RSSApple either upgrades or downgrades its MacBook Pro SATA
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published June 23, 2009, 8:30 AM
Viewpoint certainly depends on where you stand; and in some quarters this morning, Apple MacBook Pro users are reading that a firmware upgrade to MacBook Pro may double their throughput from the SATA interface to their internal hard drives.
Well, sure, after the manufacturer slowed down the transfer rate by half for unexplained reasons. That fact was uncovered by readers of MacRumors.com two weeks ago, and formally reported a week ago Sunday: Customers who purchased MacBook Pros just this month are reporting slower throughput.
The original excuse was that it wouldn't matter much to MacBook Pro users anyway, because they're probably accustomed to 1.5 Gbps transfer bandwidth anyway -- certainly the drives aren't fast enough to require 3.0 Gbps. Well, 75% of respondents to MacRumors.com's poll said they certainly noticed something. Regular readers of the publication and contributors to its forum -- some of whom know the inside of a MacBook Pro better than folks on the Cupertino campus -- said they believed that since later versions of the computer used the exact same chipset as earlier versions, Apple must have decided to arbitrarily step transfer speed down on some models in order to justify boosting them on later, more premium models. "Now with double the speed!"
Last night, Apple posted a firmware update to its support site, effectively confirming that it was only software that kept new systems handicapped. But in a fashion that has become typical for the company, the update comes with a warning to the Mac faithful not to use it, since apparently those fast 3.0 Gbps SATA drives aren't the kind that Apple likes.
"MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7 addresses an issue using drives based on the SATA 3 Gbps specification with the MacBook Pro introduced in June 2009," the warning reads. "This update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5 Gbps, however Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac portable computers, and their use remains unsupported. All previous and current Apple portables with a SATA drive interface include a SATA 1.5 Gbps hard drive."
Thus the headlines from the opposite side of the universe this morning that Apple has made SATA faster.
Sounds like another case of the 'crippled' bluetooth in the iphone.
The hardware is there you just can't use it because they say so.
I recall a Mac engineer a long time ago explaining to me the way apple crippled it's processors as well by having 'snap-off' corners whereby the speed of the chip was controlled by the number of corners that where left in place (no corners = slow & all corners = fast).
If I remember that was back in the days of the 9600 series or the first Gs and you could supposedly reconnect the contacts to speed up the processor as the connections where big enough to see and not critical in anything except some kind of 'what speed should I run at check?' which was used at boot-up.
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|How many would bet that no one noticed a difference in throughput prior to finding out that the number was lower?
Most users can't find the preferences to fix a problem that's simply a choice, but they can cling to numbers that don't necessarily have any bearing on their situation. One person will say "the sky is green" and there were be 50 more who will jump onto the bandwagon saying "me too" or "+1".
I'm not saying that Apple doesn't have its share of weird excuses but the users rarely notice anything real that doesn't have a number attached to it. They're "measurebators".
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|Apple is just buying cheap drives to help the bottom line. This is what happens when you have a monopoly on the products.
Apple is a business and needs to make money. Please leave them alone..
Long live the chruch of iMac!
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|Or it could simply have been something that slipped through the net during testing.
As they say, they have no products that use the full 3Gbps so they don't really test that.
They've fixed it now so this is a bit of a non-issue.
As for the idiots who suggested it will lessen the battery life: they need to learn how the thing works.
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|Don't kid yourself. Apple has proven over and over again that they pack their devices with good technology, but don't allow the user to use it until they, Apple, decide it's time. usually in a way that makes them money. Most recently they released the new cult favorite iphone 3gs with hardware built in that cannot be used yet. This isn't to give you a surprise Christmas or Hanukkah gift, it's because they can make more money down the road by turning the hardware on.
And they squeeze you for every penny they can. My god, they want to charge $1000 extra for 4gb of additional ram in their pro laptop line. If a company like Dell or even HP would make mac compatible units they could take Apple out of the hardware business and users would benefit because it would force units that run Microsoft to lower prices. Aren't monopolies illegal in this country? Why is the EU and US govt so dead set on killing a good company like microsoft and won't go after a company like Apple that rips every single one of their customers off?
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|Monopolies are perfectly legal in the USA as long as a company doesn't abuse their monopoly power once they become a monopoly. It doesn't matter what steps a company takes to become a monopoly either. This means that it's perfectly legal for Microsoft to tie Internet Explorer to Windows and even force people to have it as their default web browser all the time as long as people can run a different web browser.
It's also perfectly legal in the US for a company to become a monopoly by stealing someone else's idea like Rambus did with SDRAM and the various DDR memory types.
For some strange reason, the EU doesn't allow these types of activities.
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|Thu, I am not a Mac user, many articles I have read recently are about how Apple products are limited on its ability. I wonder if that's how Apple do things?
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|Yes it is. Apple's Mac Mini (Early 2009) computers take an eternity to boot Mac OS X 10.5.7 up if a CD or DVD is already in the superdrive when you turn the computer on. The computer sits at a white screen for a good 5 minutes or more. The same thing happens when trying to boot any supported version of Windows from the hard disk only in this case it doesn't matter if a CD or DVD is in the superdrive.
Clearly Apple has no clue on how to build a computer that "Just Works". With sloppy mistakes like this there must be a bunch of morons with no programming knowledge working at Apple.
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|Hey hey now.. talking like that can you will surely not be saved when Steve Jobs returns to the world to save everyone..
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|Saved from what? Apple's own sloppy mistakes?
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