6 ms·

As a consumer, I'd rather see them make faster hard drives. I think that's a much bigger impact than faster CPUs. I remember when i got my mac book pro 2015.

As a consumer, I'd rather see them make faster hard drives. I think that's a much bigger impact than faster CPUs. I remember when i got my mac book pro 2015. the hard drive was so much faster than 5 years earlier. I can now boot up in less than 20 seconds. and my IDE opens in less then 4 seconds. getting those two numbers down to 1 or less would be a much bigger improvement, IMHO.

fspeech 8y ago
Do you mean faster SSDs?
- loeg 8y ago
  I think OP means any non-volatile, 1TB +/- an order of magnitude storage. Most of us don't care what the physical media is as long as it's durable and fast.
ryanmarsh 8y ago
You’re not wrong but I just bought the 2018 MacBook Pro (i9, 6 core) to replace my 2016 TB MBP. Both had an SSD but the new one blows the doors off the old one (video encoding, compiling code). What I could use now is more memory on or near the CPU maybe like the iPhone A7+.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  The new one is probably an nvme attached directly to PCIe, and the other is probably connecting over SATA. These days, no two SSDs are the same.
  - GeekyBear 8y ago
    They are both NVMe. Apple bought a company that developed NVMe SSD controllers and has been producing it's own custom controllers for a few years now. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9136/the-2015-macbook-review/8 https://www.anandtech.com/show/9136/the-2015-macbook-review/... The 2018 MacBook Pro is just using a newer high performance version of the controller. >The T2 is also Apple’s SSD controller, so this means that the MBP is getting a SSD upgrade. Apple is now offering up to 4TB of SSD storage on the 15-inch MBP and 2TB on the 13-inch model. And judging from some of the numbers the 4TB iMac Pro has put up with the same controller, the 15-inch MBP stands to have chart-topping SSD performance. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13073/apple-updates-macbook-pro-family-for-2018 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13073/apple-updates-macbook-p...
- brickmort 8y ago
  the boot times on these new MBPs are crazy. If you look away for just a moment, you can miss the restart entirely and you'll be left wondering if it restarted or not.
  - sumnulu 8y ago
    That login screen after restart is basically fancy boot loader screen. After authentication your disk is decrypted and the slow parts start. You will notice that that login screen is some what different for restart and sleep.
skunkworker 8y ago
Faster or lower latency? Right now traditional SSDs are extremely high bandwidth when transferring sequential files (approaching 3.5gbyte/s read and 3gbyte/s write) but they lack the random 4k IOPS to lower the perceived latency on disk. Intel's Optane is the first consumer SSD I've seen that has high performance 4k read write IOPs not unlike memory, but even if you use that as your boot drive we are starting to put pressure on other part of the system. Soon the SSDs will start to have higher performance than their PCIe 3.0 x4 slot and some already need a x8 slot when striping nvme SSDs. Take a look at https://www.anandtech.com/show/12951/plextor-demonstrates-4way-m9pe-extreme-ssd-solution-up-to-65-gbs https://www.anandtech.com/show/12951/plextor-demonstrates-4w...
- loeg 8y ago
  > Faster or lower latency? Yes.
  - eps 8y ago
    Only if at a cheaper price though!
stephengillie 8y ago
I got a Lenovo Carbon X1. I have to charge it as often as a phone, and smart sleep settings make it seem like it's always on. I can just leave the IDE open, so it loads in 0 seconds.
cliffordthedog 8y ago
They are constantly working on faster and cheaper SSDs.
sombremesa 8y ago
On a MacBook, you can pretty easily create a temporary RAM based virtual disk. Just drop your IDE app in one of those? Could probably make it a script that runs on startup
lazyjones 8y ago
This is hilarious for people who used to boot their OS instantly from ROM in 1985 ... The main culprits here are OS bloat and inefficient boot procedures, not the performance of the storage system.
- afarrell 8y ago
  But as a consumer, I can't control for that. I can read specs on SSD speed. > OS bloat Results from tradeoffs against other things and is not going away.
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    > But as a consumer, I can't control for that. I can read specs on SSD speed You have options. I used to have a Windows PC for all tasks (with these annoying issues) and have since moved to an iPad for most tasks, a PS4 for games and a MacBook for programming (which I admittedly don‘t do much anymore). SSD speed is not relevant anymore, booting has been replaced by opening/picking up/starting from hibernation.
    - gbil 8y ago
      What stops you putting your xOS PC in standy/hibernation ? I believe you compare different situations/needs
  - panic 8y ago
    Hardware has been getting faster for decades; somehow software always manages to slow it down. I don't think there's a way to win this race without either changing the tradeoffs or building a software culture that actually cares about performance.
    - CarolineW 8y ago
      As the quotation goes: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."
- walkingolof 8y ago
squirrelicus 8y ago
A company called Micron is developing non volatile storage to fill the latency gap between pcie storage and sdram. Almost certainly requires new mobo architecture and might require more trivial kernel changes, but nvme tech is already pushing the limits of the north bridge. In 20 years we'll probably see this in line production. In 40, we might see non volatile storage replace volatile memory for most use cases except things that need to be volatile, such as symmetric crypto keys.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
My 2013 MacBook Air screen recently died. I just bought a new one off eBay from the same year. Teenage me would not understand. But I think personal computers peaked years ago. The reason this is possible is I have opted out of “modern” development tools and I write all my own code with a minimum of dependencies. If I was using webpack and Docker I would have to buy a 2018 machine.

fspeech 8y ago

Do you mean faster SSDs?

loeg 8y ago
I think OP means any non-volatile, 1TB +/- an order of magnitude storage. Most of us don't care what the physical media is as long as it's durable and fast.

ryanmarsh 8y ago

You’re not wrong but I just bought the 2018 MacBook Pro (i9, 6 core) to replace my 2016 TB MBP. Both had an SSD but the new one blows the doors off the old one (video encoding, compiling code). What I could use now is more memory on or near the CPU maybe like the iPhone A7+.

craftyguy 8y ago
The new one is probably an nvme attached directly to PCIe, and the other is probably connecting over SATA. These days, no two SSDs are the same.
- GeekyBear 8y ago
  They are both NVMe. Apple bought a company that developed NVMe SSD controllers and has been producing it's own custom controllers for a few years now. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9136/the-2015-macbook-review/8 https://www.anandtech.com/show/9136/the-2015-macbook-review/... The 2018 MacBook Pro is just using a newer high performance version of the controller. >The T2 is also Apple’s SSD controller, so this means that the MBP is getting a SSD upgrade. Apple is now offering up to 4TB of SSD storage on the 15-inch MBP and 2TB on the 13-inch model. And judging from some of the numbers the 4TB iMac Pro has put up with the same controller, the 15-inch MBP stands to have chart-topping SSD performance. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13073/apple-updates-macbook-pro-family-for-2018 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13073/apple-updates-macbook-p...
brickmort 8y ago
the boot times on these new MBPs are crazy. If you look away for just a moment, you can miss the restart entirely and you'll be left wondering if it restarted or not.
- sumnulu 8y ago
  That login screen after restart is basically fancy boot loader screen. After authentication your disk is decrypted and the slow parts start. You will notice that that login screen is some what different for restart and sleep.

skunkworker 8y ago

Faster or lower latency? Right now traditional SSDs are extremely high bandwidth when transferring sequential files (approaching 3.5gbyte/s read and 3gbyte/s write) but they lack the random 4k IOPS to lower the perceived latency on disk. Intel's Optane is the first consumer SSD I've seen that has high performance 4k read write IOPs not unlike memory, but even if you use that as your boot drive we are starting to put pressure on other part of the system. Soon the SSDs will start to have higher performance than their PCIe 3.0 x4 slot and some already need a x8 slot when striping nvme SSDs. Take a look at https://www.anandtech.com/show/12951/plextor-demonstrates-4way-m9pe-extreme-ssd-solution-up-to-65-gbs https://www.anandtech.com/show/12951/plextor-demonstrates-4w...

loeg 8y ago
> Faster or lower latency? Yes.
- eps 8y ago
  Only if at a cheaper price though!

stephengillie 8y ago

I got a Lenovo Carbon X1. I have to charge it as often as a phone, and smart sleep settings make it seem like it's always on. I can just leave the IDE open, so it loads in 0 seconds.

cliffordthedog 8y ago

They are constantly working on faster and cheaper SSDs.

sombremesa 8y ago

On a MacBook, you can pretty easily create a temporary RAM based virtual disk. Just drop your IDE app in one of those? Could probably make it a script that runs on startup

lazyjones 8y ago

This is hilarious for people who used to boot their OS instantly from ROM in 1985 ... The main culprits here are OS bloat and inefficient boot procedures, not the performance of the storage system.

afarrell 8y ago
But as a consumer, I can't control for that. I can read specs on SSD speed. > OS bloat Results from tradeoffs against other things and is not going away.
- lazyjones 8y ago
  > But as a consumer, I can't control for that. I can read specs on SSD speed You have options. I used to have a Windows PC for all tasks (with these annoying issues) and have since moved to an iPad for most tasks, a PS4 for games and a MacBook for programming (which I admittedly don‘t do much anymore). SSD speed is not relevant anymore, booting has been replaced by opening/picking up/starting from hibernation.
  - gbil 8y ago
    What stops you putting your xOS PC in standy/hibernation ? I believe you compare different situations/needs
- panic 8y ago
  Hardware has been getting faster for decades; somehow software always manages to slow it down. I don't think there's a way to win this race without either changing the tradeoffs or building a software culture that actually cares about performance.
  - CarolineW 8y ago
    As the quotation goes: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."
walkingolof 8y ago

squirrelicus 8y ago

A company called Micron is developing non volatile storage to fill the latency gap between pcie storage and sdram. Almost certainly requires new mobo architecture and might require more trivial kernel changes, but nvme tech is already pushing the limits of the north bridge. In 20 years we'll probably see this in line production. In 40, we might see non volatile storage replace volatile memory for most use cases except things that need to be volatile, such as symmetric crypto keys.

erikpukinskis 8y ago

My 2013 MacBook Air screen recently died. I just bought a new one off eBay from the same year. Teenage me would not understand. But I think personal computers peaked years ago. The reason this is possible is I have opted out of “modern” development tools and I write all my own code with a minimum of dependencies. If I was using webpack and Docker I would have to buy a 2018 machine.