Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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[Davee Schulte] “Have you had any drive failures with SSD?”
Not yet. I even have a couple OCZ drives in service and I’ve read the horror stories with them. I’ve got two Apple factory SSDs, two OCZs (one Agility 2 and one Vertex 2) and an Intel 320. I store my big stuff on HDDs, including my backups.
The thing to remember about SSDs is they are consumable, they destroy themselves just to work. They will die after enough activity, so backups are as important (more important?) than ever.
But it’s worth it! I almost never see beach balls. I don’t wait for the computer to catch up to my input. On laptops especially, that is a big difference. The conventional wisdom has been to upgrade your RAM to “speed up” your computer. More RAM is always good, but if you really want to get the most bang for your upgrade buck today, swap your boot drive for an SSD. You can get smaller ones (60-120 GB) for around $1/GB now. Move all your local big data (media) off to a second HDD.
Best,
Andy -
The price to have the battery replaced on the 13″ & 15″, $129, is the same price as the removable batteries of past MacBooks.
Best,
Andy -
[Michael Hadley] “The only real bummer is that you have to max out the RAM upfront and AAPL RAM is much pricier than OWC.”
If you want to get 16GB from OWC for your non-Retina 2012 MBP (factory options are 2x2GB or 2x4GB only), it’ll cost you $170+shipping.
The the 16GB RAM option on the Retina MBP is $200. Not exactly a gouge in this context.
Best,
Andy -
[Richard Cardonna] “Some say”
All we know is, he’s called The Stig.
Best,
Andy -
[Michael Hadley] “Way too expensive when you are shopping for a family of six.”
I used to work at a place that was situated above a Whole Foods. We used to call it “Whole Paycheck”.
Best,
Andy -
[Clint Wardlow] “I wonder what it is about Apple that makes it immune to a huge chunk of the “I hate and don’t trust large corporation” crowd?”
I bet a lot of those folks also shop at Whole Foods, despite the opinions of its CEO…
Best,
Andy -
[Robert Bracken] “First, Pixar. Do you think that a company built off of Apple would begin using Windows? This was a company bought by Steve Jobs himself. I highly doubt that. If someone has information that is the opposite then I would like to see it. “
You mean the Pixar that is mostly run on Linux with their own in-house apps like Marionette and Renderman?
Best,
Andy -
[Bill Davis] “Is Redmond moving toward the “we feel that control trumps openness and we’ll only tell you want we want to tell you when we want to tell it to you” space that Apple has lived in for so long?”
With respect to Windows RT? Yes. The licensing requirements are much more restrictive than those of good ol’ Windows for x86, and they have a lot in common with the restrictions Apple imposes on iOS.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “There’s a bet here, and that bet is on solid state (and retina).”
I’ve been all SSD for boot since early 2010 and now I can’t stand to boot from a spinning disk. I have one bone-stock Mac mini with an HDD I use for testing odds and ends (it is my Mountain Lion sandbox for now), and the lag from its 5400 RPM HDD boot drive is excruciating when I’m used to SSDs on all my other rigs.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Can photo/video Pros and not Business Sector Pros bang on these computers, and will they be able to survive?”
It has always been best-practice to segregate boot and media storage, now the performance characteristics of that segregation are more profound. HDDs will remain the $/GB kings for a while, but as media storage goes, not a whole lot of HDD capacity ever fit inside a laptop anyway.
[Jeremy Garchow] “If you look around, the entire computer industry loves solid state, it’s just so damn expensive when you start getting in to massive quantities at a speed that’s conducive to being “Pro” suitable.”
It is expensive in terms of capacity, but SSD speed is well beyond anything an HDD can deliver in every performance category. You need an array of HDDs to match the performance of a single SATA III SSD. 500 MBps is typical for single SSDs now. Can’t get that with any single HDD, even the 10K and 15K RPM enterprise SAS units.
If I’m spec’ing out a system today for video work, the only thing I’m using HDDs for is big data. Anything small like the OS, project files, and caches would go on an SSD. Sure would be nice if Apple would let us store FCPX renders somewhere other than the Projects folder…
Best,
Andy -
[Franz Bieberkopf] “I take it you’re satisfied with the direction of Apple’s offerings. Is there a certain basic expandability or serviceability you would require? What would that be? “
I have a 2010 MacBook Air, and I’m happy with it. I ordered it with max RAM, knowing that I would not be able to upgrade it later.
I’ve also had a number of other older MacBooks, as well as a 2005 G5 tower and a 2010 Mac Pro. I’ve disassembled non-unibody MBPs to exchange an HDD for an SSD, and did the same with a white plastic MacBook. I’ve swapped RAM on nearly every computer I’ve ever owned. I’ve paint-scrapered my way into Mac minis (the old design). I’ve got a very exotic setup inside that 2010 Mac Pro, which isn’t even running OS X anymore.
I do like to do-it-myself, but I also understand that serviceability leads to compromises in design. In the case of my “daily driver” MacBook Air, I accept the compromised servicablility for what I get in packaging efficiency. I personally do mourn the hard-soldered RAM compromise, and taking that decision up to the MacBook Pro may be too much of a compromise for that machine’s core market. The Air is Apple’s mainstream laptop, it is priced and marketed that way, and in that respect I can abide design choices that limit user-servicablility in exchange for design efficiency. Those users weren’t going to open up their Macs anyway. But the MBPs? Might be a bit too far. Apple is clearly hedging its bets a little by continuing to sell the old form factor with new Ivy Bridge guts. They are treading lightly by Apple standards.
I don’t share the pessimism that Apple is going to go on-board-RAM and custom form factor SSD with its desktops. What design problem does that solve? Desktops aren’t chasing weight savings.
My own attitude is that I appreciate user-servicability when I have it, but I don’t hold it up as an essential deal-breaker feature for most of my use cases. And there are a lot of use cases where Macs are a poor choice.
[Franz Bieberkopf] “There are those who will prefer to buy cameras with interchange-able lenses.”
This analogy can cut both ways- on one hand, interchangeable lens cameras are like a computer with a quick-release HDD/ODD bay. Or on the other hand, are they more like a computer with a Thunderbolt port?
[Franz Bieberkopf] “Likewise with batteries that can be replaced with spares or replaced.”
A necessity when the battery is only good for a matter of minutes. If the camera battery would last the whole shoot on a single charge, and be good for 5 years of recharge cycles, would you care? (Yes, of course you have spares for everything on a shoot, but we’re in academic analogy space here.)
Best,
Andy