Is Apple abandoning hard drives for SSD?
There are a number of interesting Mac rumors around lately, including Apple going all SSD in MacBooks, the exclusive use of Light Peak for data transfers, and leaving optical drives out of their laptops.
If current rumor has it right, the new Apple MacBooks, due to be announced in April 2011, will have a distinctly different feel about them. These rumors play on the changes that appeared recent introduction of the redesigned MacBook Air line. Perhaps the most exciting of these ideas is that the entire MacBook Pro line will do away with standard hard disk drives in favor of solid state drives (SSDs). That is, of course what the Air did, and it may make excellent sense for all laptops, including the MacBook Pro.
The drives are lighter, faster, require less power, and are truly coming into their own as a high-end option. Sizes of solid state drives are going up and prices are coming down, thanks to innovations by companies like Samsung and Intel. Just a couple of years ago the SSD drives were both expensive and problematic, but some new tech has solved the practical problems that plagued them then. There is no particular reason why solid state drives should not go mainstream, and Apple could be the company to take them there.
In keeping with the speed of the SSD drives, Apple is rumored to be considering a move to Intel’s Light Peak technology for high speed data transfers, according to a Slashgear story. This new tech is capable of 10 Gbps bidirectional throughput and could easily replace eSATA and USB 3.0 as the data transfer protocol of choice for external devices. Again, this is right up Apple’s alley. Finally, like the MacBook Air before them, it is rumored that MacBooks will ship without internal optical drives, which would be dropped in favor of external opticals using the aforementioned Light Peak.
All of this drive-dropping would leave Apple in a good position to make their notebooks lighter and thinner while still adding battery capacity. This would be especially meaningful since the SSDs would lowers overall power consumption as well, perhaps yielding some truly impressive battery life numbers. All of these seem like the kind of innovations that Apple is known for, and make sense in the long run for the industry as a whole.
Related Posts:
November 30th, 2010
Light Peak technology is Apple’s and Intel’s joined technology.