Will Apple announce intro of solid state notebook?

[Guitarzan]

The Apple expo is tomorrow, Tuesday 1/15.

Will we see the announcement of the first notebook computer with solid state memory in lieu of a hard drive?

These are short pieces on solid state:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/18/t...ins-the-party/

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=366


What else?

Getbent?

[Capel]

& all the purists will decide harddrive stores better than solid state, vintage harddrives will start fetching megabucks on e-bay..... :)

[Guitarzan]

Originally Posted by Capel

& all the purists will decide harddrive stores better than solid state, vintage harddrives will start fetching megabucks on e-bay..... :)

Perhaps consumers will begin demanding vacuum tubes.


I don't own any Apple products, but think it will be an interesting development and will be good for consumers as others move to compete.

[stephent2]

the buzz is a sub compact notebook w/ flash storage, we'll see.

I'm a sucker for Job's MacWorld product roll out, I'll be watching. I do own Apple products,... I'm hoping for a iPod Touch makeover w/ more storage, if they do I've got $$ dedicated.

[BritishBluesBoy]

Anyone got a blackface powerbook...??

[telel6s]

Originally Posted by BritishBluesBoy

Anyone got a blackface powerbook...??

Tweed, my friend, tweed.

Of course, you can also get the new tweed reissues that all have some cigarette burns, fraying, and beer glass circles in exactly the same place. But at least those come with Jensen speakers.

[simonc]

Solid state memory laptop?MUST.....keep......saving....money....cant. ..give..IN!!!

seriously, that would be something awesome....might even have to flog the old (last years) macbook to get one.For one thing battery life would be vastly improved, something all previous laptops have severely lacking.imho.

[J-man]

Sounds cool, looks like it could lead the way for the next gen of computers, that and 64bit (which is going to take off eventually ).

Can anyone give me the lowdown on the disadvantages of these babies versus current hard drives? I'm sure there must be some.

[BritishBluesBoy]

Originally Posted by telel6s

Tweed, my friend, tweed.

Doh! Of course... Stupid of me!!

[tdu]

Originally Posted by J-man

Can anyone give me the lowdown on the disadvantages of these babies versus current hard drives? I'm sure there must be some.

Well, you can't push them to a nice natural overdrive.

[J-man]

Originally Posted by tdu

Well, you can't push them to a nice natural overdrive.

Am I right in thinking this will mean the end of defragging?

[e-merlin]

Originally Posted by telel6s

Tweed, my friend, tweed.

Now, there's an idea!

[Unseen]

Originally Posted by Guitarzan

Perhaps consumers will begin demanding vacuum tubes.


I don't own any Apple products, but think it will be an interesting development and will be good for consumers as others move to compete.

Well, that's already happened with guitar amps, hasn't it? LOL

A double laugher is that a lot of solid state amps emulate tubes. WTF?!!! If that's so, why would anyone actually risk the unreliability of tubes?

I predict that in the future, there will be tube amps that simulate solid state sound as soon as people (in the natural cycle of preferences) feel that solid state amps sound better.

Anyway, the prices of both memory AND hard drives are plummeting. (I'm hoping for the first under $200 1T HD to appear, and when it does, I'm buying a couple to get rid of the multiple external HD's I live with now.)

It'll be interesting to see what happens in this area.

[tiktok]

Originally Posted by J-man

Sounds cool, looks like it could lead the way for the next gen of computers, that and 64bit (which is going to take off eventually ).

Can anyone give me the lowdown on the disadvantages of these babies versus current hard drives? I'm sure there must be some.

Slow. Small. Expensive.

[octatonic]

Originally Posted by tiktok

Slow. Small. Expensive.

Untrue on slow.

Flashdrives are slow- they use USB to get the data to the CPU- there is the bottleneck.
Solid state hard drives are significant;y quicker than platter based hard drives because they have no moving parts.
Depending on the bus they use they could (in theory) be slightly slower than RAM.
It is all down to data bussing and pathing as to how quick this is going to get.

My bet is if Apple do this, they will do it well and we will be amazed with the speed of solid state storage.

Just my 2c

[sunkidd]

after using an iPhone over a month I think my iMac 24" that I got last year is kinda primitive! keep trying to touch the screen to move stuff around.... and my iPod is really frustrating, keep forgetting it's not an iPhone touch screen and need to push buttons to get around....

How long till the touch screen computers for home and office???

[StuH]

Originally Posted by octatonic

Depending on the bus they use they could (in theory) be slightly slower than RAM.
It is all down to data bussing and pathing as to how quick this is going to get.

My bet is if Apple do this, they will do it well and we will be amazed with the speed of solid state storage.

Just my 2c

I agree with you here. I'm not a Mac fan but have to give these guys alot of credit. These guys really seem to have excited the public and have brought some very nice innovative products to the table.

If this new technology is soley in the hands of Mac, I will without a doubt switch to a Mac. The advantages of this technology for audio recording hobbiests is worth the price of admission alone.

There must be others working on similar things though.


EDIT: i should have read the links, I'll stick with my pc.

[imwjl]

Originally Posted by BritishBluesBoy

Anyone got a blackface powerbook...??

With the track ball? Not for a long time, but I did spend the extra for a black MacBook because the white ones look so rotten over time and I wasn't going to waste money on a Pro model when I'll have to get a new Windows laptop too.

[imwjl]

Originally Posted by J-man

Can anyone give me the lowdown on the disadvantages of these babies versus current hard drives? I'm sure there must be some.

You're not going to crash a hard drive dropping one. My brother stages the Dells with RAM drives and so do some other associates, but my users all get high function laptops or the cheapest possible fleet models.

I'm more interested in the encrypted drive models than solid state at this point, but watching it all.

[eryque]

The new solid state drives work on standard IDE or SATA channels, so they'll be able to communicate as fast as or faster than current drives. Just the fact that there are no moving parts should bring seek times way down. Also important is the fact that they won't have to take a second to spin up drives like most laptops do. They shut the drive down to save power.

There are drives as large as 512 GB listed now (maybe not to market yet), so it would appear that the only real negative is cost.

Apple doesn't do many things badly. The worst mistake they've made in the last 15 years or so has been bringing a product to market before the market's been ready, and in a couple of cases before the technology is perfected. But since Jobs came back to the helm, they haven't missed the mark very much. I'm no longer a Mac user, but I love MacWorld because Apple keeps driving the industry.

[tiktok]

From Wikipedia.

Here's a rundown of some of the drawbacks:

Flash based SSDs also have several disadvantages:

* Price – As of late 2007, flash memory prices are still considerably higher per gigabyte than those of comparable conventional hard drives – around US$15 per GB compared to typically less than US$1 for mechanical drives.[3]
* Limited capacity. As of December 2007, 32GB is still the sweet spot for commercial use. However, on February 20, 2007, Adtron announced a record-breaking 160GB laptop-SSD[4]. In addition, at CES 2008, BiTMICRO Networks announced the release of SSD drives with capacities of up to 832GB, for release in Q3 2008.
* Vulnerability to certain types of effects, including abrupt power loss (especially DRAM based SSDs), magnetic fields and electric/static charges compared to normal HDDs (which store the data inside a Faraday cage).
* Limited write cycles. Typical Flash storage will typically wear out after 300,000-500,000 write cycles, while high endurance Flash storage is often marketed with endurance of 1–5 million write cycles (many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the lifetime of a computer). Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device, rather than rewriting files in place.[5]
* Slow random write speeds – as erase blocks on SSDs generally are quite large, they're far slower than conventional disks for random writes.[6]
* In some cases,[7] SSDs have substantially lower throughput than conventional hard disks. In spite of the decreased latency, this can lead to dramatically lower performance than hard disk drives. More expensive SSDs can have much greater bandwidth than HDDs, so this isn't universally a problem.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_disk