Apple Doubles MacBook Pro R/W Performance 204
Lucas123 writes Benchmark tests performed on the 2015 MacBook Pro revealed it does have twice the read/write performance as the mid-2014 model. Tests performed with the Blackmagic benchmark tool revealed read/write speeds of more than 1,300MBps/1,400MBps, respectively. So what's changed? The new MacBook Pro does have a faster Intel dual-core i7 2.9GHz processor and 1866MHz LPDDR3) RAM, but the real performance gain is in the latest PCIe M.2 flash module. The 2014 model used a PCIe 2.0 x2 card and the 2015 model uses a PCIe 3.0 x4 (four I/O lanes) card. Twice the lanes, twice the speed. While Apple uses a proprietary flash card made by Samsung, Intel, Micron and SanDisk are all working on similar technology, so it's likely to soon wind up in high-end PCs.
Semicolons! (Score:5, Insightful)
What a missed opportunity for a semicolon after "Samsung", and what a confusing sentence as a result.
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That's two English lessons I gave you now for free; fancy a third intellectual and philosophical beating?
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You keep prattling on like you have something to teach; you'd do far better to accept the fact that you lack a basic understanding of the English language. Don't feel bad. I don't speak whatever your primary language is and so I give you credit for grasping my language to the level that you have! I have no dou
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don't use "lowercase" without quotes since it isn't actually a verb.
Hey, this is our language. We can verb an adjective if we want to.
And one single USB-C port (Score:2, Insightful)
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So you can hook up to an external monitor OR charge your Iphone OR make a powerpoint presentation! In 2016, it will be even lighter when they reduce the number of letters in the alphabet for the keyboard.
Dunno if you were joking or not, but in case you weren't, note that the MacBook Pro has (by my count) 8 ports. It's the new MacBook (not Pro) that has only the single USB-C port.
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Wait? You're saying that Cook's only pretending to be gay to increase Apple's appeal to a specific market segment? That's dedication, that is.
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So you can hook up to an external monitor OR charge your Iphone OR make a powerpoint presentation! In 2016, it will be even lighter when they reduce the number of letters in the alphabet for the keyboard.
Or they can just introduce a slipstream charger adapter so that you can plug the power cord and the monitor cord into the same thing, leave that on your desk, and only connect one cable when you get home. And once monitors start supporting USB-C natively, they'll just do the same.
Just as with dropping PS/2, floppy drives, and optical drives, someone always has to go first.
Keep in mind that the target audience for the Macbook is far less likely to use an external monitor, or even to plug it in at all during
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What the fuck? People should spend money buying a new phone battery instead of using the simple, obvious and convenient option of charging it from their laptop?
Forgive us all for being sensible.
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Especially on the iPhone with its non replaceable battery. :)
noatime,nodiratime (Score:2)
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I'm still waiting for the next laptop to even meet 2 years ago Apple's model.
Well, I'm a linux guy too, but to be fair to the windows folk HFS+ only achieves that performance by using a 16kb block size, not by having a performance filesystem and thus was very wasteful with disk space - especially when you consider how many small files exist on an fs.
No the disk performance crown still resides with Linux users that have access to enterprise grade filesystems like murderFS, ahem I mean reiserfs, xfs and other performance kings of that ilk.
I'm sure that there are macOS users out ther
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What benchmark made you conclude that HFS+ is faster than NTFS when using big block sizes ?
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"Flash Module" == "SSD" (Score:2)
Since when did we start calling SSDs Flash Modules or Flash cards? (The article uses both). Can I now call platter hard drives magnetic modules?
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I see you've been reading the press release.
Do you believe ever piece of BS you read in PR? There's a buttload of crap where that one came from. It's the salesman's job to sell you fancy NEW MOAR BETTER CRAP, so I guess if it's working, he's gonna keep his job :D
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Not referring to the drive in the article, but if you think it's all marketing bull, measure it yourself. In NVMe's case, getting rid of the SATA and SAS translation layer has cut out over 60% of the CPU overhead, and cutting out the max 6Gbps or 12Gbps speed means the drives can go insanely fast. That's a lot of real change by using NVMe. Now, I am one of those marketing guys who work for one of these companies, but I can tell you it's not all BS.
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No, it was me! /sarcasm
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Since when did we start calling flash chips SSDs? I remember when SSDs were a bunch of RAM chips behind a disk target chipset, so you got a really small (but really honking fast!) disk for your database logs, mail queues, etc.
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We started calling them SSDs when they presented themselves as hard drives. While these connect through the PCI bus, the BIOS sees them as hard drives.
Four times the speed not twice. (Score:5, Informative)
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Isn't it kinda arguing semantics? Can't you argue that the speed has doubled (500 -> 985MB/s), as well as the number of lanes, but your bandwidth has quadrupled.
2x PCIe 2 vs. 4x PCIe 3 (Score:5, Informative)
The raw bandwidth available for transfers isn't doubled, it's quadrupled. PCIe 3.0 is twice as fast as PCIe 2.0, channel for channel, so the bandwidth would have doubled even if they had not added two more channels. They doubled it in two different ways at the same time.
That said, the old flash was probably not being that badly constricted by the older standard, and the current generation is only capable of twice the throughput. However, adding even more bandwidth than that is a nice bit of future-proofing and quite welcome.
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Re:As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like any other technology purchase :(
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Re:As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd check the benchmarks on real work you might be doing. Unless you're doing some very specific unusual tasks, doubling the continuous write and read speeds over an already fast SSD won't gain much.
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The blackmagic benchmark they did, I would assume, is from BlackMagic, the company that makes video recording/production products.
So I am guessing it is benchmarking how fast you can write uncompressed video to your SSD, which, outside of that task, is probably not a relevant workload test.
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Re: As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:5, Informative)
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Basiclly, this is just a bulk transfer rate benchmark of the SSD.
Like most other SSDs, the fastest ones will not actually result in quicker real-world performance, because your brain cannot see the files load on screen any faster.
Enjoy your overpowered 4x PCIe crap. I'll be just fine here with my SATA6 SSD I've had for four years.
Re:As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:5, Informative)
The terminology police hereby fine you for incorrect terms. There is no "SATA6". You probably mean SATA3, which is 6 Gbps.
Which in no way detracts from your point, which is entirely correct.
Re:As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:4, Informative)
This is so wrong in so many ways.
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Agree.
I swapped my old Core 2 Duo E7200 (2.53) O/Ced to 3.8 with an OCZ Agility2 SSD for an i3 with a Kingston SSDnow 300 (*old* retired machine that was given to my dad). Altough the new machine boots way faster, and the new SSD is about twice as fast in benchmarks (even if low-end), I find it faster, but not *blew me out of my chair* faster.
Once you go from HDD to SSD, even the cheapest lowest performing SSD is gonna be much faster than anything with spinning platters.
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Agree.
I swapped my old Core 2 Duo E7200 (2.53) O/Ced to 3.8 with an OCZ Agility2 SSD for an i3 with a Kingston SSDnow 300 (*old* retired machine that was given to my dad). Altough the new machine boots way faster, and the new SSD is about twice as fast in benchmarks (even if low-end), I find it faster, but not *blew me out of my chair* faster.
Once you go from HDD to SSD, even the cheapest lowest performing SSD is gonna be much faster than anything with spinning platters.
True, that is simply "diminishing returns". Just going from a HDD to ANY SSD will make your computer incredibly faster, but then going to any faster SSD will not give the same benefits, because that one only will be faster on continuous access (like copying large files). Booting the OS or accessing small random files will not benefit much anymore. So going for a super expensive SSD will only be worth it if a.) you read/write lots of LARGE files (e.g. movie editing) or b.) need the long-term reliability of a
Re: As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:2)
This will have a great impact on starting and suspending virtual machines. Which i do a lot, benchmarks or no benchmarks.
Re:As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:5, Insightful)
What is somewhat notable about this change is that these days are the first time in ages that storage systems(outside of contrived scenarios involving hanging gigantic fiber channel arrays off the lousiest PCI-X HBA you can find, then adding a cheapie PCI device to the same bus just to cut the bandwidth further, or similar silliness) have actually been bottlenecked by their connection to the rest of the system, rather than by their own inadequacy.
With HDDs, and the earlier SSDs, the alleged link speed was a mostly theoretical value that determined little except how fast you could access the drive's cache RAM. Now, it seems, adding a couple of extra PCIe lanes can actually double performance. Not bad at all.
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It depends on where your bottleneck is. Hard drives are typically the lowest performing pieces of hardware, mostly because they're spinning media. You can have the fastest CPU in the world, but if you're waiting on a 5.25" full height MFM drive, your performance is going to suffer.
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1. Only for certain, fairly specific, tasks does doubling 1 subsystem's performance = 'doubling performance'. In the case of mass storage, databases seem to be the particular sweet spot. For most of what laptops are used for, the near-zero latency of an SSD makes a huge difference; but the difference between 'near zero latency, 2 PCIe lanes of ba
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Gamers need them.
IN Star Wars the Old Republic MMO Correlia took almost 4 to 5 minutes to load. I blamed my CPU at the time. Got an SSD. It loaded in 35 seconds.
Newer games all take 50 to 70 gigs like Wolfenstein and others. Having a Raid 0 SSD with a 1 gig transfer rate over SATA (not even .m2) makes a difference but it is the loading of 50,000 assets a level in parallel make an SSD as fast as 100 disk array more than the transfer rate.
I do VMware like many other slashdotters studying CISCO and MCSE and Li
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Re: As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:2)
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That is why I stopped buying the (lat/new)est stuff. I just get the older models for being cheaper, more stable, etc.
Re:As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:5, Informative)
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
They generally stay on top of most of the rumors surrounding new product launches. Well enough to know if it's worth waiting for a few months before buying the new model or holding out till the next big Apple event.
Re:As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:5, Insightful)
You bought a Haswell-based MBP knowing full well that Broadwell had been released and would work its way into the MBP line shortly.
You also ignored the fact that Apple has been updating the Retina MacBook Pros like clockwork [macrumors.com].
If you're miffed, be miffed at yourself. Nobody hid this from you.
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If you're miffed, [libertarian bromide redacted]
On the other hand, other manufacturers (like Lenovo) are better at letting you make a return(within 30 days) for those kind of conditions.
That, and they're engineered to use standard parts, not exotic and maintenance-hostile ones.
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I bought my MBP at Best Buy and I could also return it within 30 days. Whoopie-fucking-do. Not that it matters because he bought his two months ago. Additionally, it would not have been possible to for Lenovo to provide an upgrade to an existing model with this new tech since it's an entirely different part that uses a PCIe 3.0 interface rather than a standard SATA interface. In short, none of your arguments apply.
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PCIe-connected flash drives have been around in the PC space for years, and M.2 slots (which for high-end storage devices are nothing but connectors tied to X lanes of gen Y PCIe) have been increasing in popularity significantly over the past year.
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Re: As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:3)
Maybe but Lenovo simply gives you much slower ssd and cpu FOR THE SAME OR EVEN BIGGER PRICE (x1 carbon).
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When was the last time you replaced a "standard" laptop GPU ?
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Using a USB hub is like distributing a garden hose to many nozzles. When you turn them all on, the spray from each one slows to a trickle.
Cheer up, you are batter off in some ways. (Score:2)
So buy another one next year after the next jump, and then it will someone who bought the 2015 MBP will be all sad they are missing whatever.
As it stands, I have a late 2013 MBP. I accepted when I bought it, that things would advance without me... eventually I will get a new laptop, and the balance will be restored.
Personally I'm really looking forward to a Force Touch version of the MBP, so I would be kind of sad to buy a 2015 MBP knowing that very soon I'd have a strong reason to buy a newer version. At
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Happened to me a long time ago, but even worse. Just two months after buying my first new MacBook Pro, Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel. I still feel slighted about that, but I got 6 years of good use out of it. Still works fine as long as it's plugged in. And the software is horribly out of date, of course.
Re: As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP (Score:2)
It was technically impossible to buy a powerpc macbook pro just before they went to intel. Since macbook pros have ALL been intel...
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It is perhaps more useful now : for years, you could install linux (debian, buntu) on a ppc mac, but you got no binary for the adobe plugin Flash. So, it was shit, but now you can try to look at the HTML5 video, or try some software that loads the video in a regular video player.
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face it. tech has the shelf life of fresh fruit.
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No longer true, ddr3 has been around for years, an i7 from a couple of years back is still good, upgrading a SSD from a SSD of a couple of years back won't make much system performance difference for a normal desktop.
The increments are tiny these days, you're lucky if you get 5% speed boost from the latest CPU or GPU.
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Which is why I have to acknowledge, Apple's given a nice uplift in speed there.
Those write speeds are frankly impressive. I'd be sorely tempted, if I could think of a decent use case :)
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I gave my first gen MBP Retina to my brother when I refreshed it . It's three years old but he still considers it a pretty fast computer. Admittedly, I maxed out the specs when I bought it.
Why would you care? (Score:3)
It went from "faster than matters" to "even faster than matters". All SATA drives are fast enough, you don't notice the difference between normal ones and ultra fast ones.. I have a Samsung XP941 (the "proprietary" drive that you can easily buy) and a regular 840 Pro in my desktop. You can benchmark the difference easily, but you don't notice it, at all, in day to day operation.
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I hope it eventually becomes "fast enough to settle on one standard". It's getting to the point where if the software support was there we could just settle on a standard like USB3.1 gen 2 (the 10 Gbit one) for internal disks and external peripherals with some kind of PCIe slotted flash solution for people who wanted stupid fast speed that only shows on benchmarks.
Maybe by the next major revision they will figure out how to come up with a way to unify interface standards. The bus speed increases are maki
It is moving to one standard internal (Score:2)
These M.2 drivers are PCIe. It is a different slot form factor, but it is just PCIe.
USB would not be desirable for internal system use, too much overhead. It is well designed for the purpose it has but you wouldn't want it for everything.
There are reasons to want multiple transports, different ones are good at different things.
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USB would not be desirable for internal system use, too much overhead. It is well designed for the purpose it has but you wouldn't want it for everything.
But what is "too much overhead" when the transport link gets fast enough? If USB4 ends up with 20 GBit/sec, overhead for anything but SAN shelf backplanes really won't matter.
I actually think I *would* want it for everything. One connector for disks and other peripherals, usable internally and externally. The way they package SSDs now you wouldn't even
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Fixed that for ya.
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I am pretty miffed to read this. Nothing like paying a load of cash for a shiny new laptop only to find out a couple months later that you'd have been way better off waiting.
How do you ever buy anything if you're upset that technology keeps improving and you want to wait until the next leap in performance? If you're looking for the best performance, you're *always* better off waiting, but if you need a computer in the meantime, you have to draw a line in the sand and declare that the price/performance is good enough where it is now.
Though for most uses, you won't see a significant difference between a 650MB/sec SSD and a 1300MB/sec SSD.
You can upgrade your 2014 MBP (Score:4, Interesting)
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What is why you check the Mac Buying Guide to see if a new release is imminent so you don't end up with buyer's remorse:
http://buyersguide.macrumors.c... [macrumors.com]
Future proofing doesn't exist in tech. EVERYTHING eventually becomes obsolete. :-(
--
PHP: A language designed by a noob for boobs [3v4l.org]
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I am pretty miffed to read this. Nothing like paying a load of cash for a shiny new laptop only to find out a couple months later that you'd have been way better off waiting.
You were expecting that any manufacturer should stop improving their products the moment you buy in?
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Apple stuff is fairly predictable. Unlike everyone else, Apple generally releases on a set schedule the same time every year. Enough so that there are many "buyers guide" for Apple products.
http://buyersguide.macrumors.c... [macrumors.com]
If you're ever contemplating an Apple purchase, check that out first. Anything beyond midlife is a caution - if you
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Your existing m.2 SSD is on a slot with 1GB (8gb) of bandwidth. I really dont think you're going to be maxing that out with any non-enterprise SSD, so you're probably OK-- and even if you somehow did, I seriously doubt you would notice.
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Re:No WAY! (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty much.
M.2 slots and SSDs are now fairly common place in laptops.
For desktops, direct PCIe flash drives have been around for years. PCIe adapters also exist if you want to use an M.2 drive now and your motherboard doesn't have an M.2 slot. Newer desktop boards ship with SATA Express ports, and drives should show up this summer offering the speed benefits of M.2 (running off PCIe lanes) as well as the benefits of NVMe, along with the possibility of being thrown into RAID (depending on your controller, of course). Many newer boards also feature a M.2 slot if you hate cables or are very space constrained.
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M.2 PCI-E SSDs are nothing new. The samsung drive referenced here is the successor to an "OEM Only" drive that has been readily available to consumers through various retailers for a year.
It's "proprietary" in the sense that right now, Samsung's product has far better performance than ANY competing product. The connector is 100% standard, and included in most high-end laptops nowadays and many desktop motherboards as well.
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Neo Luddite (Score:2)
They've been dead in a lot of our worlds for years.
I guess you must be the modern equivalent to the Amish, shunning useful technology because it is the work of something you designate arbitrarily to be the Devil.
How sad for you and your kind, though I look forward to buying whatever the equivalent is of fine wooden furniture from your group of castaways at some point in the future.
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How sad for you and your kind, though I look forward to buying whatever the equivalent is of fine wooden furniture from your group of castaways at some point in the future.
Artisanal compilers, no doubt.
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That's your loss. It doesn't mean Apple won't continue to thrive without you.
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Good question - does the bus speed match the ram convention, or the hard drive storage convention and all other communication speed conventions?
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Good question - does the bus speed match the ram convention, or the hard drive storage convention and all other communication speed conventions?
Um, the test - is it moving bits serially, or multiples of bytes?
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This.
And along those same lines, there's not a normal user on earth who can tell the difference between an SATA 6 drive, and the same drive running off PCIe. There's enough 4k I/O operations bandwidth on either interface to satisfy any desktop or light workstation user, but Samsung will tell you proudly how much faster the exact same drive controller and flash hooked up by PCIe!
But the industry has nowhere else to grow except lower prices for higher capacity, so we're all making the transition to M.2 and N
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To be fair, Samsung sues Apple too. They just usually lose.
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While their Mobile division is crashing down hard, and other divisions that build refrigerators and the like do as well, their electronics division is quite possible, mostly because Apple buys their stuff. However, for the average Slashdotter it is quite irrelevant who is building parts. Very few people in the world are interested in Samsung's electronic division, mostly one guy at Apple, one guy at HP, one guy at Dell. There are millions i
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Having a very lightweight laptop get the same performance as a high end desktop is still newsworthy, isn't it?
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Other than putting the first mass-market GUI onto a UNIX product that people could actually use, giving us the first real "year of *NIX on the desktop" ever?
Oh, and redesigning the mobile phone (go back and watch the iPhone launch keynote and remember just how much was new, even things like "visual voicemail"?
Launching products that look obvious in retrospect yet were somehow not readily available before is a mark of good design.
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Is that "Quit Crying Cunt"?