as long as they're profitable lines they don't care that much about market share. With Firewire, Apple killed its own baby, and they have no one to blame but themselves.

Re:Fantastic

[tycoex]

At least I can right click without using my keyboard!

Re:Fantastic

[T-Bone-T]

If 20-30 year old cars were just as reliable, wouldn't there be more of them? There is absolutely no way they are as reliable. All you are doing is saying that new cars are no better than old cars because they still break down. My 2002 Taurus has 175K miles on it and only has a handful of problems that are easy to fix. My 1989 Camaro had 125K miles on it and felt like it was about to fall apart from all the problems. I got rid of it because I couldn't fix it enough for it to be acceptably reliable.

Re:Fantastic

[Nyder]

"all the Mac users I know have little understanding about hardware, nor do they care to know about the hardware."

Not having to care is liberating.

....

I'll bet it's liberating.

Probably feels good to know that you can easily get ripped off because you have no knowledge about the hardware, so you don't know exactly what your paying for or getting. Not to mention being overcharged for repairs because you have no clue.

You brought up cars today and not needing to know which sparkplug, etc. Well, mechanics have been ripping people off like you for a long time. why? because you don't bother to learn anything about your car, so you are subject to what they say, because you do NOT know better.

That makes you a very uninformed consumer. the type companies like, because they love to rip you off.

Re:Fantastic

[citylivin]

Yes, heaven forbid people know anything about their cars. Less knowledge! Thats what drives society forward!

"Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to."

Well thats the 'new car buyers' attitude all right, and you are paying a premium for that "luxury". Most people in the world however, drive cars with hundreds of thousands of kilometres on them and like to know what tire pressure is or what an alternator does. You don't have to be an electrical engineer to fix a car, and you dont have to be a hardware engineer to troubleshoot a computer. You make it seem like its so dificult and so much fuss to learn these things. If you cant do it on your own, take a course. Just like driving, or basic car repair for women that a co worker took recently - there are courses out there which will make you feel better about yourself. *Fun fact that I didnt even know that she learned in that course, if you turn the air conditioning on in the winter for a minute or so, it will suck all the moisture off of your windows and defog them much better than the fans do. Thats the kind of thing that really makes peoples lives a bit easier. Thats the kind of thing that a little knowledge brings.

Dumbing down and locking down systems has ALWAYS been what macs are about. This is why people hated them in the 90s, this is why people hate them today. You evidently want to buy into a world where you don't know how anything works and always have to rely on others to fix your problems for you. Sure its "liberating", but so is "finding god". What you call liberation, I call enslavement. Perception is everything I guess.

Re:Fantastic

[dfghjk]

Apple did nothing for the adoption of USB and contributed absolutely nothing to its development. They piggybacked on the efforts of Intel and the PC industry and then claimed credit. They only convinced fanboys like you.

Re:Fantastic

[GameboyRMH]

Still a dead end outside of the studio, the only mainstream consumer device to ever use Firewire was early iPods. And the only thing Firewire was actually useful for was making fast transfers to external devices before USB2.0 and eSATA filled the gap.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Macs, don't get me wrong, but Ubuntu really just works for me.

In terms of hardware, my sister's mac book pro's are built much better, but I really like my Acer. I actually like its trackpad much better, although I do have trouble with mouse movement while I type. I can't really say that I like their Mac Book Pro's better; they're okay, but not necessarily better. Then when the price comes in my sub-$300 price tag fits my budget much better.

I'm not knocking you for having a Mac Book Pro, if you like it better, it works for you, and you can afford it go for it.

Re:Fantastic

[Tubal-Cain]

Here you go.

"Enable javascript to use LMGTFY."

Re:Fantastic

[jo_ham]

No, they shipped a computer that had no other low-speed interface ports on it for peripherals other than USB. You may remember it: the iMac.

This created a market for USB devices: mice, keyboard, scanners, printers, card readers etc that just was not taking off before that, since while some PC motherboards shipped with this "new fangled" USB port, it was poorly supported by Win95 (barely at all until late in the release cycle) and they still shipped (and continue to ship) with things like ps/2 ports, other din sockets, RS-232, 25 pin ports etc so people had no reason to specifically seek out USB devices on a bus that barely worked on Windows.

However, if you used an iMac, and many people did - it sold like hot cakes, and then soon after the iBook and other new Mac products you needed USB devices because it was the only peripheral port you had.

Also, I don;t recall Apple themselves actually claiming credit for anything - they just did what they did. I haven't seen any evidence they ever claimed they were taking credit for USB.

Also, if by "piggybacked on the efforts of Intel and the PC industry" you mean "adopted a standard that was designed to be used by hardware manufacturers to create a standard port and protocol for peripherals, ie DID EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS DESIGNED FOR" then I suppose you are correct. Apple adopting USB early in the game could only have been a positive thing for Intel, who developed the thing. What do you think they wanted Apple to do? Not use it? When you Apple haters get going, you just throw logic right out of the window, don't you?

Re:Fantastic

[fast turtle]

Had a 1968 Dodge Dart - Western Sport Special. It had a 318 CiD (5.3L) and was equiped with factory Air, Auto Trans and had Disk Brakes up front. Averaged 22MPG Hgwy running 75-80 in So.Cal with the A/C on during the summer. Had over 350k Miles on it when I sold it with minimal maintenance. Funny thing is, my new Tracker with 3L v6 only doesn't get better milage and it's a 2003 model - last year Chevy Offered them. Of course it's 1 ton heavier and includes full 4 wheel drive (Transfer case/front diff/cv joints - hi/lo range).

Re:Fantastic

[devphaeton]

Well said.

But the thing is, in his case, he doesn't *want* to learn these things. There's a difference here. There are some of us that dig around in the groady bits of a computer and lick the mosfet-driven voltage regulators around the northbridge to enjoy the hardware as a feat of engineering. We root around in smelly innards of the OS because seeing our favorite brace/indent style releases endorphins in our heads. We're the 'geeks'. We're in love with this stuff.

This guy is just an 'IT Professional". It's just a job for him. Something he does for a paycheck. I hear this same party line from guys just like him.

Even his car analogy proves my point. In the 1950s, all the stuff he talked about employed all kinds of guys just like him. They were called "Mechanics". But there were gearheads in those days too- they were the ones that were converting their flathead engines to OHC, installing dual spark, cherry bomb mufflers, dual carbs with velocity stacks and pulling every non-essential part off the body to make the car lighter and faster. They were geeks, and they were in love with that stuff.

Are the gearheads any *better* than the mechanics? No, but it does make me wonder why he's here reading /., except to troll with his sense of arrogance. Glad his Mac works for him, but I can probably do just as well with some crusty K6-II running FreeBSD, and it won't be a lot of work for me either.

Re:Fantastic

[.tekrox]

USB2 Never filled that gap. (Except for maybe flash drives, but then again - I've never seen a FW Flash Drive) eSATA has; in a way; but it's still largely non hot-swap on general consumer machines.

FW400 still kicks that CRAP out of USB2 when it comes to IO; and this is especially important for external drives. USB2 typically has me copying at 20-30MB/s whilst FW400 40-45MB/s.
eSATA blows them both out of the water - but I still see more FW400 ports than eSATA during my travels.

This is all without mentioning FW800.

Re:Fantastic

[hobo sapiens]

yup, before the macbook pro I was using ubuntu. Three pain points for me:

1) the wireless networking worked, but it always seemed to forget my password. Annoying.

2) I used two monitors, so every morning I would have to go back in and reconfigure my displays. It got to be really annoying to do every single morning.

3) even with all of the needed codecs installed, sometimes I could play my aac music and sometimes I couldn't. It was weird.

I was running this on a lenovo laptop which was utter crap in every way.

The three pain points are minor things. But that's why I alluded to polish in my original post. Canonical developed an awesome desktop env. I don't know if it's just a side effect of having to support every piece of hardware under the sun, but it seems like ubuntu just still lacks polish. I have been using it since maybe dapper drake and it's really improved over the years. But that last little bit always seems to elude them. If I have to spend five minutes every morning performing some repetitive task, that's a small thing that becomes a big deal over time.

Re:Fantastic

[Billly Gates]

Windows 7 is a great improvement over Vista and is catching up to MacOSX.

For the same price you can get a PC as good and about as reliable. People just want cheap.

I cringed upgrading my computer. After looking into things and buying parts my wife convinced just to go all new and blow up to $1499. Ouch.

I was very close to getting a mac. My wife is a teacher and she brought her ibook from work home one weekend so I could play with it. The fact that I didn't have a second mouse button and no right button click with menus as well as the lack of a bottom task bar drove me nuts. I downloaded a demo of dreamweaver and it drove me crazy to have to keep selecting menu after menu with the mouse. The keyboard shortcuts are not that well support or way different. I admit this was because I got used to Windows and Gnome.

I went with a Windows 7 desktop with a nice monitor. It is as good as a mac and just about as reliable and it is a really fast and nice system. Macs have less problems but they miss .NET decent Java support and lack of Linux support. Linux does not support EFI and you could damage your mac running it. I have only had one weird glitch with my lan card in the past month playing with settings.

My cheap systems have always had problems. You get what you pay for regardless of OS.

Re:Fantastic

[hobo sapiens]

'This guy is just an 'IT Professional". It's just a job for him. Something he does for a paycheck.'

Uh, no. I do code for a living, but I am very much a programming geek. I'd write code even if I did something else for a living or I'd find a way to get back to doing code for a living. So much so, in fact, that as I get older I should probably from a financial standpoint move into management. But I want to design software, not sit in an office with a door.

I am not a hardware geek. This isn't 1983 anymore. Having a computer that you built that sort of works sometimes is no longer acceptable and it's not really a novelty. If you want to get real work done then you need something that always works. In case you weren't aware, sometime in the last 20 years computers went from being novelties to being tools used to accomplish work.

And /. isn't just for hardware geeks. There are a good number of programmers here.

Re:Fantastic

[node 3]

The supreme irony is that Apple doesn't actually make anything which will be well suited to utilize Light Peak.

External storage. Hard drives are now a bit faster in practice than FW800, and a *lot* faster than USB2. Now, throw in multiple drives for a music or video setup. Which brings me to...

Music and video. FireWire is wildly successful here. As hard drives get faster (and SSDs begin to take hold), Light Peak can potentially replace FireWire, allowing for even *more* simultaneous HD video streams, etc.

(If anyone wonders why it might be said that Apple doesn't innovate, this is one good example: take something awesome and wrap it in pretty white plastic, doing nothing new with it.)

WiFi, USB, FireWire, magsafe, unibody cases, Face Time, iPhone, glass trackpads, iPod, the batteries in the current MacBooks, Bonjour, AirPrint, multitouch... The list of things Apple directly invented, co-invented, or were early adopters of is extensive. The notion that Apple doesn't innovate is way out there. It's extremely difficult to think of a company that innovates more than Apple!

Talk about a disappointing "gimmick". Hopefully it'll reach mainstream within the next year or two, or it'll likely see an unfortunate demise similar to Firewire (low adoption rates, fringe technology), making Infiniband look all the more attractive.

FireWire has been subject to demise? When exactly did this happen? It's not the dominant external bus, but it's very much alive and well. Apple had nothing to do with it's status of not being the dominant bus, the fact that it's so expensive is why (and that's also why it's such a great bus and is far from dead).

Re:Fantastic

[hobo sapiens]

oh my, where to begin?

When did abstraction become ignorance? Do you know about metallurgy? Yet you are typing on a computer that contains alloys. You don't care about that. You choose what to care about and what isn't worth worrying about. In other words, you are liberated from knowing about or having to care about the chemical composition of your hard drive. This is good, because if you were worried about such trivial details you'd never get to worry about trivial details like what kind of hard drive or motherboard is inside your computer.

"Dumbing down and locking down systems has ALWAYS been what macs are about"
1997 called. They want their OS back. My macbook runs OSX. Which means that beneath the covers it runs a variant of BSD linux. Which, as I said in my original post, allows me to get up close and personal with my file system. I look at OSX as yet another linux desktop env. And it's not an iPhone or an iPad. You would actually have a cogent point were we talking about iPhone OS. But we're not. So, bzzzt.

Re:Fantastic

[pushing-robot]

And AV devices, including practically every digital camcorder.

Re:Fantastic

[Midnight Thunder]

Beyond the $1 fee, Firewire chipsets are probably more expensive than the USB counter parts. I say this because Firewire controllers usually do the heavy lifting, while with USB this is delegated to the processor.

Re:Fantastic

[node 3]

Please tell me you aren't trying to argue that integrated graphics, a Core 2 Duo, and 2GB of RAM in a cheap plastic case with soldered-in battery for $1000 is anything approaching a good deal.

You mean the best integrated graphics available, a Core2Duo (instead of the shitty CPUs in low-end PCs, the only reason they aren't Core i5's is that Intel screwed Nvidia), a state of the art unibody plastic case, a 10 hour battery that is designed to far outlast standard batteries in terms of load cycles, an LED display, glass multitouch trackpad, in a one inch case, just to name a few?

Re:Fantastic

[node 3]

I'm not bashing Mac users here, just pointing out that (with the exception of two people I know who are IT consultants), all the Mac users I know have little understanding about hardware, nor do they care to know about the hardware.

How is this any different on the PC side of things? Do you think most PC owners could even tell you what brand of CPU they have, let alone the line or speed? Do you think they know what graphics chips they have? What the resolution of their displays are? What all the different audio ports on the back are for?

You are bashing Mac users by pretending like they are stupid compared to their oh-so magnificent PC brethren. But the simple fact is most people know very little about their computers, and truthfully they really shouldn't have to.

Re:Fantastic

[node 3]

I only wonder, on a tangent, if Apple will eventually replace all of what we know of OSX (incl *nix CLI) with some form of iOS without the *nix for the desktop

This will never, ever happen. They will bring features back from iOS to Mac OS X, and from Mac OS X to iOS (which are ultimately both the same OS at the core. Namely NeXTstep). What won't happen is Apple bringing irrational features from the Mac to iOS (like overlapping windows) or irrational iOS features to Mac OS X (like no CLI).

It seems to be directed this way with the emphasis and plans for the App Store for desktop.

Thinking that the Mac App Store indicates that Mac OS X will become closed like iOS is like saying that bringing Pages to iOS indicates they are going to open that system.

In fact, with each new version of Mac OS X, Apple has made the terminal more useful, not less. If they were to take that away, the outcry would dwarf anything has ever faced.

Re:Fantastic

[node 3]

I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it.

Yeah? Except that's not true.

I understood him to mean things like having a choke, manual transmissions, having to warm it up, be aware of things like various belts and cables, propensity for overheating, etc. Basically, the car analog of defragging your HD or running AV scans. Cars are much more trouble-free and maintenance-free than decades past. Computers are getting better, but the Mac really shines as a PC that requires the least amount of administrative attention.

Re:Fantastic

[node 3]

I couldn't write any response to your post that didn't come off sounding like I was trolling

The preface to your post was spot-on.

Re:Fantastic

[CaptSlaq]

If 20-30 year old cars were just as reliable, wouldn't there be more of them? There is absolutely no way they are as reliable. All you are doing is saying that new cars are no better than old cars because they still break down. My 2002 Taurus has 175K miles on it and only has a handful of problems that are easy to fix. My 1989 Camaro had 125K miles on it and felt like it was about to fall apart from all the problems. I got rid of it because I couldn't fix it enough for it to be acceptably reliable.

Partially parts availability (plastic still breaks and doesn't typically age well, among other things) and partially the general "throw away" societal belief that permeates western culture. There are many, many people driving these older cars happily. My boss being one of them: He owns a mid 70's full size Jeep pickup and an old post-war surplus Willys. He swaps them both out as his daily, depending on the weather and what he has to do.

American cars built from the beginning of the OPEC crisis to about the mid 2000s are bean-counter engineered stuff, which is why your Camaro was what it was. There are a very few that are special in that 30 or so years.

Most of the Japanese stuff from the same time frame were incredibly tiny, lightweight econobox tin cans with low horsepower/high efficiency sewing machines for engines that don't really hold much appeal to the average western buyer. Assuming rust (another materials science issue, specifically for paint) or accidents didn't take them, they would be more common today, if the average buyer had any interest in them.

Re:Fantastic

[barzok]

I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it. Today, you really don't have to know what kind of spark system your car has, or what kind of plugs it uses, or what kind of fuel delivery system it has. You don't have to clean varnish out of the carbuerator every year, or have the piston rings done at 60k miles. You don't have to replace the plugs and points every 10k miles. Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two.

Cars have swung too far in that direction. More and more, they're getting to a "no user-serviceable parts" state. You're expected to bring the car to the expensive dealer for everything, or just replace the car when big maintenance is required. Recently, one of the headlights on my wife's car burned out. I checked the manual, it said to turn the steering wheel all the way to the opposite side, remove a couple clips, pull the fender liner back, and reach up and in to remove & replace the bulb.

I spent 30 minutes in the driveway attempting to follow those instructions, but the liner would not move far enough for me to get my arm in there. Finally I relented, spent 15 minutes putting it back together, and sent my wife to the dealer. It took the dealer 45 minutes to do, and they had to remove the wheel completely (the new bulb & labor were covered under warranty). IMO, this is a ridiculous amount of work required to replace a light bulb.

Chrysler PT Cruiser? The battery is buried behind the right front suspension. There's a couple terminals located under the hood if you have to jump the car, but good luck replacing the battery in the Sears parking lot.

Re:Fantastic

[hobo sapiens]

you are right about fuel, lubricants, and filters improving over time. But it's not as though that's the only thing that has improved. Engine design has also improved. How many engines use pushrods anymore? How many engines are fuel injected today? Even things like plugs. Today, you get platinum tipped plugs which can go 30k - 60k miles without a change. Hardened valve seats means no more leaded gas. That means cleaner emissions. Engine tech has improved.

It is pretty unremarkable for a 4 cylinder engine to get 170 hp/150ft-lbs of torque and get 30 mpg on the highway. Those old engines would get about 15mpg and make 50% less hp/torque.

http://www.edmunds.com/new/2011/ford/fusion/101325677/specs.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_210#Engines_2

I said that you had to take your car to a mechanic every year or two. Coolant flush, plugs, fuel filter, tranny flush, etc. All required maintenance. But you don't have to really know about that stuff. Personally, I do and perform my own maintenance. But you don't have to be so hands on.

I drive a 2000 nissan. 150k miles on it so far and just now recently it developed its first real problem (had to replace fuel pump). If that thing doesn't get at least 250k I'll be wondering what the heck went wrong.

I like cars. It'd be awesome to work on one of those old chevy small blocks. Would love to get my hands on one. If I had the time and money, you can bet I'd drive an old bel-air or impala. But I certainly wouldn't expect to drive it for 150k miles and only have to do only routine maintenance.

"Who cares about the hardware, as long as it looks nice! It is very, very important to developers to know how the hardware works. I'd not want one who does not anywhere near my systems "

Depends on the type of work you need done. If you need someone to write a device driver or program a microcontroller, then sure. If you want someone to develop a website then you'd be a fool to want it tailored to specific hardware. In that case, you want someone who knows how to design a good scalable website, which means that you don't even know what kind of hardware will be running the site because it could change.

And sharepoint doesn't look nice.

Re:Fantastic

[dbIII]

PC hardware is incredibly simple to deal with. You can put together a very decent PC with motherboard, memory, disk, case (with power supply) and CPU in minutes with no prior experience. Macs, eg. something like an eMac is a different story - it seemed almost complicated enough to be a fucking satellite once I got 25+ screws out to upgrade CDROM to DVD.
There's a good reason why Mac people rarely stuff about with internal hardware beyond memory upgrades which can be VERY simple (orginal iMac - remove hatch by twisting coin placed in slot, put stick of memory in space provided, close hatch).

Re:Fantastic

[hobo sapiens]

when I switched to mac I did miss the task bar. After almost a year, not anymore. I never missed the mouse buttons. Two finger tap on the trackpad does the same thing. Keyboard shorts are actually better IMO but they are different. They are generally speaking, more ergonomic.

Worst part about MBP is the sharp edge around the perimeter of the thing. That drives me nuts.

I use my mac to make a living. I like cheap too, but I'd rather have a quality tool for the job. If I were using a table saw all day every day, the $150 ryobi I have would never work. If I drilled holes all day, a $30 black & decker drill would not suffice. In the realm of tools, I learned from experience to never buy cheap tools (but since I cannot afford a $1500 table saw, the cheap one has to do for me). That applies well to computers.

I recently saw someone with a nice looking vaio. Obviously judging by the case only, but it looked comparable to a macbook. I figure if someone is going to make a nice case rather than the crappy glued together plastic then maybe they had the sense to put good components in there. Probably costs similarly too but then you get stuck with crappy windows unless you want linux. You get what you pay for in most cases.

Re:Fantastic

[hobo sapiens]

having messed with a decent amount of pc hardware, I agree. The point is that with a mac, you shouldn't have to do much of that. Otherwise, what would be the point? I am not liking the mac because of the so-called cool factor or steve jobs or whatever. I like it cause I don't have to mess with it. It's a reliable tool.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

The Netbook will do just fine to get out of Windows, even with OS X :)

My GF don't run OS X. Thankfully ;)

Re:Fantastic

[Tokerat]

I'm with you. I know there are plenty of reasons not to like Apple (in fact many of my own disagreements with Apple have come about only very recently), but trolling statements like this from grandparent are just ridiculous. At least make sure your argument makes sense.

Re:Fantastic

[dilvish_the_damned]

Not having to care is different from not being able to care.
Price a high end MBP with anything of the same specs from Dell and look at the price difference. If you get the same resolution, same CPU, ram, bus speed, HD, battery runtime, your looking at maybe a $100-$200 price difference, and the MBP comes in an aluminum case, higher MTBF, no exposed fan ports.

Purchasing higher quality hardware for a marginally higher price does not, in itself, indicate ignorance. Sometimes it indicates the belief that the value of a machine is not restricted to the quantitative factors but also the qualitative.

Also, Dell dresses your laptop funny.

Re:Fantastic

[hobo sapiens]

true. I have a 2000 nissan and do most of the work on it myself. I find that with so many parts on modern cars like mine, they have to cram lot in a small space. Some do better than others. My car is no fun to work on because there are a lot of tight spaces, but there's nothing like what you describe. I can do just about anything to that car short of pulling the oil pan or crankshaft (which I hope to never do) with the engine in the car. Had a mid 80's ford that to replace the starter, you had to lift the engine out of the car. Asinine.

Next time I go car shopping, part of my criteria will be based on the assumption that I will be doing work on it myself at some point. But that's just because for some things, I do like knowing the internals. Computers, not so much.

Re:Fantastic

[dbIII]

Actually if I'd waited another year I wouldn't have bothered putting a DVD burner into that eMac since USB sticks get the job done in larger volumes. These days the eMac only gets used as a media player for codecs that a cheap set top box can't handle and Skype. Dunno what to do with the second one where everything works but the DVD drive. What would you do with two Macs at once?

Re:Fantastic

[toddestan]

FireWire has been subject to demise? When exactly did this happen? It's not the dominant external bus, but it's very much alive and well. Apple had nothing to do with it's status of not being the dominant bus, the fact that it's so expensive is why (and that's also why it's such a great bus and is far from dead).

Apple has had a lot to do with the current state of Firewire. They've removed it from their iPods and dropping it on their lower-end machines. They are also part of the reason it's so expensive, by charging licensing fees that pushed people to USB2 as it was cheaper. Firewire is not dead, but it's pretty much turned into a niche market at this point.

Re:Fantastic

[binary paladin]

You know what's cool? Having spent enough time caring about computers, hardware and software to get a job that pays well enough that I really don't need to give a shit about buying some cheap ass Dell or HP laptop instead of a MacBook.

Barring that I know precisely what hardware is in my MacBook Pro. I know that Apple hardware is more expensive. I also know that my time is even more precious and expensive. So, having a computer that pretty much never fails and requires basically no tinkering is awesome. I'm at a point in my life where things like processor MHz mean far less to me than say a trackpad (something I use ALL THE TIME) that is very functional or extended battery life. These kinds of details are where Apple reigns supreme.

My MacBook still has a Core 2 Duo and on forums full of the nitwits who measure their penis by their i7, there is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. In fact, they tell me they could get a Dell with an i7 for $300 or something. Whatever. I don't care. That laptop would be a plastic piece of shit with a terrible track pad that's twice as thick with half the battery life of the machine I'm running.

This computer is a tool that meets my need and does it better and more enjoyably than any other machines I've used. I fucking hate Windows (7 included) and Linux was always more work than I wanted to put into it (and ran it exclusively for 3 years before switching to a Mac).

(Incidentally, I don't know shit about cars. However, since I'm not a moron finding an honest mechanic in a day and age where shopping around and internet reviews are easy to come by is not exactly rocket science.)

Re:Fantastic

[darthdavid]

My macbook runs OSX. Which means that beneath the covers it runs a variant of BSD linux.

it runs a variant of BSD linux.

BSD linux.

Get out. Turn in your geek card at the door, hang your head in shame and leave.

Re:Fantastic

[fermion]

On thing that the recent sale of the Apple 1 did was reminded the world that it allowed losers who did not have basic skills in soldering, or coding, or using a screwdriver to use a computer. This was a horrible thing because if you do not know how to solder and insert chips correctly and understand the nomenclature on chips and know how to set the pots so the floppy drive speed is correct, you really had no bussiness owning a computer. I understand all one wanted to do was run visicalc, but one does not deserve doing that unless you built the computer and typed in the code from a magazine.

When the mac came out, Apple made an equal atrocity. Underserving people were able to do complex tasks because of the WIMP interface. No longer did users have to muck about in the computer and install overly complex device drivers, because the clean interfaces meant that the machine was much more plug and play. Of couse, this meant that more underserving people had access to a comptuer.

Then came the iPad, which let people browse the web and send text messages and emails. No talk about technical details that few understands, and expansions that no one uses, just functionality. More undeserving people can use a computer. Of couse there is no phone, and the iPhone is a basd phone, but only old bussiness people and teenagers use the phone.The rest of us text. It is like people saying a computer is worthless if it does not have an ethernet connection or memory exapnsion slot. For some who are stuck in the old ways, yes. For other who embrace modern effeciencies not at all.

Re:Fantastic

[hobo sapiens]

Pat yourself on the back for catching me forgetting to delete some text from my post before hitting submit. I typed both and googled which is under OSX so I could delete the incorrect one. Why did I have to google it? Why do I not just know that? Because practically speaking THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO ARE MINUSCULE. So you gotta rmdir instead of rm -rF. BFD.

Re:Fantastic

[hobo sapiens]

"
When the mac came out, Apple made an equal atrocity. Underserving people were able to do complex tasks because of the WIMP interface. No longer did users have to muck about in the computer and install overly complex device drivers, because the clean interfaces meant that the machine was much more plug and play. Of couse, this meant that more underserving people had access to a comptuer.
" [sic]

I feel the same way about air. If you don't understand cellular respiration on a molecular level, then you don't deserve to breathe it.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is making awesome computers with an OS waaaay superior to Windows because it has a *nix CLI under it and way better than linux distro X because it has the polish you'd expect from commercial software.

in return, you have to run this cool os on hardware produced by one manufacturer only (if you want any stability, of course) and surrender any idea of customization (well, except for the generous choice of "appearance: blue / graphite", of course!).

Re:Fantastic

[drsmithy]

Don't worry. Like USB in the 90s, this technology will eventually become standard on PCs thanks to Apple forcing device manufacturers to support it for the Mac.

USB was already "standard" on PCs when the iMac was released and had been for a year or so.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

> USB was already "standard" on PCs when the iMac was released and had been for a year or so.

"Common," maybe, but not really "standard." There was almost nothing you could plug into it and have it work.

Re:Fantastic

[binary paladin]

"Yes, Heaven forbid people know anything about their cars. Less knowledge! Thats what drives society forward!"

I hate to break this to every obnoxiously arrogant jackass on this site that thinks because they know how to fix their car or their radio or whatever else that they are somehow some elevated and enlightened individual that can look down their noses at others but here's a fucking news flash: there are tons of interesting and important subjects, disciplines and things that most people—even intelligent and well educated people—don't give two shits about and never want to have to deal with. Not ever.

For instance, I'll bet there are plenty of trauma surgeons out there that didn't know your fun fact. I bet people who have won Nobel prizes didn't know that. I bet if they found out they wouldn't be even slightly inclined to take a course on fucking auto repair.

I use a Mac and the computer isn't any more dumbed down than Windows or even some variants of Linux (which is what I used three years prior to switching to a Mac). It's certainly easier to use and more trouble free. However, it doesn't limit me in any way I care about. (Besides, it's like saying a manual transmission is "dumbed down" rather than "easier to use with less control, but since I use my car for commuting and not for racing the ease of use is more important than the performance.")

Mac discussions always bring out the most retarded this site has to offer (except for maybe global warming and/or anything about Republicans).

"Sure its 'liberating', but so is 'finding god'. What you call liberation, I call enslavement."

Seriously? This is what I'm talking about. Somehow someone being pleased with the ease of use of a computer has become akin to "enslavement." It was also, apparently, a fine opportunity to tie in your own religious spite at the same time, which of course is totally necessary in a discussion about a rumor about Apple incorporating a new I/O bus. That always makes me wax religious.

Some people want their stuff to just work. It doesn't make them stupid or ignorant or inferior or less enlightened. It doesn't even mean their somehow universally opposed to learning. I mean, come the fuck on, people have their disciplines and their interests. You sound like you'd be some asshole who'd get on a guy's case because he always ate out because he didn't care about learning to cook. There's nothing wrong with that. Do you get one people's cases for seeing doctors because they aren't experts on health? Do you hate power tools because people should learn how to properly use hand tools?

What the fuck is wrong with you people? Easier to use != dumbed down. Dumbed down != bad.

Re:Fantastic

[rolfwind]

Probably feels good to know that you can easily get ripped off because you have no knowledge about the hardware, so you don't know exactly what your paying for or getting.

Your parent made it pretty clear what he is paying for, a hassle-free experience so he can get something productive done instead of tinker and his Apple provides that. Jeesh.

You have a point in people getting ripped off by mechanics, but that doesn't always translate into computers (I suppose if the hard drive died, your parent poster could easily replace it himself). Also, knowing all about cars beyond the basics doesn't really do you a lot of good as models change year after year, and some systems like the transmission need their own expert -- what are you going to do? Diagnose yourself? With a car, if the repair estimate seems out of whack, take it to another garage and get a second opinion even if you have to tow it there, don't mention what the 1st mechanic told you (so you can compare diagnosis w/o influencing the answer), etc. Little car knowledge needed.

Re:Fantastic

[steve_bryan]

Is this an impenetrable mystery to everyone? If you want a two button mouse with a Mac, buy a two button mouse, you cheapskate! Honestly, they are widely available, inexpensive and work with all Mac software. This has been true forever (at least since the late 80's when I bought my first two button, optical mouse). I am sure there are reasons why one might not choose to buy a Mac, but availability of multi-button mice is not a legitimate reason.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot PCI and PCIe. Those buses can be replaced by LightPeak too.

Re:Fantastic

[Knuckles]

The OP wasn't correct, I guess that's why everyone focuses on the other aspects of what you wrote. I'm not a Mac fan at all, but still decided for a Macbook Pro (running Ubuntu) after evaluating the offers from Dell, Lenovo and others. It turned out that the Macbook Pro simply was the nicest laptop on offer, all things considered, and not significantly more expensive if you take the niceties into account.

Re:Fantastic

[thetoadwarrior]

I completely agree with this.

Re:Fantastic

[gnasher719]

My girlfriend (yes, really! ;) ) was asking me this morning if I knew where she could buy an as-new MacBook from circa 2007.

On eBay, MacBooks get sold but at ridiculously high prices. Tell her to check out the Apple Store www.apple.com/ukstore and check under "Special Deals/Refurbished Mac" regularly. Sometimes you'll find a MacBook for slightly over £700. And it is brand new; better deal than anything you find on eBay.

Re:Fantastic

[TheUser0x58]

Less knowledge! Thats what drives society forward!

What a fucking joke. Having a nation of amateur auto-mechanics accomplishes nothing for society. Specialization has always been the vanguard of civilization. 10,000 odd years ago some enterprising folks learned all about how to grow edible plants as a reliable food source, and then idiots like you probably laughed at them because they were too busy creating civilization as we know it to hunt for themselves. The fact that I can pay some bloke to fix my car means instead of spending a weekend fixing it myself I can learn things that won't be obsolete in 5 years.

Classic Slashtard mentality. You know a lot about computers so you think yourself some intellectual fucking superstar, and belittle those who are doing more important things than swapping out motherboards.

Re:Fantastic

[petermgreen]

Plus afaict very few machines actually had a "USB chipset", intel (and I think AMD too but I haven't followed that side of the fence closely) bundled USB in their southbridges whether you wanted it or not.

Re:Fantastic

[DaVince21]

USB wasn't supported by anything else either. Though it became widespread fast enough.

Problem is, LightPeak is apparently a Mac "exclusive" right now, so I can't see the technology take off if it's only available for those computers for the first year (or longer?).

Re:Fantastic

[marcello_dl]

> Light Peak is a design that is intended to replace the myriad of bus technologies present in the average computer.

That's exactly what was said about firewire when it debuted.

I hope this time things will work differently, as I too would prefer usb2 for dumb peripherals, ethernet and a high performance interface for all the rest.

Re:Fantastic

[mister_dave]

It there a reason you get the new stuff, and your wife gets hand-me-downs?

Re:Fantastic

[itsdapead]

This created a market for USB devices: mice, keyboard, scanners, printers, card readers etc that just was not taking off before that, since while some PC motherboards shipped with this "new fangled" USB port, it was poorly supported

Exactly - this is what Apple is very, very good at, and why the industry needs them. They didn't invent the personal computer***, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, local area networking*, laptops** RISC-based PCs* USB, the small-form-factor computer, the floppy-free computer, the MP3 player, online music sales, the smartphone... What they did do is turn them into mainstream commercial successes and put a very large rocket up the conservative asses of the competition. Oh, you'd better add UNIX to that list, as well as standards-based rich internet apps.

(* Actually, Acorn- who had a good college try at being the UK equivalent of Apple - got to those two first, but the only thing that had much impact outside of Blighty was the CPU they designed for their RISC-based PC, the ARM).

(** Apple "invented" - maybe in partnership with Sony - the modern laptop layout, with the set-back keyboard and trackball/trackpad in front).

(*** Joint honours with Commodore and Tandy, and maybe others, on the first "appliance" PC, but they were on the front line - previous PCs were "some assembly required" and/or needed a terminal or teletype).

Re:Fantastic

[russotto]

I hate to break this to every obnoxiously arrogant jackass on this site that thinks because they know how to fix their car or their radio or whatever else that they are somehow some elevated and enlightened individual that can look down their noses at others but here's a fucking news flash: there are tons of interesting and important subjects, disciplines and things that most people--even intelligent and well educated people--don't give two shits about and never want to have to deal with. Not ever.

At the risk of being an obnoxiously arrogant jackass (hey, I use Macs, which puts me at least halfway there anyway), but I've found that people who do at least know something about how their car or their radio or some other thing they use regularly works tend to be more intelligent and better-educated than those who have no clue about anything.

Re:Fantastic

[dwightk]

Do you think most PC owners could even tell you what brand of CPU they have, let alone the line or speed? Do you think they know what graphics chips they have? What the resolution of their displays are? What all the different audio ports on the back are for?

I'm pretty sure every PC is required to have a separate colorful sticker to answer each of those questions

Re:Fantastic

[drinkypoo]

Firewire is a peer-to-peer register-based protocol while USB is a sad joke. You can buy lots of chips with USB integrated but not so many with IEEE1394. The licensing fee is also pretty major, though; The cost will be inflated two or even four times before the item reaches the customer's hands due to standard markup and they'll buy the USB stuff instead.

Re:Fantastic

[drinkypoo]

USB had become a fairly standard feature of Slot motherboards before USB made it into the south bridge. Consequently it was provided by an additional chip. This was repeated all over with USB2, with USB in the south bridge.

Re:Fantastic

[salmo]

Actually, yes. Your "less knowledge" is pretty much exactly what drives society forward. If you had to worry about breeding, raising, and slaughtering livestock, growing vegetables and grain, weaving fabric, etc. you wouldn't have time to play with maintaining your vehicle. You pay for the "luxury" of pre-packaged and prepared foods in order to free yourself for other tasks. You pay for pre-milled lumber, pre-fabricated tools, etc. to free yourself to do the particular task at hand that you get to choose. Sure it's fun to learn about how these things work, but not having to know is what frees you to learn about what you are interested in: like car maintenance, quilting, electrical engineering, or whatever whets your whistle.

I really don't care that much about cars. Their history is interesting to me. But, working on them: not so much. I do love philosophy, basic electronics, esoteric computer hardware, OS innards, college football, and pets. I'm really grateful for this for myself and, for example, my surgeon. I hope he's freed to only have to worry about his craft and whatever interests him.

Mac's aren't evil, they're just a product with a market of folks who want to use a computer without thinking about it. Heck, I'm typing on one. I have a collection of oddball hardware, but when I just want to browse the internet and watch TV I pretty much exclusively use this little laptop. There isn't an evil Apple horde looking for new ways to make a Mac dumb, just a bunch of guys and gals trying to come up with new ways to make a computer fun and easy to use. I mean really, you use a PC. There's a community of folks out there who look down on you for using a dumbed down collection of cheap commodity parts.

Chevy Malibu's aren't evil, they're just marketed to folks who want a reasonably low-cost car that they don't have to spend a lot of effort maintaining. 2x4's aren't evil, they're just made for folks who want to use a piece of wood without having to cut it down and mill it themselves. Ground beef isn't evil, it's just marketed to folks who don't want to breed, raise, slaughter, and uh, grind their own cows.

TLDR; Don't get pissed at folks for liking an easy to use product, so they can enjoy something else. We all do it and benefit for it, 'cause foraging pretty much sucks.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably for the same reason that mine does: She has zero interest in a new laptop and will happily use her held-together-by-duct-tape one until it absolutely won't start up anymore. If I try to buy her a new one, she complains that it was expensive and a waste of money.

There are plenty of new things that she's interested in, but a laptop isn't one of them.

Re:Fantastic

[CAIMLAS]

I frequently come across the following vehicles for sale, in good working order (20-30 years old):

* Ford and Chevy vans and trucks (from S10s and Rangers up through the full size)
* Volvos
* Plymouth/Chrysler/etc. minivans
* Subarus
* Oldsmobiles (yep, still lots of those on the road)
* Hondas (surprisingly)

The problem is that, in the 1986 and later range, ECUs and sensors became common. They were mostly crap, and they could drastically interfere with the actual functionality of the car. They were also incredibly expensive to replace (because only original manufacturer parts were available and the like). The core vehicles were still reliable, but if the shocks were getting worn and the ECU goes out around 100k, people assumed it was time to junk it.

The other side of the problem is that 'common' cars are not taken care of. There are plenty of 5-year-old vehicles in the junk yard because their owners were too stupid or too lazy to change the oil. The reason there are more trucks on the road than (say) sedans is because they cost more and the people who buy them (men) typically give a bit more of a damn about their reliable operation. They're taken care of, so they last.

I'm not saying they're all great, but your Camaro is clearly an exception: they've always been known for being of shoddy workmanship (or at least, during 1989).

Older vehicles are out there, and they are reliable. I personally drive a 1989 Ford Econoline van with mostly original parts (eg. battery, muffler - which was probably only replaced once, filters, etc. have all been changed). It's got 250k miles on it. The only reason I've not taken the time to replace parts on it that are worn is because I can get an entirely new van for around $1000 with half as many miles in just as good condition (which is considerable) and easily $1000 in 'better parts' (thinks like shocks, springs, etc.).

My father-in-law drives an '84 Volvo with 190k on it. A friend drove a '78 Blazer into the ground (ie, the body was so severely rusted it didn't make sense to drive it anymore) with about 160k miles on the odometer. My dad drives a Chevy S10 from '85 and uses the hell out of it - 190k on the odometer. My wife had an '89 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra that she drove to 160k without any major problems (still on the road 20k and 4 years later).

You seem to fail to realize that there are certain things which just need replacement in vehicles as they age. This holds particularly true if the vehicle sits outdoors when not in use: the elements take their toll on the paint and metal. The plastic gets embrittled. Our 2000 Focus is starting to show it's age at 120k miles. It needs new shocks and another transmission flush. These things happen - or, if they don't, the vehicle dies. The Focus easily has another 80k miles on it, I suspect - assuming it's taken care of. My van's rust cancer is likely going to hold back any significant repairs (though it wouldn't if I had a welder and knew how to use it), and I can replace it for a song.

Re:Fantastic

[jeremyp]

Ways to get a right click with a Mac trackpad

1. press ctrl at the same time as left clicking
2. configure a two finger tap to be the secondary click
3. configure the one finger tap in the bottom right corner to be the secondary click
4. buy an external mouse - even the Apple ones have two buttons.

 

Re:Fantastic

[B4light]

Oh no, are you butthurt that you had javascript disabled?

Re:Fantastic

[paimin]

Dude, you're just digging yourself deeper. Hand in the card.

Re:Fantastic

[B4light]

Women suck at computers and this Man browses slashdot, are you too retarded to figure this out on your own?

Re:Fantastic

[dfghjk]

The iMac was a hail-mary from a company that was nearly backrupt. It was targeted at users who had little to no legacy requirements so loss of legacy ports was minimal (and largely mitigated by dongles). The iMac used USB, a technology wholly developed by Intel, whose interoperability was refined by the industry and whose compatibility was tested largely by the PC industry, and whose progress to market was aided in no way by Apple. It appeared as a first for Apple only because Microsoft was late delivering OS support. It was, in fact, already integrated into many PCs at the time of the iMac introduction. PC makers had to hide that due to Microsoft's failiures.

The only USB market that Apple created with the iMac was for the translucent, multicolored versions of USB devices that had already been developed by the industry. Of course, the USB market hadn't taken off YET at the iMac's introduction. Windows didn't support it then. The iMac contributed little to USB's adoption except in the Apple fanboy's mind.

Now if you want to recognize that Apple lifted an already mature standard developed by Intel and the PC industry, a little sanity is fine by me. It's far from what the OP said that I responded to, however.

Re:Fantastic

[dfghjk]

As a person who worked in the industry closely with people who did much of the original USB interoperability and integration development, I can assure you that my statements were not only factual but educated. You won't find anything but religion coming from the Apple fanboys on the USB front.

Re:Fantastic

[dfghjk]

True, just like for the iMac at that time. There was not a single USB peripheral developed because of Apple's involvement though there were many that got skinned with Apple's pretty colors.

Re:Fantastic

[Totenglocke]

Yes, specialization is what drives society forward - but just because you're the best Nuclear Physicist on the planet doesn't mean that you can't also know how to change your oil and windshield wipers or replace a hard drive.

Hell, look back through history and examine the most brilliant scientists and inventors - they all knew about multiple subjects. Why? Because a truly brilliant person wants to know as much as they can about as many things as they can.

Classic Slashtard mentality. You know a lot about computers so you think yourself some intellectual fucking superstar, and belittle those who are doing more important things than swapping out motherboards.

Bullshit. It's not about "having more important things to do" and you can't afford 20 minutes, it's about being too lazy to bother to learn something and instead pay way more than necessary to have someone else do what you could easily do yourself. Even the busiest CEO alive can take 5 minutes (or less) to swap out a hard drive. Those who are dependent upon others for everything eventually end up losing everything.

Re:Fantastic

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Don't worry. Like USB in the 90s, this technology will eventually become standard on PCs thanks to Apple forcing device manufacturers to support it for the Mac.

USB was already "standard" on PCs when the iMac was released and had been for a year or so.

Sure, just that almost all PCs didn't have an actual USB plug. And the fact that most early USB peripherals came in translucent blue was so they matched the BSOD you oh so often got when operating them on Windows.

Re:Fantastic

[okmijnuhb]

And as always, Apple leads the way, so that they can wring a high price from Apple aficionados, before it's eventually available at a more affordable price from PC makers everywhere.
Thank you early adopters for paying the brunt of the R&D costs, and filling Apple's coffers, so that losers like me can pay less down the road, when it's passe, and less cool.
I wish I could be so cool, with so much expendable cash. Thanks. You're so clever. Genius.

Re:Fantastic

[okmijnuhb]

I only dislike Apple based on iTunes, which, as ambassador to Windows on behalf of Mac, is utterly unimpressive, to say the least.

Re:Fantastic

[drsmithy]

Sure, just that almost all PCs didn't have an actual USB plug.

Yes they did. You would have had to have searched long and hard in 1998 to find a PC being sold without USB ports. Even servers had them by then.

And the fact that most early USB peripherals came in translucent blue was so they matched the BSOD you oh so often got when operating them on Windows.

That most USB peripherals at the time existed to help Apple shift costs to the customer has no relevance to whether or not PCs had USB ports.

Re:Fantastic

[okmijnuhb]

I have an innate intolerance for the intellectually incurious. Personal flaw of mine.

Re:Fantastic

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Sure, just that almost all PCs didn't have an actual USB plug.

Yes they did. You would have had to have searched long and hard in 1998 to find a PC being sold without USB ports. Even servers had them by then.

You've been making that claim for a full decade now, and never could prove it.

And the fact that most early USB peripherals came in translucent blue was so they matched the BSOD you oh so often got when operating them on Windows.

That most USB peripherals at the time existed to help Apple shift costs to the customer has no relevance to whether or not PCs had USB ports.

That doesn't even make sense.

Re:Fantastic

[michaelok]

I think that's probably true, but it would be just as true for your average PC user too. There are the Mac users that drool over the latest chipset, and video capabilities, just like anyone else, and then there's everybody else. I'd imagine that, besides someone setting up a server farm (business user), for the typical home user, the guy that cares about the technology, and is willing to pay for it, is your heavy duty gamer. Anyway, point is your statement is flawed in that it assumes that PC users are "techies" and Mac users are arty, creative types. And that's hardly the case, I mean, how many millions of PCs are out there?

Re:Fantastic

[michaelok]

Thinking that the Mac App Store indicates that Mac OS X will become closed like iOS is like saying that bringing Pages to iOS indicates they are going to open that system.

No, not at all. The parent has a good point. It's really reading the news releases verbatim i.e. when apple states something like "all updates/software installs will be done via iTunes/App Store", well, one really has to wonder. Is there a clause in there that says "homebrew/macports/git" will still function? Sure, there would be outcry, Microsoft used this tactic to test the waters, big enough fuss and they'd relent. But these days, with Apple deprecating Java, many in the Java world are puzzled. And then on top of that Oracle vs. Apache vs. Google vs. JCP. And maybe that's good. At this point, if there's no Java on the Mac, as DHH puts it "Meh". But not so with other stuff, yes there would be an outcry alright, you betcha.

Re:Fantastic

[SteeldrivingJon]

How are you going to write apps if you can't install anything that doesn't come from the App Store? It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem.

More importantly, the app store isn't going to be used for big, expensive, important software, like AutoCAD or Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office. They aren't going to limit themselves to Apple's app DRM for licensing, and Apple isn't going to throw away Office and Photoshop.

Re:Fantastic

[drsmithy]

You've been making that claim for a full decade now, and never could prove it.

Huh ? The "proof" is trivially easy to find - just look up the specs for an average laptop of the day like an Inspiron 7000, or a typical DIY PC motherboard like an Asus P2L97. All have USB ports on them.

The first Intel southbridge supporting USB was released mid-1996. The first PC motherboards and systems with USB ports were released at pretty much the same time. By two years later when the first iMac was released, even servers typically had a couple of USB ports on them, and regular desktop PCs and laptops had already had them for a solid 6-12 months.

That doesn't even make sense.

The suggestion was that "all" USB peripherals at the time having translucent blue plastic somehow supported the argument that PCs didn't have USB. My point was that it's a non-sequitur.

Re:Fantastic

[SteeldrivingJon]

"Glad his Mac works for him, but I can probably do just as well with some crusty K6-II running FreeBSD, and it won't be a lot of work for me either."

So you're fetishizing a commodity CPU, in a commodity motherboard, with some commodity components hanging off it. That's effectively only one level of abstraction lower than the person who read that his iPad has an A4 ARM-based CPU. Big deal. You've looked at your CPU.

That doesn't exactly make you Dean Kamen.

Throw some sensors and actuators together with an Arduino or something and make something unique.

Re:Fantastic

[SteeldrivingJon]

"Yes they did. You would have had to have searched long and hard in 1998 to find a PC being sold without USB ports. "

They might have had a header on the motherboard. But there probably wasn't a port on the case that you could plug a device into.

Re:Fantastic

[drsmithy]

They might have had a header on the motherboard. But there probably wasn't a port on the case that you could plug a device into.

Motherboards started shipping with USB ports on the back (along with motherboard headers) around mid-late 1996. Somewhere in one of my boxes I have a Tyan Tomcat IV with a couple of 166Mhz Pentium MMX CPUs on it dating from 1997, and it has two USB ports on the back.

Two years after USB was introduced on PCs, when the first iMac was released, pretty much every new desktop PC and laptop sold - along with even many _servers_ - had at least a couple of USB ports.

Re:Fantastic

[FxChiP]

original iMac - remove hatch by twisting coin placed in slot, put stick of memory in space provided, close hatch

Only if your "original iMac" is a slot-loader -- tray-loaders actually require you to take apart the chassis, and they only take notebook-style PC100 SDRAM, IIRC. Everything after that takes the normal PC100/PC133 sticks.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

So we should be impressed because Apple has enough money to pay Intel to come up with good technology for them? Or should we be impressed that Apple has enough money to restrict technology to their products when that technology could benefit all computers, not just Apple devotees?

If Apple had invented this, it would be one thing. Since Intel invented it, it's entirely different.

I'm sure the Apple fanatics would be singing a different story if all new Intel processors were exclusively available to PCs sold with Windows for the next 2 years. Let Apple go back to developing their own tech, and keep their arrogant BS out of the computer world. The worst thing that could happen to computers would be for Apple to be the primary supplier of computers in the world.

Re:Fantastic

[jo_ham]

My goodness, your biased frothing is quite amusing.

How could the standard have already been mature, when in the previous paragraph you talk about the PC industry having to "bury" it because of Microsoft's failures - it was either mature or not, you can't switch and change mid post to try and make Apple look bad. (Well, you can, since you seem to have some sort of axe to grind).

You are also completely missing the point - the market for people who had no need of legacy equipment is *exactly* what USB needed to take off - otherwise, why would people buy new if they have something that works already? People are also generally resistant to change, so if they have the option of using the older ports, they continue to do so.

Creating a market of people who need to buy USB equipment by design spawns a market of USB vendors, since someone needs to make it, and Apple didn't make anything except the mouse and keyboard.

Also, not everything for the iMac was translucent plastic. Printers, scanners, disk drives etc were all almost universally battleship grey, as usual. The Iomega Zip drive was blue, with a translucent USB lead, for a splash of colour, and was cross platform with it's new fancy USB connector.

You are so blinded by your need to negate anything Apple has ever done that you are dismissing the release of a computer that sold like hot cakes that only had USB ports, at a time when the USB market had barely taken off at all (due to very poor support in Windows at the time), and trying to assert that it had no effect on the peripheral market at all.

Hilarious.

Re:Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

I dislike the Apple "cool factor" because it causes people to overlook the fact that Apple is making awesome computers with an OS waaaay superior to Windows because it has a *nix CLI under it and way better than linux distro X because it has the polish you'd expect from commercial software. Most people who dislike Apple, I find, have never actually gotten their hands on any of their products and dislike Apple based on principle. Apple has their flaws (iPhone 4 comes to mind + Jobs denial of said flaws), but let's not pretend that some dell laptop running windows 7 is even on the same level as a macbook pro.

You're right, it isn't. A Dell laptop running Windows 7 is far superior. I can buy several for the price of one MacBook Pro. I can play music on it just fine. I can write software on it just fine. I could care less that it's running on a *nix CLI as you put it. Apple doesn't have a cool factor. Apple has an arrogance factor, and a moron factor. They are an arrogant company (iPhone 4 comes to mind), and they cater to morons who buy overpriced technology because the Apple marketing team was AMAZING at making people think their lives were better because the purchased a piece of technology.

The fact of the matter is. You can buy the equivalent of any Apple products for cheaper from other manufacturers. But then... you wouldn't be "cool" and you wouldn't have your status symbol.

Re:Fantastic

[Mattsson]

It's really good that Apple within 6 month finally will introduce a faster interface than USB2, since many of their laptops no longer has the option of FW800 and (some) harddrives today can saturate even FW1600, especially if you daisychain a few on the bus.
It's also nice that Lightpeak finally gets introduced in the market.
It's damn annoying that Intel let Apple have the technology exclusively at the start though. I guess Apple are really eager to be able to market their PC's as the only ones with Lightpeak, and of course they are free to sign any exclusivity agreements they want, but agreements like that is bad for the computer market as a whole...

Hope they introduce a target-disk mode for Lightpeak too. The most annoying thing about Apple computers without Firewire is that they can't be used in target-disk mode over USB.

Re:Fantastic

[mattack2]

You meant automatic transmission, not manual.

Re:Fantastic

[mattack2]

Another respondent mentioned AV devices, but I'll point out the specific case of cable boxes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewire#Cable_TV_system_support
which at one point were required to have a functional firewire port upon demand of the consumer. (I thought I have read rumblings of that possibly being changed, but it is still in effect AFAIK.)

Re:Fantastic

[nashv]

In your support, here is a (not a car) analogy :

Person 1 : "Hey, I got this really cool fly-swatter. It was made by Christian Dior and has these all-metal one piece construction. I don't care how they managed to fuse the suede handle onto the metal , why should I know? All I care about is how great it works! It kills a fly in one swat !"

Person 2 : "Oh, I kind of just used the spatula they sell at Walmart and wrapped a bunch of electrical tape around the handle. Took me some work to get the plastic bendy enough with a little heating. It looks ugly as hell, but guess what, it kills a fly in....exactly one swat!"

Oh, yeah, and of course, the spatula is only updo date until about 18 months later, when the wing-buzz tracking ZapFly laser tech is pushed to the market. You decide which person you want to be. But as the parent said, only one of those attitudes is what made that ZapFly laser possible.

Re:Fantastic

[bennomatic]

1- She doesn't care about having the latest-and-greatest.
2- She's really quite utilitarian about her laptop; and is far less careful about dropping it, spilling things on it, etc. We both feel a little less bad about a $1000 laptop falling quickly into disrepair if it's not new out of the box.

Re:Fantastic

[jjoelc]

Amen to this whole thread!

I'm IT director for a TV station. I spend all day buying, installing, troubleshooting, configuring, fixing, and explaining everything from video servers to telephones... Most of the servers are Linux based (a couple of Windows thrown in to keep things interesting) Most of the desktops are Windows based (with a couple of Macs and one Linux system thrown in for good measure) and the phones.. don't get me started on that end of things!

When I go home.. I just want my stuff to work. I want it to connect to all the stuff AT work that DOESN'T work, and I want have to work on it as little as possible. Mac, OSX all the way.

And to put in my bit with the ongoing car analogy... Yes, it is always a good thing to know how stuff works, and how to fix it when it doesn't.. A little knowledge goes a long way. But when you want a reliable car, you go ask the mechanic what he drives. Sure, they might have a project car to tinker with (and brag about how much horsepower and how much over it is bored and how much torque and how many PSI of boost etc...) But Odds are the car they drive 90% of the time is the one they don't have to mess with constantly to keep running...

Re:Fantastic

[badkarmadayaccount]

I believe System76 ought to be competitive, but I have no experience with them - anybody care to chip in?

Re:Fantastic

[badkarmadayaccount]

Mods are on crack again - and BSD and Linux family trees, internal design, aims, philosophy vary a lot. Second, XNU uses a BSD kernel stack for userspace interfacing - the HAL is a Mach microkernel - OSF/1 style, and uses a NeXT derived driver stack.

Re:Fantastic

[badkarmadayaccount]

IBM, Burroughs Large Systems, Sun Microsystems, Google, Nokia, Palm.

FireWire?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use FireWire, you can kiss it goodbye. Apple will probably remove it and replace it with LightPeak.

There's also rumors that they're dropping the optical drive. That makes room for a better CPU, better GPU and bigger batteries. Still need an optical drive? Use an external one connected via USB.

Re:FireWire?

[obarthelemy]

you mean, via lightpeak ?

Re:FireWire?

[Teun]

Why USB when you have Light Peak on board?

Makes you wonder how durable these fiber cables and connectors are going to be.

And does it run Linux?

Re:FireWire?

[Yvan256]

Apple already has an external USB Superdrive available for sale.

Re:FireWire?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Carefully suited only to the nonstandard power-delivery of the macbook air's single USB port, for your Universal serial bus convenience...

Re:FireWire?

[Anonymous Coward]

This device only works with Macbook Airs, not with Macbook Pros or any other Mac products. Don't ask me why.

Re:FireWire?

[Yvan256]

Also works on the new Mac minis. The port is standard as far as connector and data go, but they use double the 500mA specified by the USB specs.

It probably will work with all newer Mac models from now on. Nothing prevents other companies to also support 1A through their USB ports. If enough of them do it, it could become USB 2.1 or something.

Re:FireWire?

[wootest]

The MacBook Air now has two USB ports.

Otherwise, you're correct. Carry on.

Re:FireWire?

[644bd346996]

From what I recall, all Macs for the past 2 years or so have supported much-higher-than-spec currents over USB so that they can charge iPods and iPhones more quickly.

Re:FireWire?

[Firehed]

Good riddance to optical drives. Outside of spending a few minutes trying to get a Playstation emulator working, I haven't used one in at least a year - including an OS reinstall; I haven't used optical media on a regular basis since probably 2005. For the longest time I've been hoping someone will make an adapter which will allow me to swap my DVD drive for an additional battery, something that I haven't seen as an option since using a Thinkpad Ultrabay probably fifteen years ago. If Apple finally does this across their entire laptop line rather than just the Airs, so much the better.

Re:FireWire?

[pankkake]

It also costs twice as much as a regular USB DVD drive, but, it's a SuperDrive!!

Re:FireWire?

[spyfrog]

Some of us watch DVDs using these optical drives you know...
It is especially nice if you is on a business trip and want to see a movie - you only need to go down to the gas station and rent it and it will fit right into your laptop. So until we have another way of renting movies (and preferable not over Internet since that would be slow when you connect from hotels or with a 3g modem) I would like to keep the DVD drive.

Re:FireWire?

[pankkake]

USB 3.0 raises the 500mA limit to 900mA. Why create a nonstandard extension when there is a standard one?

Re:FireWire?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Because it doesn't harm anything? Supporting more amps than the spec requires is hardly a bad thing.

Re:FireWire?

[shmlco]

Exception and not the rule? I suspect it would be easier for most people who carry a notebook daily to do without the extra size and weight, and then grab an external drive from your suitcase on those rare occasions when you actually want rent a movie from a gas station... ;)

Re:FireWire?

[herojig]

>>>Use an external one connected via USB. Yes, we already do, after at least 4 superdrive failures per year in this almost all apple shop. The MATSHITA UJ-875's just don't perform in dusty environments, so all our macs now are deployed with a cheap USB external writer. An annoyance, and the one black mark on an otherwise clean aluminum score sheet. I doubt firewire will go away next year, so bring on Lightpeak. How could firewire go away when some very important hardware devices depend on it being there (tape cameras, sound cards, etc)? But it looks like USB3 may never make it to the mac, which may not be a good thing...

Re:FireWire?

[pankkake]

Uh? It means Apple's "Super"Drives can't work on stantard USB 2.0 ports, they could use USB 3.0 and advertise it as a USB 3.0 device, it would be much more clear for the consumer. But I guess Apple wants its "Super"Drive to work only with Macs.

Re:FireWire?

[drsmithy]

There's also rumors that they're dropping the optical drive. That makes room for a better CPU, better GPU and bigger batteries. Still need an optical drive? Use an external one connected via USB.

Personally, I was astounded they kept the optical drive when they moved to the "unibody" MBPs. Surely there's no meaningful proportion of users out there who actually need a built-in optical drive ?

Re:FireWire?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

so what? They're advertised as Mac accessories; you can throw in a caveat about demanding more than the nominal power, but according to a number of other posts, this is hardly an uncommon thing.

Re:FireWire?

[adolf]

They're advertised as USB devices, but they don't work with standard USB ports.

That such chicanery is extraordinarily common these days does not mean that it is the right or true thing for Apple (or any other company) to be doing.

Re:FireWire?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

fair enough, but they're advertised to mac users and will probably not be much used elsewhere, so the impact is likely low.

Light Peak?

[Haedrian]

I thought they discontinued that technology in favour of USB 3...

Now the most obvious reaction is to just say "Meh, apple can play around with their expensive toys".

But history has shown that within 1 month we'll have SUPER LAPTOPS with this technology in them.

I can't understand anything...

Re:Light Peak?

[Yvan256]

I think they want to make USB 3 obsolete before it has a chance to really take off. Yes, I'm sure you can give me real-world examples of USB 3 hardware already for sale but it's not widespread yet.

I'd bet that there's more DisplayPort/mini DisplayPort hardware than USB 3 hardware at this point.

Re:Light Peak?

[obarthelemy]

I think lightpeak is both much faster and much more versatile, and aims to replace usb, firewire, dvi, hdmi, even ethernet. this may be a good thing, because my experience with USB ( and , no yet) has been quite bad, from compatibility issues, to slow transfers, to high cpu usage. I lamented the fact that firewire was not cheaper and more widespread... maybe i'll get my wish with lighpeak.

Re:Light Peak?

[obarthelemy]

(usb 1 and 2, no 3 yet) stupid numlock.

Re:Light Peak?

[snowraver1]

What are your compatibility issues with USB? The only compatibility issue I have with USB is when I try to plug the damn thing in upside down.

Re:Light Peak?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It'll be a cold day in hell before anything replaces ethernet. Do you have any idea what the install base on that stuff is? and the fact that(aside from autonegotiation issues on some chipsets) you can get anything from 10mbit crap with external AUI dongles to contemporary 1Gb gear happily chatting away on even a fairly cheap switch?

The consumer market is, increasingly, wireless for anything that isn't within a few meters of the ugly-stack-o-network-gear that inevitably collects next to the DSL or cable modem; so there is approximately zero interest there in experiencing the joy of dealing with optical fiber just to get a 10Gb/s connection to the cable modem that is doing 20mbit/s with a following wind. On the corporate side, the idea that fiber-to-the-desk is going to replace dirt cheap copper seems equally implausible...

Re:Light Peak?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I assume he refers to the unfortunate mixture of optimism, on the part of peripheral manufacturers, and strict adherence, on the part of some computer makes and models, to the USB spec's sections on power delivery. USB2 is quite clear about 5VDC, 500ma; but devices that work poorly, partially, or not at all without at least a few hundred ma more are downright ubiquitous. How exactly a fiber optic interface is going to solve that particular market problem is utterly beyond me; but it is a pain in the ass in some USB situations(mind you, firewire was even worse, since the spec explicitly allowed ports to deliver almost whatever they wanted...)

The only other compatibility issue is with drivers; but USB's "classes" are probably the closest thing to a solution we've yet seen. The world is still replete with non-class-conformant widgets; but it isn't clear how a new bus is going to solve that...

Re:Light Peak?

[sirsnork]

It doesn't have to _replace_ ethernet.

Imagine a dock or port bar on your desk, you bring your laptop in plug in a single connector (although you may need power too, depends how Apple implement it) and everything on your deks now works, screen, keyboard, mouse, printer, ethernet... everything.

Thats something a LOT of laptop users have wanted for a very long time, and this is the potential in a standardized cable format not some propriety thing with 200 seperate wires so the slightest bend of the cable and you lose your display and have to buy a new dock/portbar

Re:Light Peak?

[obarthelemy]

A bunch of stuff:
- power certainly is one, with some devices way over spec, and some computers very sensitive to usb drawing too much power (head over to the plug-computer forums for for sob stories)
- i've had a usb card reader that caused my pc to fail at boot.
- a usb 2 hd that wouldn't work as usb2, had to limit usb to "1" in the bios for it to work
- very jerky performance (high cpu usage) when doing heavy usb2 i/o
- windows reinstalling drivers when a usb dongle gets moved from one port to the next ...

all in all, not a very convincing experience... actually probably the worst I've ever had with a connection, except rs-232 back in the days.

Re:Light Peak?

[obarthelemy]

whether hell is cold or hot is not quite determined yet ?

seriously, the idea is that one single connection can take care of everything. i personally have a server at home, so i'll probably use than the xdsl bandwidth you're quoting. same thing at work.

but above all, i'll appreciate connecting all my stuff with just one cable, not having to stock/pack 5 (or is it 6 ?) different usb cables, plus another handful other cables..

Re:Light Peak?

[petermgreen]

Plus I don't see unifying the network and local interconnects as desirable anyway at least in a corporate situation. The local interconnect is "trusted" (anyone who has access to it probablly has physical access to the PC anyway) and is autoconfigured. The network spans a whole site or more, is relatively untrusted (since anyone anywhere on the site can connect something to it) and is managed by the IT team.

In a server or other technical situation (e.g. lab test equipment) one often has multiple seperate networks running the same protocols/hardware. but doing that on the lusers desks is just asking for stuff to get connected to the wrong network.

Re:Light Peak?

[adolf]

I've been using something similar at work for a long, long time: A USB 2.0 docking station.

Included are PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, a USB hub with two ports, RS-232, parallel, and 10/100 Ethernet.

I plug one cable into my laptop when I plop it down on my desk, and I've got network, scanner, sound, and whatever else connected and ready to go. But it's obviously an old adapter, hence the array of legacy ports, though it seems to do just fine in terms of speed. It was expensive when it was new -- about $90 from unashamed Chinese importers, and up to $200 from various retailers, but similar devices are a lot cheaper these days...

I can easily imagine a Light Peak docking station which might include a USB hub, a video adapter (with HDMI or DVI or VGA or some combination thereof), sound, and gig-E. I imagine that such a device will also be fairly expensive at first, but that it will get cheaper after the chips become better integrated and volumes increase.

Re:Light Peak?

[Blakey Rat]

I always figured we'd be better off using ethernet *as* the port for things like external HDs, printers, displays even possibly. It's a well-designed cable, well-established and specced protocol, omnipresent, and cheap. (Well, cheap compared to this Apple shit, not compared to USB.)

The only drawback is that it requires a "smarter" device on the other end. But in this day and age? What's the incremental cost on adding a network card? $0.10? $0.05?

Re:Light Peak?

[drsmithy]

Thats something a LOT of laptop users have wanted for a very long time [...]

And by "a lot" you mean "the handful of people who haven't been buying one of dozens of PC laptops that have had a docking option for the last decade or two", right ?

The last time I didn't have a laptop that couldn't do what you describe, was when a 486SX processor was still cutting edge.

Re:Light Peak?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't my dock all ready do this?

Re:Light Peak?

[petermgreen]

I've been using something similar at work for a long, long time: A USB 2.0 docking station.

Included are PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, a USB hub with two ports, RS-232, parallel, and 10/100 Ethernet.
Yeah if you don't care too much about network performance (or don't have gigabit anyway) and you don't use and external monitor (or don't care about the low performance that comes from USB based video) then USB will do it.

USB 3 should improve matters but it will still be cuttting things a bit close to the line for high performance video especially as on many systems USB 3 is stuck behind PCIe 1.0 x1 ( 1920×1200×24×60=3317760000 bits per second vs a "raw speed" of 4Gbps for USB 3 and 2.5Gbps for PCIe 1.0 x1) ,. I don't think i've actually seen anywhere selling a USB 3 video adaptor yet nor do most laptops seem to offer it.

Expresscard docking stations also exist and should offer better video performance than USB but they mean a bulky card plugging into the laptop with a thick cable and again the bandwidth limitations of PCIe 1.0 x1 will rear their ugly head if you actually try to push 60FPS fullscreen video on them.

Re:Light Peak?

[petermgreen]

What's the incremental cost on adding a network card? $0.10? $0.05?
Depends what is there already. The ethernet chip, magnetics and sockets probablly aren't hugely expensive in quantity given that whole cards sell for $10 or so. I'd still think we are talking dollars rather than cents though.

Though IMO the real problems with ethernet as an interface aren't the cost of the interface but the following
1: At least in an office environment it's actually useful to have a demarcation between "trusted peripherals" and the "big wide network". Would you want all the gear on your desk accessible to everyone in your building or more. Yes you CAN have multiple seperate networks (and I do because I use ethernet based test gear) but that's not a solution I'd recommend with end lusers and in any case most machines only have one network port.
2: ethernet perhipherals generally need far more intelligence. A usb hard drive just presents itself as a block device and lets the OS handle everything else. An ethernet one has to security (because it might not be on a trusted network), filesystems (because people expect ethernet devices to be multiuser capable) etc. That means instead of a cheap USB-sata bridge chip you are talking a complete computer in there.
3: ethernet perhipherals need a means of configuration since the network they are on may not offer DHCP and most ethernet perhipherals will also want security options. While there are ways to do said intital configuration over the network it's often painful (for example connecting it directly to a PC and messing with the network settings on said PC so that you can talk to the thing and set the settings it needs to operate on your network).

Now for some gear ethernet works out well. A big laser printer for example will already have a fairly powerful CPU. It will already have a front panel interface and in a small office situation people will probablly want it accessible to everyone in the office anyway. In a larger business IT should (though unfortunately should doesn't always mean will :/ ) be responsible for appropriately securing access to it.

P.S. versions of ethernet currently in desktop use are not fast enough to deliver a new frame to a display 60 times per second

Re:Light Peak?

[adolf]

You have somehow managed to completely miss my entire fucking point.

Re:Light Peak?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hm. TODAY, I bring my laptop to work, plug in TWO connectors (power & display), and everything on my desk now works ... screen, keyboard (bluetooth), mouse (bluetooth), printer (wifi), network (wifi). Everything.

Re:Light Peak?

[badkarmadayaccount]

You are confusing Ethernet with TCP/IP.

Re:Light Peak?

[petermgreen]

Only at one place in my post did I assume TCP/IP (a reasonable assumption IMO based on current trends). That was the need for a configuration mecahnism because not all networks had DHCP. All the other issues I listed apply regardless of what protocol is used over ethernet.

Re:Light Peak?

[badkarmadayaccount]

Network cards are dumb and cheap. Just consider it LightPeak replacing PCI. It's also more flexible in carrying protocols, so it can simply wrap up Ethernet frames and manage them differently from other virtual buses on chip. Who said that the physical layer must map perfectly to the logical one.

There's still hope

[Yvan256]

Let's drop VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, USB 3 and only use two types of ports: USB 2.0 for the low-cost/low-bandwidth stuff and LightPeak for everything else.

Wait, what about my old EZ135 SCSI drive? Those carts have 135 MEGABYTES each! That's a lot of data! Oh, my USB flash drive can store 118 of those carts, never mind.

Re:There's still hope

[whiteboy86]

drop VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, USB 3 and only use two types of ports

iPad dropped even the USB port, just Wi-Fi everything. Cables and ports are so last century for the Q guy from Cupertino.

Re:There's still hope

[Yvan256]

Cables are a bit annoying for something you're supposed to be holding in your arms and walking around with.

Re:There's still hope

[frosty_tsm]

There is an adapter for USB-in so you can download pictures from a camera straight to the iPad. You're comment is still valid since a very small number of iPad owners would buy it.

Re:There's still hope

[vux984]

and LightPeak for everything else.

Will lightpeak be able to power my external hard drive? Will it charge my HD video camera while I pull video off it? Is it easily adaptable to HDMI? My new TV doesn't have a lightpeak port, and I'm not interested in buying another tv to get one.

I can hdmi cables for under $10. How long before lightpeak cables are that cheap?

DisplayPort is fine and all, but the adaptor to connect my macbook to my tv cost a small fortune, and it uses the headphone jack for optical audio, the displayport for video, and the usb port to power the adapter that converts it all to hdmi. A good PC laptop comes with an HDMI port... which just works with external equipment.

Hey apple, I'm onboard with modernizing connectors and letting the legacy fall away. Your switch to USB was welcome (although your awfully stingy with ports.)

But every generation of your laptop doesn't need a whole new video connection. PCs are going from VGA to HDMI. That makes sense. Macs... started with some apple proprietary garbage, to mini dvi, to mini displayport, and now on to light peak... 4 separate connectors in the same period of time, while managing to bypass anything that anyone actually uses for anything else.

Re:There's still hope

[acromosh]

Firewire 400 is important for audio engineers. It transfers with data streams rather than bursts. Until audio waves start organising themselves into uniformly arranged packets, I'm using firewire 400.

Re:There's still hope

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an adapter for USB-in so you can download pictures from a camera straight to the iPad. You are comment is still valid since a very small number of iPad owners would buy it.

Does this make any sense to you? No, right? Then don't type it like that.

I don't do this all the time, but "your" <-> "you're" sounds too stupid to pass.

Re:There's still hope

[AaronW]

But USB is still quite useful for connecting things like SD readers (or better yet, have a SD reader slot) and thumb drives for data transfer. Not everything can easily be done over wireless.

Re:There's still hope

[ColdWetDog]

Cables are a bit annoying for something you're supposed to be holding in your arms and walking around with.

Why do you want to plug your kid into a cable? And just which type do you use?

Re:There's still hope

[PhunkySchtuff]

But every generation of your laptop doesn't need a whole new video connection. PCs are going from VGA to HDMI. That makes sense. Macs... started with some apple proprietary garbage, to mini dvi, to mini displayport, and now on to light peak... 4 separate connectors in the same period of time, while managing to bypass anything that anyone actually uses for anything else.

Umm, Apple have used VGA and then DVI and then Mini DisplayPort for video interfaces in the past 10 years. They had mini versions of these connectors, for which you were also given the necessary dongle to upsize it to the standard version of the interface.

There was also the short-lived ADC which was a superset of DVI and all machines that had an ADC connector on them also had a standard VGA or DVI port on them too.

On the PC front, you also seem to have forgotten DVI, which I'd warrant is a lot more common than HDMI.

Re:There's still hope

[vux984]

On the PC front, you also seem to have forgotten DVI, which I'd warrant is a lot more common than HDMI.

I didn't forget it but I don't think I've ever seen a DVI laptop that didn't either come with the vga adapter in the box or in many cases had the vga connector in addition to the dvi connector right on the laptop.

I wouldn't complain about mac's forays into obscure high performance connectors if they had provided a VGA to fall back on. But they didn't.

There was also the short-lived ADC...

ADC right. That's the proprietary apple crap I referred to.

Umm, Apple have used VGA and then DVI and then Mini DisplayPort for video interfaces in the past 10 years. They had mini versions of these connectors, for which you were also given the necessary dongle to upsize it to the standard version of the interface.

mini-vga and mini-dvi and mini-displayport... when was the last time you went anywhere and were able to use any of those connections without an adapter that you brought yourself?

Every conference room projector and big screen tv I've ever hooked my laptop to provides: VGA, sometimes DVI, and sometimes HDMI.

Not once has there ever been a mini-displayport or mini-vga or mini-dvi or adc ready to go.

To make things worse, by current macbook pro has mini-displayport. My wifes which is a year older is mini-dvi... we have a stupid number of adaptors.

for which you were also given the necessary dongle to upsize it to the standard version of the interface.

Neither of my previous two macs came with the necessary dongle to upsize it to anything. My previous was mini-dvi. My current is mini-displayport.

The biggest fail there is that my main monitor, an HP has displayport capability.. you couldn't actually buy a mini-displayport to full-size displayport adapter from anybody... including apple, for the first 6 months or so that I had my mini-displayport equipped laptop. And the mini-displayport to hdmi adaptor? Apple didn't include it in the box. They were charging $75 for it. And that's just video... no audio support.

Re:There's still hope

[Yvan256]

My first Mac mini only had a DVI output but came with a DVI->VGA adaptor.

My new Mac mini ("unibody") has both HDMI and mini DisplayPort on the back but came with an HDMI->DVI adaptor.

Re:There's still hope

[petermgreen]

Indeed on the minis they are more generous with adaptors than on the laptops and imacs (I dunno what the situation is the with pro). Presumablly because you need to hook up a monitor to use the thing at all.

Re:There's still hope

[coaxial]

DisplayPort is fine and all, but the adaptor to connect my macbook to my tv cost a small fortune, and it uses the headphone jack for optical audio, the displayport for video, and the usb port to power the adapter that converts it all to hdmi.

Or you could just get a dvi to hdmi connector for 10 bucks at Fry's

Re:There's still hope

[Paradise Pete]

Why do you want to plug your kid into a cable? And just which type do you use?

An umbilical serial bus cord, obviously.

Re:There's still hope

[jseale]

Yep, SD cards, memory sticks and the like, at their current size limits, have made SCSI and their brethren pretty much obsolete. Leave us not forget how easy it is to share the stuff we carry on these media via Pogo Plugs and other NAS devices and the cloud in general. We've come a long way dude!

Re:There's still hope

[willy_me]

and only use two types of ports: USB 2.0 for the low-cost/low-bandwidth stuff and LightPeak for everything else.

No, only one type of physical port - LightPeak. You can still plug in a standard USB cable and it will act as a standard USB port. The only thing LightPeak does is it adds 4 little fiber optic transceivers into a standard sized USB port. So new LightPeak cables will enable the new LightPeak devices but USB cables will still work as they did before.

Re:There's still hope

[saleenS281]

Will lightpeak be able to power my external hard drive? Will it charge my HD video camera while I pull video off it?

According to Intel, yes:

In addition, Intel said it's working on bundling the optical fiber with copper wire so Light Peak can be used to power devices plugged into the PC, he said.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10360047-264.html

Re:There's still hope

[noidentity]

Macs... started with some apple proprietary garbage, to mini dvi, to mini displayport, and now on to light peak... 4 separate connectors in the same period of time, while managing to bypass anything that anyone actually uses for anything else.

You forgot the terrible HDI-45 connector on the early PowerMacs. I was just dealing with one today. Apple's adapter sticks out a good 8 inches, putting lots of stress on the connector.

Re:There's still hope

[petermgreen]

Umm, Apple have used VGA and then DVI and then Mini DisplayPort for video interfaces in the past 10 years. They had mini versions of these connectors, for which you were also given the necessary dongle to upsize it to the standard version of the interface.
No you aren't, it's bundled with the mini but on the laptops i'm pretty sure it's an optional extra (at least it was when I bought mine)

But even if you spring for the adaptor it's still another thing to lose/get annoyed by and the only place you are going to pick one up in a B&M outlet is probablly an apple store.

And apple laptops have been all over the place with display connectors. IIRC the ibook used mini-vga (Not sure what the powerbooks did), the first macbooks used mini DVI, the first macbook pros used full sized dvi, the first macbook air used micro DVI and then they moved to them all to mini displayport with the unibody stuff. Meanwhile the de-facto standard for lecture theatre/confrence room projector setups has remained VGA so every apple laptop needed an adaptor and there is a good chance it would be fifferent from the last one.

And worse still the adaptors to DVI are DVI-D only so you can't combine them with the DVI to VGA adaptor you have hanging arround you have to buy a seperate adaptor from whatever apple mini plug you have to VGA (and good f*cking luck buying such an adaptor anywhere except an online store or an official apple reseller).

And then there is the clusterfuck that was the mini displayport to dual link DVI adaptor (read the reviews on it...) or the clusterfuck of being unable to buy mini displayport to dislayport adaptors (they do exist now but the only seller i've found is monoprice in the US).

Re:There's still hope

[vux984]

Or you could just get a dvi to hdmi connector for 10 bucks at Fry's

And that would pass audio and video from a mini-displayport equipped macbook pro to an hdmi tv how exactly?

Re:There's still hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Firewire 400 is important for audio engineers. It transfers with data streams rather than bursts. Until audio waves start organising themselves into uniformly arranged packets, I'm using firewire 400.

Um, I hate to break it to you, but Firewire transfers audio data in uniformly arranged packets. The ADC box which translates analog domain audio signals into digital data also handles the job of organizing the data into packets and transmitting them on Firewire.

The reason FW works so well for audio/video streaming is that it has a well-designed mechanism for allocating timeslots for isochronous (evenly spaced in time) data sources. IIRC, the timebase is 8 kHz, or 125 microseconds. An audio device can request a repeating window of time during which it, and only it, is allowed to transmit data, and if the request is successful it will get that window every 125 us, on the dot. So if you're doing 48 kHz 24-bit stereo audio, an ADC would need to send 6 samples (18 bytes) per channel (36 bytes total) per 125 us isoch frame. Since the bus can transfer about 6000 bytes per 125 us, that's not a big deal, and in fact you can allocate many more channels. (They do reserve some percentage of the bus time for non-isoch devices, so you can't allocate 100% of the bus BW to audio or video devices.)

The other good property of FW for this application is that it's designed as a peripheral expansion bus, so FW audio ADC/DAC boxes can DMA to/from the host computer's memory just as if they were PCI cards. No waiting around for your host computer's CPU to marshal data in and out of packets, the Firewire host controller does all that and transfers data directly to/from buffers in DRAM.

With the right software stack design, no audio sample transferred over FW ever waits for as long as a millisecond after it was generated by the ADC to be processed by the computer. But it's definitely not a contiguous stream... the very fact that Firewire can multiplex multiple streams on a serial data bus precludes that possibility. At a low level, it's quite bursty.

Oh, come on, ir's a rumor

[Anonymous Coward]

How many Apple rumors have been wrong over the years? It's much more likely they'd introduce this in the Mac Pro first.

Screw macbooks, I want an HBA!

[billcopc]

If Light Peak is everything it's cracked out to be, I want to see it replace idiotic Infiniband and FC on HBAs, stat! We've been stuck on these outdated interfaces for far too long.

Re:Screw macbooks, I want an HBA!

[amorsen]

Hasn't ethernet pretty much won over Fibre Channel?

Re:Screw macbooks, I want an HBA!

[Darkinspiration]

Tel that to my SAN.... Frankly i would welcome something to make fiberchannel configuration less of a pain.

Re:Screw macbooks, I want an HBA!

[sirsnork]

IB is much less about bandwidth and much more about latency. I doubt seriously that this will have latency even remotely competitive with IB

Re:Screw macbooks, I want an HBA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Someone mod this guy down for pretending to know what he is talking about.

"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[Elbart]

Anybody got a source for that? Other than an Apple-fanboy-page.

Re:"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody got a source for that? Other than an Apple-fanboy-page.

The LightPeak page at Intel Research doesn't even mention Apple at all, but do mention partners like Sony and several others.

Some tech sites, blogs and fanboy pages have been posting claims/rumours of Apple involvement, but with Intel not acknowledging this, and even promoting Sony and others as partners, it doesn't seem very likely.

Re:"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[bonch]

Engadget: Apple Dictated Light Peak Creation To Intel

Re:"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest spending some time learning the definition of English words, dictating has nothing to do with development.

Re:"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[Overly Critical Guy]

Wikipedia says: "Apple brought the concept of Light Peak, an interoperable standard which could handle large amounts of data and replace the multitudinous connector types with a single universal connector, to Intel in 2007 with the intention of Intel producing and developing the technology."

However, I know that Slashdot is packed to the bring with suspiciously anonymous Apple-bashers these days and that they won't believe anything positive about Apple whatsoever. The only good company is Google.

Re:"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, but any source that isn't an Apple fanboy site?

Re:"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[Polumna]

Incidentally, I believe Apple also co-developed the i7. I understand Steve Jobs went to one of those intel commercial shoots and told the actors that they should make a "more better processor, with like... multiple cores and more cache... and like... a laptop one too."

If you're interested, I have another concept where they should make some still faster processors, perhaps on a smaller manufacturing process. I think that'd be really awesome. Also, Apple should make a new phone at some point and maybe a music player with more storage. I'm innovating all over the place. I can't wait for my wikipedia article.

Re:"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[aristotle-dude]

Anybody got a source for that?
Other than an Apple-fanboy-page.

I suggest that you learn to use google. I'll shine a light for you in the right directly. Search Youtube for a video demonstrating Light Peak. The demo was done on a custom Mac Pro motherboard demoing light peak transporting video and other protocols.

Re:"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[aristotle-dude]

Ok, but any source that isn't an Apple fanboy site?

Google it on Youtube. There is a video demo showing light peak on a Mac Pro running OS X Leopard.

They demoed 4X video displayed on a monitor and files being copied from SSDs at the same time over light peak.

Re:"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[dfghjk]

Wow, that's quite a contribution that highly reputable journalistic resource described there. ;)

Who would have ever thought of an interoperable standard that could handle large amounts of data?

Re:"jointly developed by Intel and Apple"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia says: "Apple brought the concept of Light Peak, an interoperable standard which could handle large amounts of data and replace the multitudinous connector types with a single universal connector, to Intel in 2007 with the intention of Intel producing and developing the technology."

No, it doesn't.

Also, from the Light Peak Wikipedia article:
Sources: 'Light Peak' technology not Apple idea

Usefulness of Light Peak?

[fluffy99]

So Apple is finally catching up with SSDs in laptops. Light Peak is still in its infancy and useless as there are no devices to connect to it yet. Why pay more for something that should be standard now, and something that it's going to be useful until he laptop is well past its prime?

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[Anonymous Coward]

The laptop's release is five months away, and between now and then we'll probably see some devices come on the market hoping to capitalize on the new market.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[Microlith]

Chicken and Egg.

If laptops have the ports people will develop devices for it. That Macs are -known- to be coming with them then it's highly likely that peripheral manufacturers are creating devices that use it to be ready for the release.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[Yvan256]

The same could almost be said for USB 3. What's the point of USB 3 when there's eSATA? USB 3 is too slow for connecting a monitor, we already have ethernet ports... You either move forward or you'll get stuck with parallel ports, serial ports, SCSI, etc.

It's also a chicken-egg problem, device manufacturers won't make anything compatible with LightPeak until there is at least some computers with it.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[DJRumpy]

Finally catching up? They were the first to offer SSD as a standard drive. As far as I know, they are still the only manufacturer to do so. The others still offer it as an upgrade, but not baseline as Apple has started to do. You'll also be hard pressed to find manufacturer's offering 512 GB SSD drives from the factory, also as Apple is already doing.

As to the 'why', Light Peak to USB adapters will most likely be an easy win for manufacturer's who aren't yet ready to make the jump to Light Peak, meaning it could easily support USB 'ports' out of the box even though it uses Light Peak underneath.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[amorsen]

It's hard to see why "taking away the choice between a traditional hard drive and SSD" would be innovation. Why would it be innovation that something is baseline rather than only fitted on certain models?

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[Soft Cosmic Rusk]

I think Lenovo beat them to it with the x300. Also, the first eee pc's all came with ssd's.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[Winckle]

Because it means the size of the laptop can be greatly reduced as the chassis no longer has to account for a hard drive bay.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[fluffy99]

It's hard to see why "taking away the choice between a traditional hard drive and SSD" would be innovation. Why would it be innovation that something is baseline rather than only fitted on certain models?

I wouldn't call it innovation either, but a design choice. It does give better speed, albeit typically lower capacities. They might even go proprietary on the SSD and not use the standard form factor for an SSD drive or include it on the mainboard, allowing them to gain real estate within the chassis. Imho, that would be a mistake, but then again how many MacBook owners actually upgrade components instead of buying a who new unit?

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[Vancorps]

huh? I use USB 2.0 DVI adapters all the time so I can have three monitors on my laptop, I can even string six or more of them together and you think USB 3.0 somehow couldn't handle that? As someone that already has USB 3.0 in my machine and external hard drives with USB 3.0 support I can say that the same is not true for USB 3.0. eSata has it's own problems and you're relying on your motherboard to time it correctly, nine times out of ten when I reboot a computer with a Drobo hooked to it, it will fail to post because the Drobo hasn't responded in time. So I just restart with Drobo off, then turn it back on after the machine has booted, finally just mount -a and away I go.

If anything HDMI 1.4 is the only current competitor but it's connectors are all over the board. HDMI 1.4 support ethernet alongside video and audio, has automobile specifications and is the only real competition. Of course HDCP needs to die, all the manufacturers using different handshake frequencies so your Sony Bluray will have trouble with your Samsung tv or Pioneer receiver.

LightPeak won't take off if it is exclusive to Apple, the reason USB took off was because it was available everywhere and it was good for everyone.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[travisco_nabisco]

The Sony Vaio Z Series laptops actually come with 2 SSD's in RAID 0, and this is the standard option.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[dfghjk]

Furthermore, if Light Peak is only for the SSD connection then it is a waste. There are other, existing interfaces that would be perfectly suitable.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[AHuxley]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Comparisons_with_other_interfaces
USB 3 has a few more MByte/s than eSATA if the enclosure, card and fast SSD/memory device can support it.
Light Peak has much larger MByte/s numbers.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[toddestan]

The other possibility is that they'll just ignore the new ports, and Apple users get to carry around a bag of overpriced adapters. For example, I don't think I've ever seen a single monitor, television, or projector that uses mini-DVI or mini-DisplayPort, despite Apple using it for years at this point.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[painandgreed]

Light Peak is still in its infancy and useless as there are no devices to connect to it yet. Why pay more for something that should be standard now, and something that it's going to be useful until he laptop is well past its prime?

There were no devices* to connect to the USB port when the iMac was announced.

*Well, there was like five cameras.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[Patch86]

And you only need to look at the profligacy of devices with that "Apple idock connector" thing (not sure exactly what it's supposed to be called), when the only devices that support them are Apple's portables. Infuriatingly; I haven't seen a decent set of minispeakers that are compatible with a regular MP3 player for years.

Where Apple lead, peripheral makers follow.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah right, manufacturers are in line pumping out all kinds of Firewire 800 devices since Apple dropped the FW400 interface.
Fortunatly you and I have heaps of FW800 at home and never got any FW400 device.
And for the stupid people who bought some obsolete FW400 interface devices you can get an aftermarket(!) convertor making your cable really easy to handle and in the mean time giving it a real nice look!
So I really foresee that light peak will take the world by storm since this group of roughly 10 - 15% of all worldwide computer users are closely watched by OEM's which are ready to have their production lines pump out any kind of really needed devices incorporating the latest technology "innovations" by Apple.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[petermgreen]

Afaict while the standard haven't officially been ratified for running eSATA at 6Gbps yet there is nothing to actually prevent it.

Also IIRC on many boards the USB 3 is stuck behind PCIe 1.0 x1.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[fluffy99]

Light Peak is still in its infancy and useless as there are no devices to connect to it yet. Why pay more for something that should be standard now, and something that it's going to be useful until he laptop is well past its prime?

There were no devices* to connect to the USB port when the iMac was announced.

*Well, there was like five cameras.

The USB spec was written in 1994 and already coming into wide adoption at the time the iMac came out in 1998. There were hundreds of USB products on the market already. Whether those devices had suitable drivers for Apple was a completely different story. At the time, Apple was only interested in USB as a replacement for the ADB.

We can credit Apple with dorking up the spec and using proprietary connector though (the apple keyboard connectors were keyed so they'd only connect to an Apple).

LightPeak in this case isn't even a finalized standard. Unlike USB, there is no consortium of manufacturers promising to products products that use it. http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus.

I think Apple is doing this more for bragging rights than anything else. At best it will go the way of Firewire, which is technically superior in many ways but saw very low adoption in the market. Don't forget that Intel is interested in licensing this technology. It might very well go the route of RDIMMS and get dropped as a technology since vendors didn't want to pay Intel.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[fluffy99]

No it's not meant for the SSD drive interface. It would be pretty silly to run fiber inside the chassis.

As for existing harddrive interfaces, the transfer rates of current high-end SSDs are getting pretty close to the limits of SATA2/SATA-300. SAS is the next generation and can support up to 6-gigabit.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[dfghjk]

Yeah just like ExpressCard, only in that case Macs actually WERE -known- to have them.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[Quila]

Apple beat Lenovo with SSDs, but Dell beat Apple with an SSD option.

Re:Usefulness of Light Peak?

[Anonymous Coward]

The USB spec was written in 1994 and already coming into wide adoption at the time the iMac came out in 1998. There were hundreds of USB products on the market already. Whether those devices had suitable drivers for Apple was a completely different story. At the time, Apple was only interested in USB as a replacement for the ADB.

Only as a replacement for ADB? That's easily disproven. Apple never tried to connect a printer via ADB. USB was the only way to connect a non-network printer to an iMac, and they supported that out of the box IIRC. Same goes for Iomega Zip drives (very popular in 1998, especially on Macs), SCSI devices (only possible to connect through a USB->SCSI adapter), floppy drives, and a ton of other things which Apple never used ADB for.

We can credit Apple with dorking up the spec and using proprietary connector though (the apple keyboard connectors were keyed so they'd only connect to an Apple).

Um, no. Apple USB keyboard connectors are keyed so that the USB A-female to A-male extension cable Apple ships with some keyboards cannot work with anything other than an Apple keyboard. The keyboard itself plugs into anything, despite having an ever-so-slightly nonstandard connector.

This is done by putting a extra notch in the keyboard's connector (because it only takes away material, not adds anything, this is compatible with normal connectors), and a matching internal bump in the extension cable's female connector. I know for a fact that you can plug an Apple keyboard with one of these connectors into a PC because I've done it, so please don't bother telling me it's not possible.

The computers themselves have completely standard A female connectors.

(I may have gotten the genders swapped, it's hard to remember what's what for USB.)

Now, why would they go to all that trouble? Well, passive A-to-A extension cables are outlawed by the USB spec. It's certainly possible to design your own devices which are OK with using them, especially for low/medium speed (1.5 and 12 Mbps) devices like keyboards and mice, but technically it's "against the law". Some engineer at Apple probably figured they'd avoid any possibility of someone using one of their extension cables for other USB devices which Apple hadn't done any testing on by slightly modifying the 2 connectors in question.

Apple sometimes gets too-anal about probably inconsequential things like that.

HTH.

Someone learned a new word today

[Anonymous Coward]

you know, reportedly...

are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net dvi v

[Joe The Dragon]

are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net / dvi / vga / hdmi / display port / firewire?

Does ATI and NVIDIA video work over light-peak? Or will you need some kind of voodoo 1 daisy-chained cable setup?

also what about mouses and key boards light peak is extreme overkill in them?

What will light peak hubs and cables cost?

how much power can a cable pass?

Will you need a powered hub / powered adapters for DVI / VGA / Display port out?

they need to keep the Ethernet port.

What about sound?

isn't exclusivity counterproductive?

[YesIAmAScript]

If this is true, someone really doesn't get it.

The usefulness of a port is directly proportional to the number of things you can connect to it. Exclusivity means fewer devices available.

I'd much rather have USB 3.0 than any kind of exclusive port.

Isn't exclusive just another way of saying proprietary?

Re:isn't exclusivity counterproductive?

[Microlith]

Isn't exclusive just another way of saying proprietary?

No, it just means they're the first to roll it out. I expect it'll start appearing on expansion cards and other motherboards not long after. But Apple will get to tout having the first systems with the interface.

Re:isn't exclusivity counterproductive?

[mosb1000]

Maybe a better word would be "first".

Re:isn't exclusivity counterproductive?

[spyfrog]

Yeah, and as long as they are the only one rolling out the Lightpeak because they are the only one allowed, there will be almost no devices made to plug into the interface... an interface without anything to plug in isn't much to brag about.

Re:isn't exclusivity counterproductive?

[Microlith]

there will be almost no devices made to plug into the interface

Just like no one ever made devices that plugged into the far more proprietary Apple Dock port? Come now, it's an Intel backed technology that appears first in MacBook Pros and is guaranteed to appear shortly afterward across the PC market.

The only question is what will appear, not if anything will appear.

Re:isn't exclusivity counterproductive?

[spyfrog]

I am not saying they won't appear.
I am saying that most won't appear until Apples exclusive right is over.
Having "exclusive right" off an interface is only stupid - you want an interface to be as widespread as possible so as many uses it as possible to get as many devices to use it as possibly.
Exclusive is the opposite of that.

Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Then slap Light Peak on the iPod Touches, and they'll finally be useful (if not practical) for clustering with many common parallelized algorithms. That'll be fun times.

10 Gbps? Really?

[HunterA3]

What advantage will this have over everything else when no home network, and many corporate networks, won't operate at anything over 1Gbps. Your Mac may be the fastest thing on the network, but that's no good when it has to talk to slower devices. Are we going to see an entirely new lineup of network equipment, accessories, etc that take advantage of this too? Netflix streamed from your Mac to your TV would be sweet at 10Gbps.

Re:10 Gbps? Really?

[Totenglocke]

What advantage does it have? It'll load your program / files off your hard drive significantly faster and boot faster (the best SATA is only 6 Gbps). I don't know about you, but I can definitely see people being happier that their system / files load 66.667% faster.

Re:10 Gbps? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Advantage: lots of headroom for the future.

Re:10 Gbps? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlikely, guy. They would have the potential to load stuff more quickly, but I'd like to see a hard drive available in the present in a macbook pro capable of saturating lightpeak.

Re:10 Gbps? Really?

[mitgib]

I know I am in a minority, but I would welcome this interface at home and if price permits, adopt early. I can get 900+MB/s reads off my home media server (32 drive RAID60) and have 802.3ad implemented between all but a couple of devices. Have you looked at the cost for a 10g HBA lately? Like $500 was the last I remember. FC HBA? Even double that and more, and it has been around for years. I don't see networking in the enterprise making much use of LightPeak when 40Gb and 60Gb are already available, but for storage devices? Well it might just shine there, time will tell about it's adoption and pricing. I have SSD as the only local storage device on my desktop, then use my NAS for everything else, but would I really have a need for any local storage if I had 10Gb of network and storage interface at my disposal at home? Hello PXE and iSCSI

Re:10 Gbps? Really?

[googlesmith123]

I didn't really think it would be a replacement for USB, Firewire and video (HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI).

Essentially Intel is hoping that copper cables are nearing their peak transfer rates and won't be useful in 5-10 years for high throughput data. Normal rotational harddrives today can read at rates up to 100 mbps, and ssds can do 355. If speeds keep doubling USB 3.0 will be saturated in less than 4.5 years for hdd and 1.5 years for ssd. It took 8 years to release usb 3.0 after the release of 2.0.

The more interesting question is how this will affect the market for thumb drives and cell phone charging. Especially interesting is the question of power at all. If you read the wikipedia article on the subject there is some thought to bundling Light Peak with USB 3.0, or atleast it's power supply standards.

Oh, great idea

[spyfrog]

Lightpeak "will reportedly be an Apple exclusive at first."
Sounds like a very good idea - making an interface exclusive for a manufacture which makes less than 10% of the computers. That will off course make the third party appliance makers go wild and support this interface instead of USB3 which can be used with the other 90% of the computers... really a great idea.
It will sure be funny for the Apple users to brag about their new Lightpeak connections when they have almost nothing to plug into them and all other poor users will envy them.

Re:Oh, great idea

[spyfrog]

I see. If you don't applaud Apples decisions, you are a troll?

Re:Oh, great idea

[snowraver1]

You must be new here.

Re:Oh, great idea

[KarmaMB84]

It just means nobody else is going to have Lightpeak devices at first. Apple is playing the early adopter here.

Re:Oh, great idea

[spyfrog]

Which is a bad way to spread an new interface.
You want an interface to become widespread and used by everyone - making it exclusive for Apple is counter productive even if it is only for a limited time.

Remember the USB launch? USB didn't took off until PCs and Windows supported it - there was quite few USB devices made before when Apple was the only one delivering USB equipped computers and then it almost exploded when Windows 98 was launched with USB support. Now I am sure some Mac zealot is going to dig up one hundred USB devices that existed before PCs got USB ports but I am not saying that USB devices didn't exist - I am saying that there was no mass market like became later.

Re:Oh, great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's just that your point is inane to where the only reason to write it is to rip on Apple. Lightpeak will obviously be released on other platforms, and both Apple and Intel already know this, as does anyone who isn't mental deficient either due to physical/chemical reasons or blinded by their hatred for Apple. This will just give Apple a little bit of bragging rights for a short period of time, being able to say that they have (insert cool new feature) first. We've seen this many times over, from many manufacturers besides just Apple; you know this, bothered to pretend you don't, and bothered to derive conclusions that you would recognize as dumb if you saw someone else write the same thing about a similar situation involving a different manufacturer. Hence, your post got modded troll.

Re:Oh, great idea

[sirsnork]

Unless I remember this wrong. Apple was the LAST manufacturer to include USB. They were using firewire only for a LONG LONG time. The reason USB support took so long to come about is because Windows 95 and 98 SUCKED in the driver department

Re:Oh, great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir are retarded. Mac OS didn't even have support for firewire until 1998 when OS 8.5 was released. The original G3 iMac was the first mac to use USB released the very next year in 1999. So I'd hardly call them being a hold out to USB. It was in fact that first iMac that got manufactures to create USB products like printers and mice, before then there were literally none. Many of the first USB products were mac only because of that, I remember the first lexmark printers using USB and some keyboards working only on macs because they were the only ones that had the drivers to run them. If it wasn't for Apple pushing USB and ditching the floppy at the same time in that first iMac, I'm pretty sure it would have taken much longer to catch on.

Re:Oh, great idea

[jo_ham]

No, if you act like a dick you're a troll.

It's not the argument, it's the way you make it.

You have stupid hair.

Re:Oh, great idea

[toddestan]

He's probably thinking of USB 2.0. Apple was really late to that game, as they were still trying to push Firewire at the time.

SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[speculatrix]

linux and windows have TRIM, so when will OSX have it?

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

linux and windows have TRIM, so when will OSX have it?

I'm guessing in Mac OS 10.7 ("Lion"), which is due in Summer 2011. I don't that SSDs are mainstream enough quite yet, but if an OS doesn't have them soon it's going to start being an issue.

I also hope that the new version would support querying SATA/SAS drive for logical and physical sector sizes to help with alignment issues. Currently most disks lie and say "512" even if they're not, but given the average life span of most OSes, you need to 'future proof' things a bit RSN.

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

The SSDs that come with the Macbook Air don't need TRIM (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-macbook-air-11-13inch-reviewed/4) the way Windows does.

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[leenks]

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-performance-trim-in-osx/7

Maybe it does not need it?

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using an Intel x25m in my mac pro for a year, and read/write rates are 5% lower than when I first got it.

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[CAIMLAS]

Maybe, but doubtful. HFS+ has no features which would conceivably allow it to compensate for TRIM. It's likely the above benchmark is just a decent example of Amateur Hour - or HFS+ performance is just so abysmal to begin with, or that HFS+ isn't featureful enough to impact it, that it doesn't make a difference.

As with our Windows SSD testing, we filled the SSD with around 112GB of files from a USB hard disk - the files included OS files, game installs and media. We then deleted these files, then copied them across again, repeating the process ten times, so that we'd written over 1TB of data to the SSD

I'm guessing that, had they used a different data set each time, the results would have been different. (I'm unfamiliar with the HFS+ journaling method, but I'm going to guess it tries to put the same files in the same place, keeping record of deleted files. Maybe.)

In other news, Solaris doesn't do TRIM, either (or, at least, the derivatives do not - it was committed to OpenSolaris just before Oracle killed it and didn't quite make the cut, as I understand it). ZFS, however, has functionality that makes TRIM somewhat redundant.

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

linux and windows have TRIM, so when will OSX have it?

Go to bit-tech.net and read, "Does OS X need TRIM?" It is an eye opener, very enlightening and positive for OS X.

Also, USB 3 has been slow in adoption. Very few platforms are available with USB 3.0. The word has been out about LightPeak, it is all about cutting the time to access data.

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

This part might be important:

We started off this article making it intentionally limited in scope as we weren't expecting, in a OS that doesn't support TRIM, to find anything all that interesting. What we found was the exact opposite: an OS that doesn't appear to be affected by SSD performance degradation, at least if you stick to the SSD Apple provides - but if you do stick with that SSD, you get, by modern PC standards, decidedly substandard performance. This one raises many more questions than it answers, and we're going to investigate further.

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Their testing methodology was crap. They erased the drive by writing all zeros to the whole SSD. They didn't use the vendor-provided (and generally Windows-only) tool to mark all blocks as free. As such, the SSD controller thought the whole thing was used so their "clean" SSD was really a 100% "dirty" SSD. Thus their results indicating no performance difference.

If they had properly cleared the drive (in a manner that let the drive controller know the space had been freed) I suspect their results would have been very different.

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[pesc]

Please mod the parent up!

The referenced article says nothing since they never did a proper reset on the SSD.

Of course OS X needs TRIM. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to reset an SSD on a Mac. You have to remove the drive and put it in a Linux or Windows machine to reset it properly.

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[locu64]

According to the benchmarks there is almost a 20% speed reduction between the clean and dirty states of the ssd for the 1024KB random write test. That seems like a noticeable reduction, maybe the hardware garbage collection implemented in these ssds is not as good for large writes?

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think their methodology is sound. Writing zeros to a SSD doesn't equal TRIMming: so their disk was probably degraded from the get go. In any case "not needing TRIM" sounds very implausible -- it doesn't make sense.

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[jones_supa]

linux and windows have TRIM, so when will OSX have it?

By the way: does it even work in Linux, in practice? The first kernels to include TRIM support had it disabled by default, and I still believe there is some work left at the filesystem level.

Also the installers would need to take care of partition alignment...

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[BitZtream]

The following statement is where you should have known they didn't know WTF they were talking about and their tests were completely flawed:

Consider the Indilinx powered OCZ Vertex: without TRIM, its sequential read speed of 1,024KB files plummeted by astonishing 47 per cent - from 258MB/sec to 138MB/sec.

TRIM has absolutely no effect what so ever on read speeds, and they are seeing speed differences. The test is clearly broken.

I'd guess the macbook was tested with a drive that has never had all of its blocks written to, so the wear leveling is still hitting clean blocks, its still writing to blocks that have been TRIM'd. And they've probably used the Windows drives more, hit ever previously unused block and are now at the stage where every bit of the disk has been dirtied and must be erased before it can be written to ... which is why you'll notice the speed killing without TRIM.

Re:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but doubtful. HFS+ has no features which would conceivably allow it to compensate for TRIM.

How can you tell? Are you an expert on (a) what TRIM actually does and (b) HFS?

(answer: no)

It's likely the above benchmark is just a decent example of Amateur Hour - or HFS+ performance is just so abysmal to begin with, or that HFS+ isn't featureful enough to impact it, that it doesn't make a difference.

I doubt you even know why TRIM exists, because you're certainly not trying to reason about its interaction with filesystems in any kind of informed fashion.

SSDs need to have a decently large pool of pre-erased blocks ready to accept writes, or write performance drops off. If you don't have several GB of blocks ready to accept writes, it's easy to induce scenarios where write performance drops through the floor as the SSD shuffles data around. For this reason, all SSDs have a substantial (probably at least 1GB in all but the smallest drives) amount of extra flash memory above and beyond the capacity on the label. It isn't visible to the OS, only to the drive, and it's there so that the drive absolutely never runs out of free space. The more free space, the bigger the performance win. (Free space reduces the amount of "write amplification", ie wear, due to user writes. For this reason, it's common for "enterprise" SSDs to have a much higher amount of spare area per GB of visible space than consumer SSDs.)

TRIM is nothing more than a new SATA command which informs the drive "This sector's data is safe to throw away, I'm not using it any more". Filesystems simply issue TRIM commands to drives whenever they know that data is de-allocated (e.g. when you delete a file). This lets SSDs recycle de-allocated sectors without having to wait until they're actually overwritten, which increases the size of the free pool that the SSD knows about. (So long as you have free space in your FS, anyways. Which is why even TRIM drives must have some reserved space that the OS doesn't know about.)

Now, what could cause a FS to be slow in a way which could possibly interact with TRIM? For any FS, that's going to be the quantity and randomness of its metadata writes. Obviously, the more writing a FS does, and the more random the pattern, the slower it will be, TRIM or not.

But here's the thing: if a FS is slow to begin with, that implies it's writing a lot of really random block addresses during metadata updates. And that's exactly what TRIM should be able to help with! So your idea that an abysmally slow FS couldn't benefit from TRIM is ridiculous nonsense. The "worse" the FS design, the more likely it is that TRIM support would make a big difference.

(I put worse in scarequotes because some filesystems make legitimate tradeoffs in this area. Nobody is going to accuse ZFS of being a horribly primitive and flawed FS design, but it has a much higher metadata overhead than filesystems like HFS+ simply because it does things like always writing at least 2 redundant copies of any metadata block. Not to mention bloating all its on-disk structures with lots of CRC fields so it can always tell when a metadata block has been corrupted. ZFS's obsessive focus on reliability costs it some performance and space overhead. And that's a reasonable tradeoff to make in a FS designed to manage thousands of terabytes of data in a single FS reliably. Maybe not so much in a desktop end-user FS like HFS+, however.)

Repeating History

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just repeating history. Firewire sought to dethrone USB and never did because, at first, it was exclusive to Apple. Even being superior to USB, it still fails to catch on.

USB will continue on. I have no use for a Mac so my next peripheral technology in this realm is likely to be USB3.

Re:Repeating History

[Anonymous Coward]

> This is just repeating history. Firewire sought to dethrone USB and never did because, at first, it was exclusive to Apple.

No, FireWire was never intended to replace USB. They're different animals. FW isn't suited to peripherals like keyboards, mice, and printers. It was meant to replace SCSI, and it did so for external devices in Macs for over 10 years - Macs that shipped with both USB and FireWire.

Re:Repeating History

[dfghjk]

Firewire wasn't originally intended to do any of those things, and if it weren't for Sony and their pioneering digital video product, firewire would never have come into existence at all. Firewire owes more to Sony than it does to Apple, who never envisioned it for the uses it eventually became known for.

Stop spreading the Apple rumour

[Tagged_84]

Lightpeak wasn't an Apple idea, that rumour was squashed last year: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10363956-64.html Still excited to see it coming out next year!

Re:Stop spreading the Apple rumour

[Anonymous Coward]

That link does not confirm or deny the rumor. Interestingly, the intel demo used apple hardware and software.

Re:Stop spreading the Apple rumour

[dfghjk]

Apple hardware IS Intel hardware. Not really that interesting.

Docking Bay?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, with the claimed speed and versatility of this port onboard, does this mean we might FINALLY get a non-shitty, official or third-party docking bay option for Apple laptops?

I haven't upgraded my Macbook Pro since their aluminum Core2 model because I have been disgusted at the lack of features/expandability and dramatically decreased value proposition of the newer models. Does this finally represent a MacBook Pro that can be docked, and take any variety of expansion like an external video adapter that is faster than PCIe 1x? Hallelujah!

LightPeek

[hey]

LightPeak is reportedly nearly as fast as the LightPeek protocol which is currently use for transmitting "peeks" of cleavage in close proximity. Common applications include viewing plumber butt-crack and looking at the waitress's cleavage as she leans over the wipe the table.

Re:LightPeek

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook and Flickr should combine forces to make a cleavage-detecting neural network to quickly sift for the accidental good stuff.

captcha: redwood

Pure speculation. Don't believe it!

[JonathanF]

The podcast is pure (and false) speculation -- it doesn't cite sources, and it's providing supposedly very definite details about something that won't show up for half a year. Having talked to Apple workers and knowing a bit of what goes on in the inside, even *Apple* doesn't know what the system will necessarily be like that far out. It has cancelled systems at the last minute or made part swaps weeks before launch because they either didn't work properly, cost too much or even for political reasons. Apple dropped ATI video cards from a line of Power Macs because an ATI PR confirmed the new models a day early.

LightPeak sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

and LightPeak for everything else.

LightPeak is a product that just won't make it I'm afraid. And like other Intel products, it just doesn't measure up and is inadequate.

My benchmarks?

I'm using the same standards that Intel used when they moved their R&D overseas because they "couldn't find qualified Americans".

If they can lie and make bogus qualifications, so can I and vote with my money.

This is just the beginning...

[migeller]

...to read more about our concept of the future Mac, please see: http://www.empoweringcreativity.com/

DVD drives

[philj]

From the article: "We’re not sure how we feel about removing the optical drive from the Pro machine, but that’s a debate for another time." I welcome it. I've never used the drive in my MacBook Pro. I used the drive in my old MacBook Pro once, and that was to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Shipping Lion on a USB stick would be awesome. A few people would whinge if they dropped the DVD drive but I guess if they had 2 models, one with and one without, they'd end up killing the one with the DVD drive as it'd be fatter. Before people wittier on about Blu Ray - I can't see Jobs doing it. the DRM is such a headache what with key revocation etc.

Re:DVD drives

[ColdWetDog]

I took the optical drive out of my MacBook Pro, stuffed a 1 terabyte HD in it and haven't looked back. The kit came with a cheapo USB optical box which I've used exactly once to load Disk Warrior.

Usually I just use another PC's optical drive and share it over the network. DVDs aren't dead yet but they're walking pretty darned slow these days.

Re:DVD drives

[penguinchris]

I've used the drive in mine. Not frequently, but almost every time I did use it was not a time when I would have had an external drive easily accessible (e.g. travel) - not that I even have an external drive at all, now that I think about it. If I'm not going to use it frequently, I'm not going to bother bringing it with me if I travel - and then I'm stuck without it if I unexpectedly need it, which is what's happened to me in the past (didn't expect to need it - but finding blank discs is much easier than finding an inexpensive external drive).

And for those who do use it frequently, perhaps even while traveling - well that sucks, because now you've got to carry around (and pay for) an external drive.

That said, I don't mind losing the weight and size of the drive, and whatever else they shove into that space I'm sure will be much more useful overall. But it does seem a tad too early to effectively obsolete the ability to burn "emergency" CDs/DVDs while traveling.

I do expect to get another year or two, at least, out of this macbook pro - so perhaps by then I'll not mind. Hopefully then LightPeak will be widely used too, or if not, that the macbook pros at that time will have USB3 and won't skimp on any necessary ports.

By the way, the first time I used the drive was the day I got the computer. It was right after Snow Leopard came out, but the computers they were selling didn't all have it installed yet. So they included the disc for free. That's a situation where you want to make sure your customers can all use the disc without having to buy anything!

Re:are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net dv

[pankkake]

how much power can a cable pass?

This is a very good question, still unresolved. Funny how people state LightPeak will replace everything, yet we don't even know what it is supposed to be.

Re:are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net dv

[Ricken]

Or you could have 1 universal adapter with all those ports connected to a single Light Peak port.

Re:are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net dv

[Sycraft-fu]

Well who knows how it will work in Apple land. They are known for forcing changes because they think they are cool, whether it is time or not. For other manufacturers, Light Peak is just going to be another port at first. It isn't going to replace anything. Capabilities aside, you need to wait as peripherals get support. The first things I expect to see are external HDDs, and things like pro audio/video capture equipment. Video is going to be some time. No monitor today supports Light Peak (and relatively few even support DP) so it'll be some time. If it is to gain any traction, it'll have to have an interface to work with the high end discrete cards.

Even then it may need to develop a generation or so before it is useful 10gbps is not fast when you talk video. It is acceptable, but not fast. DP has 17gbits of bandwidth with its current standard, HDMI has 10gbits. So it is around as fast as current video standards, but offers no real speed advantage, which is really what it would take to force a change at this point. HDMI is heavily entrenched because it is what home theater gear uses. The reason to move to somethign else would be higher resolution, colour depth, and frame rate displays will need more. Say we want 2560x1600@30bpp@120Hz. That would need about 15gbits so DP could barely handle it, but nothing else. Now suppose we go with a 4k display, and 96bpp (32-bit floating point per colour to allow for HDR) again at 120Hz. Now we need 108gbps. So if a connector can offer much higher bandwidths, there'll be interest as we eventually want that for video, but at 10gbps Light Peak offers nothign the current ones don't. If Intel let's nVidia and AMD support it they probably will, but otherwise people will give it a miss.

For networking, no fucking way. Networking is stuck on Ethernet because networking uses Ethernet. It sounds like a tautology and that is really how it works. All local area nets are Ethernet. As such you have to support Ethernet to use them. As such all devices ship with Ethernet, as such all future stuff has to support it and so on. Nobody is going to redo their network to Light Peak. This is particularly true because 10gbE is already here, and really with networks even 1gig is really fast. Your network is local disk speed at that point. So you aren't going to convince people to dump their existing infrastructure for it.

In the long run Light Peak may become a popular somewhat universal computer interconnect but it is not happening any time soon. If Apple thinks they can force it they are wrong (for that matter they didn't force USB adoption, Mac users had to deal with it and then the industry moved that way at its own pace). However networking it will probably never replace, just because of the massive installed base of Ethernet.

Re:are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net dv

[donstenk]

Everybody knows mice and keyboards are only Bluetooth.

USB 3.0 is intel-backed too

[YesIAmAScript]

So say Light Peak comes to Macs first. The few peripherals that are made for this 10% of the market, how much are they going to cost? Well, you can only sell to a few people and those people already showed a propensity to buy expensive computers. On top of this, the costs of an optical interface are high.

So what do you think the companies will charge? They'll charge 3x what they do for anything else, just like with every other Mac-specific interface.

And then other PC companies will have a choice, put on Light Peak, with its expensive interface and expensive peripherals, or add USB 3.0, which accepts plenty of cheap devices people already have. What do you think these companies are going to choose? It's going to be Firewire versus USB 2.0 all over again.

And before you think Intel-backing means automatic success, Intel backed RDRAM, FB-DIMMS, Itanium and I2O.

Re:USB 3.0 is intel-backed too

[aristotle-dude]

So say Light Peak comes to Macs first. The few peripherals that are made for this 10% of the market, how much are they going to cost?

Wow. Do you really believe that they are only 10% of the market in the US? They are currently over 12 % of the total market and that includes machines that are used as Point of sale devices and kiosks.

If you ignore the "total" market numbers and look at only the relevant market segments that actually buy after market addons then the number grows to double or triple of your estimate.

Re:USB 3.0 is intel-backed too

[toddestan]

Keep in mind that Apple is planning to use Lightpeak to try and segment market as they always try to do. So your 12% number is meaningless, as most of those sales are iMacs and Macbooks which don't get LightPeak just like their PC cousins.

So just how big do you think the Macbook Pro/Mac Pro peripheral market is? We're going to see a few high-end cameras, maybe some very expensive (but very fast) external drives, and probably some of Apple's own Cimena displays. And that'll be about it.

Pure Speculation!

[iamagloworm]

folks are getting all excited as these guys are getting traction on reporting that the macbook pro in april 2010 will have lightpeak. the fact is they probably know less than you. amusingly in their post where they claim all this about ipad, mbp and lightpeak they cite their previous prediction in an article from september of an update to to the macbook air in "October or November" and "The base MacBook will cease to exist" while "Gone will be the custom packaged Core 2 Duo, and in it's place will ride Intel's latest Core i-series of processors". I and any other pundit can guess at months with a good chance of being in the ballpark, but they clearly do not have a source with access to apple details. They are not a reliable source of information and should not be reported on at all - expect possibly for comic relief, providing fodder for the /. trolls picking off easy targets that are apple fanatics.

New MacBook Pros To Sport Light Peak Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel is planning to supply the controller chip and is working with optical component manufacturers to make Light Peak components ready to ship in late 2010, and expects complete systems in 2011. Great, something else for Intel to control... And yet they (Intel) won't help motherboard makers integrate USB3 controllers!

Re:are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net dv

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry so much, I see this following the path of betamax:

[...] will reportedly be an Apple exclusive at first.

Sounds worse than what Apple and MPEG-LA did with IEEE 1394 (trademark the name and require licensing fees).

Create a superior technology, then bundle it up in red tape, surround it with an army of lawyers, and watch it fail... a proven formula.

so you want a $30? $60? super adapter that may nee

[Joe The Dragon]

so you want a $30? $60? super adapter that may need a wall wort to power it?

Nostradamus strikes again

[jamrock]

Sounds like a very good idea - making an interface exclusive for a manufacture which makes less than 10% of the computers. That will off course make the third party appliance makers go wild and support this interface instead of USB3 which can be used with the other 90% of the computers... really a great idea.

You're absolutely correct. Like when Apple stupidly introduced the iMac back in 1998 with no floppy drive and those bizarre little USB ports. Not to mention the colors and attention to design, which flew in the face of the beige-box standard. Considering that Macintosh only had market share of around 3%, peripheral manufacturers refused to waste time and resources supporting USB, and consumers ignored the iMac because floppy drives to this day remain a must-have for personal computers. The iMac failed dramatically as predicted by tech pundits, and it will be remembered as just another inane idea by Steve Jobs. So typical of Apple, to arrogantly believe that they can influence the tech industry with their pie-in-the-sky toys.

Wait...

Re:Nostradamus strikes again

[Sycraft-fu]

They didn't influence the industry with their force to USB. Sorry, I know that Mac users would like to think so but when you look at the history it is clear it made little to no difference. USB peripherals started launching almost right away because it was a good bus and Intel mandated it on all new motherboards. However support for older standards remained for a long time. USB keyboards and mice were the exception, not the rule, even after it had been around for awhile. Printers took a long time to stop having parallel, and so on. USB grew to dominance because it was a good connector, and with USB 2 is became fast enough for just about everything. It did not grow because Apple decided to force all Mac users to buy USB to ADB adapters with their new line of Macs.

I've got no problems with offering a new connector. Offering Light Peak seems sensible. I think it'll be common on PCs too, Intel is going to be pushing it hard with their 6 series chipsets for Sandy Bridge. What is stupid is getting rid of the old connectors, when the new connectors are used by almost nothing. Sure, if in 5-10 years everythign is Light Peak, then ditch everything else. However right now? Who knows how little or much will support it?

Re:Nostradamus strikes again

[rolfwind]

They didn't influence the industry with their force to USB. Sorry, I know that Mac users would like to think so but when you look at the history it is clear it made little to no difference. USB peripherals started launching almost right away because it was a good bus and Intel mandated it on all new motherboards.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-spec7.html

The adoption problem

USB, even after support for it was available in Windows, faced an adoption problem. Standard adoption is largely driven by network effects; the utility of a standard-compatible device comes from its ability to interoperate with other things compatible with the same standard. A standard is only useful to you if there are compatible devices and if there are a lot of them.

This creates a Catch-22 situation for adoption. If users lack USB ports or drivers, those users cannot buy a USB device. For vendors, that limits the market for USB devices and makes it more reasonable to develop peripherals for other ports (such as the once-ubiquitous serial and parallel ports, or the SCSI port if you also wanted to tap the Mac market).

Even if users would prefer a USB device, they would still be more willing to accept a non-USB device since it can be connected to their computer. Even if USB is a better, more desirable piece of technology, it may not be more marketable than the alternatives! The number of people who would buy a USB Webcam might be smaller than the number who would buy a serial Webcam -- and almost all of them could be persuaded to buy a serial one instead.

Enter the iMac.

The original "bondi blue" iMac was the first computer to offer USB ports without offering "legacy" ports. That's right -- no serial ports, no ADB. This changes the network effects. Before the iMac showed up, there were many millions of PC users who had no USB ports and perhaps a couple of million who had a USB port and also legacy ports. The biggest market in 1998 was in serial and parallel ports (or joystick ports, PS/2 ports, and so on) -- there was no reason to target the USB market. That would just restrict your audience.

The iMac presented a ready-made market of users who chose the Mac line for its graphics capability. In turn, the iMac offered a captive audience of users who would buy a USB peripheral but would not buy any other kind of peripheral. These users provided a market for USB peripherals that wasn't facing competition from other port choices. The result was a flood of USB devices in white-and-blue plastic. This was a crucial turning point that created a reason (tied to a proven system choice) to prefer USB to non-USB ports.

Once adoption was foist onto this substantial segment of users, the technical merits of the technology won out easily. USB's technical superiority (for most peripherals) to the conglomeration of a half-dozen different port types was unambiguous.

Re:Nostradamus strikes again

[LodCrappo]

wish I had mod points. you are correct on all points. USB adoption happened because the software market leader (Microsoft with Win98 and updates to Win95) and the hardware market leader (Intel with their chipsets) supported it, and it worked pretty well. It did not become ubiquitous overnight because older systems from the market leaders still had usable life when the standard was released. As these systems were replaced with newer ones, USB became more and more common.

The iMac made no measurable difference in the adoption of USB as a standard. Can't believe how common the myth that it did seems to be here. iMac sales were good compared to other Apple computers, but it's laughable to think they sold enough units to mandate the adoption of *anything* in the mainstream computer market.

Re:Nostradamus strikes again

[gnasher719]

The iMac made no measurable difference in the adoption of USB as a standard. Can't believe how common the myth that it did seems to be here. iMac sales were good compared to other Apple computers, but it's laughable to think they sold enough units to mandate the adoption of *anything* in the mainstream computer market.

So how come I couldn't find an external CD writer that didn't come in shiny iMac-coloured plastic?

Re:Nostradamus strikes again

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows didn't even fully support USB until Windows 98, and you sure as hell couldn't buy any consumer-space USB peripherals before 1998. Intel included the controllers in most mainboards, but did not mandate the PORTS--in fact, you could buy motherboards in 2000 that didn't have any onboard USB ports, just headers.

You mention keyboards, mice, and printers taking a long time to adopt USB on the PC side, and you're right. But those were the first USB peripherals. There were no digital cameras, flash drives, PDAs, or cell phones back then. Absent those peripherals (and scanners), there WERE NO USB consumer peripherals to buy in the first place.

When you look at the history, it's clear that it did make a difference. All the early USB input devices, Zip drives, printers, and scanners for consumers were Mac products, all SUBSEQUENTLY launched for Windows since they'd already gone to the effort of designing them for their Mac customers.

Re:Nostradamus strikes again

[dfghjk]

The author of the IBM article has the same failure of understanding of history as do Apple fanatics. Legacy-free PCs were already envisioned at the time of the iMac introduction, were in development, and some were introduced quickly. USB on the PC was simply held up by Microsoft's lateness with OS support. Apple did nothing regarding USB that wasn't already underway. They simply added visibility through their RDF and pretty colors plus they gave peripheral makers some extra opportunities to differentiate with ugly skins.

Just because IBM said it doesn't make it true. They were too busy failing to remember anything about the USB era.

RDMA or not or just a Carrier?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does LightPeak, like Firewire, contain RDMA - so the CPU doesn't have to call an interrupt every time a signal comes in (Like USB) does?
It is the main reason why I prefer Firewire - latency and CPU utility is just so much lower, even through new processors are very powerfull, why not use the most optimal solution?
Or does LightPeak just works as a carrier for e.g. firewire800, esata, so it's handed off to the "next" io-controller?

Standard appears to have power...

[SuperKendall]

Will lightpeak be able to power my external hard drive? Will it charge my HD video camera while I pull video off it?

Any description I've seen of it includes the ability to transmit power along with data. Yes.

Would you be interested in pulling video data off a camera in 5 realtime?

Is it easily adaptable to HDMI?

Probably, just as you can transmit HDCP encrypted video over a DVI connection just as easily as DisplayPort.

DisplayPort is fine and all, but the adaptor to connect my macbook to my tv cost a small fortune

If $5.13 is a small fortune for you, I think you might be living with the laptop you have for some time. Just as HDMI cables are outrageous in cost when not purchased online, you have to shop around for things like DisplayPort cables too (though at the time you bought it choices were probably more limited).

But every generation of your laptop doesn't need a whole new video connection.

I agree, but LightPeak is such a huge jump in bandwidth that I think it will be a welcome addition to abilities - I don't think Apple will make it the only display adaptor for a while, out of necessity I'm sure a future Mac will also include Display Port, USB, and possibly even ExpressCard/34 (though that I could see dropping since uptake has been low and LightPeak is perfect for external storage).

Agreed

[Midnight Ryder]

I'll agree with you - most of my development these days is web development and iPhone / iPad development, but I still dabble back into industrial automation from time to time. I like my Mac Mini, for instance - it's solid, it's managed to survive three major OS upgrades since 2006, and it's still solid after four years of constant use. I like the "it just works" philosophy - I can focus on software development, not hardware troubleshooting. Apple isn't perfect, but the OS and Hardware combination is pretty damned good. (I will say, though, that after four years I'm finally going to upgrade the little box. This one will sit on the shelf and be a media box.)

The 'cool factor' is problematic - you're dead on right about that. But I've not been one to care too much about what everyone else thinks is cool anway ;-)

I'll second this!

[King_TJ]

The last 2 posts in this thread mirror my experiences 100%.

As perhaps my most recent "why the hell can't Linux ever detect all the hardware properly?" moment? I had an old Acer laptop (circa 2002) that was in like-new condition. One of my customers dug it out of her closet and gave it to me, saying "It's so old, I don't want it anymore, but I rarely used it even when it was new .... so maybe you can do something constructive with it?" I upgraded the PC100 memory in it from 64MB to 256MB, so it at least had a CHANCE of doing something useful, and proceeded to install Linux on it. First, I tried Ubuntu -- but it ran PAINFULLY slow. Obviously not designed with a Pentium II based processor in mind, these days. Then I started doing research to find out which distro was recommended for a vintage machine like this. I settled on CrunchBang Linux, after looking at a LOT of options. Turns out neither the latest Ubuntu OR CrunchBang could detect the built-in sound on the machine though! It is REALLY so much to ask, for a Linux distro to auto-detect something as basic as a sound chipset on a laptop that they had 8 YEARS to get around to supporting properly??

Re:I'll second this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux on laptops is hard to do if you if you want to follow the true open source mantra. The chipsets are often customized to the laptop and open source developers don't focus on writing drivers for chipsets that are limited.

The easiest way to get all the hardware working under Linux is by using Windows drivers in a wrapper. This has been available for years, but creates moral objections among a portion of Linux enthusiasts.

In the US?

[YesIAmAScript]

Peripheral devices are created for the global marketplace not the US.

If I look at the total market for addons, Apple actually gets smaller. There are a lot of ports (especially USB) on devices out there that aren't PCs at all. I currently have a USB headset, steering wheel and webcam plugged into my PS3. And I didn't even count the USB memory key or Rock Band guitars.

Having a port that only appears on a small number of devices, even 12% of the US PC market, will still lead to a reduced number of devices. And as I said, the fact that these ports only appear on expensive devices will mean the peripherals will be priced higher, making the standard even less attractive to customers.

Re:In the US?

[aristotle-dude]

General purpose peripheral devices are created mainly for the home and small business market. While corporations may have printers, most are present as "shared" network printers.

After market peripherals generally are not sold to a lot of corporate accounts nor are they present in Point of sale installations beyond the ones that make up the POS system itself.

The same barriers exist for third party software in both the corporate and POS/Kiosk segments. Most corporate desktops are standardized on a specific set of software and locked down to prevent installation of new software.

It seems a bit pointless to lump Apple sales in with segments where Apple is not actively involved in, if at all.

Apple is going to do what they did with USB

[crovira]

PC motherboard makers are all STILL delivering boards with parallel printer ports and those awful separate printer and mouse ports and D25 external monitor ports. How brave of them. How daring.

Apple is the only company with the balls to spit in the eye of backward compatibility. They're the only company who get it and don't mind pissing off their old customers by forcing them to adopt something new the next time they buy an Apple computer.

That's the only way we get advancement in this lousy industry.

The bigger change is letting go of the optical drive (there goes using my DVDs anymore without an external drive... (Good thing I have three...)

I've got a Titanium PowerBook G4, an iMac G5, two MacBook Pros ALL OF WHICH ARE STILL WORKING EVEN AFTER NINE YEARS.

Let Apple keep on innovating. They're not obsolescing my machines.

I just keep buying new ones, new storage devices, scaners, MIDI keyboards, cameras, audio recorders, mixers.

The setup I've got now will keep on working just fine...

Re:Apple is going to do what they did with USB

[dfghjk]

"PC motherboard makers are all STILL delivering boards with parallel printer ports and those awful separate printer and mouse ports and D25 external monitor ports. How brave of them. How daring."

They do that on specific models for specific reasons. Apple would too if they could sell into those accounts. Legacy ports are valuable to large business accounts that Apple wishes they could get a piece of.

"Apple is the only company with the balls to spit in the eye of backward compatibility."

No they aren't, but they are the only company that doesn't have any customers that would be especially unhappy with the move. Removing legacy ports was not an Apple idea. They did it in a desperation move with the iMac. The PC industry had been working on it for years.

"They're the only company who get it and don't mind pissing off their old customers by forcing them to adopt something new the next time they buy an Apple computer."

No they're not. What old customers did they piss off?

"Let Apple keep on innovating. They're not obsolescing my machines."

You just disproved your own fanboy claims.

The iMac drove the adoption of USB

[jamrock]

They didn't influence the industry with their force to USB. Sorry, I know that Mac users would like to think so but when you look at the history it is clear it made little to no difference.

To say that Apple's move to USB made little or no difference is simply not true. The original iMac did in fact influence multiple industries in terms of industrial design, and in the tech industry by popularizing the new technology in the minds of consumers. Intel mandated it on all new motherboards, but they did not prohibit the use of legacy ports. PC manufacturers took the wait-and-see attitude, and even today most PC's still include legacy ports side-by-side with USB ports. Apple jumped in with both feet, and the iMac was the first personal computer to be completely free of legacy ports. While USB peripherals had existed before, it was only after the iMac became a hit that the wave of translucent, candy-colored printers, scanners, USB floppy drives, external hard drives etc., began to appear. Not to mention pencil sharpeners, staplers, electric grills etc. Remember that phase? I don't recall seeing any plain vanilla USB peripherals in the late 90's, and consumers wanting a new printer or scanner were confronted by the plethora of brightly-colored USB peripherals. Joe Sixpack's first encounter with USB was typically with a device that had been inspired by the iMac's design.

Re:The iMac drove the adoption of USB

[jpmorgan]

Pure revisionist history. This narrative that only Apple can innovate is pure dreck. When the iMac was released, Apple was close to insolvency. They'd been bailed out the previous year by Microsoft, and the Mac's market share was in the 2-3% range. The iMac attracted attention to Apple, but Apple absolutely did not have the influence in the market to drive adoption of USB.

You know what else came, just a month before the iMac G3, that just might have had some influence? Windows 98, which introduced to the wintel world proper support for USB, and ended up with around 95% market share. That just might have something to do with the reason why USB was uncommon before 1998.

But ultimately the GP is right. What drove adoption of USB is that USB was good. It was enormously better than serial and parallel connections in practically every way.

what about the chiclet keyboard?

[0WaitState]

Will the new macbookpro address the chiclet keyboard? The original macbookpro had a real keyboard--that's why I keep mine, battered as it is. If I wanted to attempt to work on a chiclet keyboard I'd get a PC junior just to be all retro and cool.

Re:what about the chiclet keyboard?

[wootest]

I had a PowerBook G4, then a MacBook, their first to have the chiclet keyboard, then an early aluminium MacBook Pro. The chiclet keyboard is the most comfortable keyboard I've used, and a day didn't go by when I was on the MBP that I didn't want the chiclet keyboard back. (I have since gotten a MacBook Pro with the chiclet keyboard, and I'm very happy with it.) It may share some superficial looks with actual rubber-like chiclet keyboards (like the ZX Spectrum keyboard or those waterproof things you can roll up), but the keys are real keys; very distinct and deliberate without needing to travel far. The connection is made by scissor switches and the keys provide just the right amount of resistance. The aluminium keyboard was prone to accidentally triggering too easily unless you were built like a crane fly.

It's not too hard to find reviews of the desktop Apple keyboard of the same model where people walked in with preconceived notions but are now converted. Here's one. I have one of those keyboards at work at a mostly-Windows-based development shop, and the usual sequence from interested visitors tends to be to ridicule me, paint me with overzealous brand loyalty (who the hell uses an Apple keyboard!?) and then trying it out for half a minute before deciding they want one themselves, damn the torpedoes, even though they'll have to remap some keys and swallow some pride. Even people who already have flat, laptop-like keyboards tend to note an improvement.

If you've tried the keyboard for a significant period of time and don't like it, I apologize. Everyone should have the right to use a keyboard they're comfortable with. But you should know that you're in a clear minority from what I've seen, and that regardless of that, the keyboard is not actually anything like a PC junior model keyboard and people tend to like it because of how it feels, not because of how it makes them feel.

Re:what about the chiclet keyboard?

[0WaitState]

Project much, do you? I live within easy walking distance of an Apple store. Some of my peers have bought macbook airs. I have enjoyed many, many opportunities to use the chiclet keyboard. It does not work for me. I'm glad it works for you.

Re:what about the chiclet keyboard?

[wootest]

I don't understand how pointing out that it's not of the same model as the PC junior keyboard, which comes down to facts, is "projecting". I figured that someone who would equate the MacBook keyboard with the old chiclet keyboards with a rubbery feel and without durable mechanisms hadn't used them, since the difference is quite stark.

But okay, it does suck for you that they don't make the previous model then.

what?

[YesIAmAScript]

Forget point of sales. There enough cell phones that have USB to more than make up for the subtraction of PCs used as point of sales devices.

You're crazy if you think corporations don't use USB. They don't use mice?

You're off your rocker.

It seems a bit pointless to lump Apple sales in with segments where Apple is not actively involved in, if at all.

I'm not lumping Apple sales in, I'm splitting them out. I'm pointing out they account for only a small number of the devices with ports out there. And furthermore you still ignore my point about devices being made only for Mac costing a lot more. Ever bought a Mac video card? They cost far more than PC video cards, even though they use the same interface (PCIe). Now imagine what happens when even the interface changes. Compare the price of a VGA or DVI monitor versus a DisplayPort one.

And software? Who is talking about software. Was I talking about software when I mentioned the USB devices I have plugged into my PS3? You can't load your own software onto a PS3, and yet it still uses USB. Software is not part of my point at all.

Re:what?

[aristotle-dude]

*SIGH* Virtually all USB mice are HUMAN INTERFACE DEVICE compatible which means that they will work without a device specific. Most corporate desktops are NOT generic whitebox PCs but rather are usually standardized around a specific vendor be it Lenovo, HP or Dell and those vendors supply branded mice and keyboards.

I'm not going to directly bother to respond to the rest of your post because you completely missed the point.

*WOOOOSH*

The discussion was concerning peripherals as in printers, scanners and other "EXTERNAL" devices. Hence the word "peripheral". We were also talking about "AFTER MARKET" devices that are not OEM branded to the specific workstation brand.

The corporate world likes to keep things pretty standardized so you are not likely to get a lot of sales if your device was not chosen by the IT staff as "standard" equipment. The same thing applies even more for Point of sale units which can often have clauses in their maintenance contracts specifying no aftermarket upgrades of either software or hardware from other vendors.

If you are a third party vendor of either hardware peripherals or software and you are NOT MSFT then you are probably going to write off any chance of breaking into the corporate or POS OEM market in any big way.

I've worked the technology field for over 15 years.

Re:are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net dv

[Blakey Rat]

Please, it's fucking Apple.

You need a $30 adapter to use *ethernet* on the MacBook Airs. It's not like Apple's ever been shy about charging extra for industry standards.

Obnoxious generalization

[Brannon]

People buy Macs because they think they are worth the money, not because they aren't aware that you can buy other computers cheaper. Kinda like the same reason that people buy nice cars or any other product on the planet.

Lots of very technical people buy Macs. People who value good design.

Have you ever used one?

[Brannon]

I can open and close the lid on my MacBook thirty times in a row in under a minute and it will go to sleep and wake up perfectly each time. Care to try that with your Win 7 box?

Re:Have you ever used one?

[honkycat]

Maybe so, but try to configure your MacBook so it won't go to sleep and freeze your downloads when you close the lid...

Or try to remember the magic steps to get it into or out of external-display-only mode. Ugh.

I'm a mostly happy Linux->MacBookPro convert, but these two issues are absurd. I understand the former may have had to do with previous hardware versions that could not tolerate operating with the cover closed, but that's a pretty lousy excuse.

Re:Have you ever used one?

[petermgreen]

I understand the former may have had to do with previous hardware versions that could not tolerate operating with the cover closed, but that's a pretty lousy excuse.
It's really a result of apple's obsession with smooth sleek stuff. The macbooks have no vent holes on the bottom, this has it's good points (looks sleek when closes and no need to worry about blocking them by using the machine on a poor surface) but it means the only real place for the machine to vent through is the keyboard and hence running it closed (i've done it under linux) is a bad idea.

Re:Have you ever used one?

[honkycat]

Yes, but they now endorse (or at least provide support for) running at least the aluminum MacBookPros with an external display and the lid closed. That "support" entails plugging in the display, putting it to sleep, then using an external keyboard to wake it back up (and a similar exercise when trying to switch back to the internal display).

may be it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

you're right in a sense that on mac clean ssd performance on mac isn't any better that dirty ssd performance:

from page you linked:
windows with trim (or clean drive) - 9.8MB/s,
windows w/o trim, dirty drive - 4.93MB/s,
mac os x with or without trim, clean or dirty - 5.6MB/s.

mac performance on clean drive is 15% better than windows performance on dirty drive w/o trim, and is almost half of windows performance on clean or trim-capable drive. it doesn't degrade with time as it starts degraded compared to windows ssd performance.

Re:Oh, come on, it's a rumor

[mrxak]

Seriously, how did this make slashdot? It's completely unfounded speculation that doesn't even make sense.

Re:are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net dv

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a suggestion, try using fewer paragraphs.

The Popcorn Argument

[justthinkit]

Price a high end MBP with anything of the same specs from Dell and look at the price difference.

Price a jumbo sized popcorn with anything of the same ingredients from any other movie theater and look at the price difference.

You'll find both are a waste of money.

10 Gbps? Really. Combined

[rsborg]

You will run FW, USB, Ethernet and VIDEO all over this bus.

All the other protocols will sit on top. So if you're running lots of the various connectors at the same time, you *might* be able to saturate it.

reasons for exclusivity

[Gary W. Longsine]

Well, you're assuming that Intel and Apple have negotiated some sort of exclusive arrangement. That may or may not be true. It also might be the case that other PC vendors have been dragging their feet, as they are wont to do.

FireWire ghetto

[Gary W. Longsine]

FireWire was marginalized before Apple dropped it from iPods and tried to drop it from low-end Macs. Frankly, the first vendors to adopt LightPeak are likely to be the same vendors who use FireWire. They'll be eager to get onto a more modern standard with a better looking roadmap.

viva la difference

[Gary W. Longsine]

Well, the differences between BSD and Linux flavors of UNIX are greater than you imagine. However, you illustrate interesting larger points through your error.

• Abstraction is good.
• Specialization is useful, because we can't all be experts in everything.
• At certain levels of abstraction, lower level details appear to be largely irrelevant.

However, there's a curious thing about Apple's design philosophy: all of those lower level details are not considered to be irrelevant.

BSD is different from Linux in some important ways that make it a better foundation for a system like Mac OS X, the license, for example. The fine products which are built on top of this mountain of details illustrate -- by their marked contrast with the crap emitted by most other companies which consider those low level details to be largely irrelevant -- the importance of attention to multiple layers of abstraction, and not merely dismissing the lower layers.

You remember it wrong

[Quila]

USB, at 1.5-12 mbps (theoretical, actual was much lower), was supposed to be the low-speed connector for mice, keyboards, external floppies, printers and such. It was a replacement for the common serial and parallel ports. Firewire, at 400 mpbs, was supposed to be the high-speed connector for external hard drives and video. It was a replacement for SCSI.

Apple initially saw no competition between the two, no reason to have one over the other.

You can add a Unix CLI to Windows

[judeancodersfront]

Cygwin has been around for years.

I actually dislike the "Unix cool factor" since it encourages the use of a locked down Unix that has a lousy implementation of X.

Macbook parts come from the same Chinese factories

[judeancodersfront]

It's a myth that Mac is on top when it comes to reliability. They also don't use the best hard drives:
http://www.binplay.com/2010/09/reason-5-why-i-will-not-buy-macbook-not.html

Or they'll just use USB 3.0

[judeancodersfront]

Fighting USB will work about as well as fighting Flash.

Re:are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net dv

[repetty]

For networking, no fucking way. Networking is stuck on Ethernet because networking uses Ethernet.

Methinks that you are young.

Could you elaborate on how all networking can only work on Ethernet and how that relates to it having been done successfully for years on FireWire?

I haven't used it myself, but I've seen it used.