New MacBook Pros To Sport Light Peak Technology 356
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."
There's still hope (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Fantastic (Score:1, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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:SSDs - when will TRIM come to OSX (Score:1, Interesting)
linux and windows have TRIM [wikipedia.org], 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:FireWire? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Agreed (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ;-)
Re:Fantastic (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
'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.