appleinsider.com — "people familiar with the Mac maker say it has been working closely with Intel engineers to implement NAND flash into a future-generation of its MacBook notebook lines. Apple is amongst the best positioned in the PC industry to adopt the technology broadly due, in part, to itssupplier arrangements with the world's five-largest NAND suppliers"
Sep 28, 2006 View in Crawl 4
arthurbarnhouseSep 29, 2006
"Is this tech that could be applied toward Apple developing an HDD-free sub-notebook"Maybe you could read the article and find out.
wjadamsSep 29, 2006
Hey Crepsley,Since you seemed to have made a mistake by buying a "poorly designed and cooled" laptop, I would like to buy it for $100 and a six pack of Coke or Pepsi...your choice. Then you could sue Coke or Pepsi for making the can too sharp.
entropymanSep 29, 2006
They burned your hand and they won't replace it? Do I get points for spotting the line that isn't true? (at least until Apple gets into body parts. iSurgeon anyone?)
lobsterSep 29, 2006
Yes it is possible to run an OS such as Austrumi, DSL or Puppy from USB.Burn a CD and run the Puppy Universal Installer<a class="user" href="http://rhinoweb.us/">http://rhinoweb.us/</a> . . . then enter your bios and change to USB bootHave fun
coolbruSep 29, 2006
Actually Apple have had very few machines with soldered down processors. The few I can think of are the Mac IIcx and Power Mac 7200 (if ever there was a dead-end machine!). Witness the enormous market in CPU upgrades for almost every Mac built - I had a DayStar accelerator installed in my Mac II in 1988. Most Apple laptop processors have been soldered, but then that makes them lighter and more compact, as has already been said. Apple is not alone in adopting this approach. Having said that, the Dell Inspiron I have is socketed, but then it weighs twice what my MacBook does and has all the sex appeal of a breeze block.
danielwsmitheeSep 29, 2006
It called wear balancing. A decently wear balanced flash drive will last as long as your HD.
mikecermSep 29, 2006
Flash hard drives will do well for limited purposes, but plain-old magnetic hard drives will be with use for a long time. There are many instances, such as audio/video-encoding where transfer-rate is much more important than random-access. With more powerful processors arriving, hard-drive transfer rates are becoming a bottleneck. (Once Intel ditches the FSB, tranfer-rates and internet connection speeds will be the only bottlenecks left.)Robson is useful interim technology. There are certain DLLs and other bits of data that could benefit from quicker access-times, particularly while booting. The life-span of flash, while it is improving, is still not long enough for flash to serve as a full-time replacement for a hard-drive. One technology that I really don't understand is Vista's "ReadyBoost", as well as Robson's usefulness as system-accessible cache. If the system is constantly accessing files on the hard-drive, and performance could benefit from having instant, random-access to those files, why not use some more of those 1-2 gigs of RAM that people have these days? Sure, RAM costs a bit more than NAND, but it's also a lot faster, and reduces system complexity (because it's already there). I'm not always using all of my RAM, so couldn't the extra be put to better use?Sure, you can't boot from it, but that's where Robson could be useful.
starmantaSep 29, 2006
They're expensiveish and smallish, but they are already here.
alwaysmc2Sep 29, 2006
"No doubt. $1500, Macbook, 32GB, Core2Duo, 1-2GB RAM....and 15+ hour battery life. What a laptop should have always been."I don't think you understand how it works. You said 32GB disk space because that's the largest flash drive, right? The whole point of these is there is a big hard drive, and a much smaller flash buffer, because flash memory is so expensive.
rebernikOct 9, 2006
We won't be able to go to Circuit City tomorrow and buy a flash based hd, but to say that we won't see them for at least five years is a bit pessimistic. Just take into account all of the money and interest going into flash-enabled hybrids. It's bound to bring more attention and money to the concept of a flash-based harddrive.