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Apple once thought carrying your life (your Mac OS X home directory) was a good idea when they publicly announced "Home on iPod". They quickly reversed course.

Apple once thought carrying your life (your Mac OS X home directory) was a good idea when they publicly announced "Home on iPod". They quickly reversed course. I assume the failure rates of the iPod's spinning hard disks were a contributing factor. I think this could only work if you had great backup with the cloud. "Your iPod wasn’t designed to be used as a startup drive for long periods of time. When the tiny hard drive inside the device spins for hours on end—as it can if you boot from it—the player heats up enough to make your palms sweat. Since there’s no way for the heat to vent, as it would on a hard drive in your computer, you risk tragedy." - Macworld.

SeanLuke 12y ago
> Apple once thought carrying your life (your Mac OS X home directory) was a good idea when they publicly announced "Home on iPod". They quickly reversed course. FWIW, this was also the original pitch of the NeXT computer. As a student you'd carry around all of your stuff on a single magneto-optical disk (a predecessor to CD-RW), and stick it into any available NeXT on campus to continue doing work.
egypturnash 12y ago
When's the last time you saw an iThing with a spinning HD in it? Everything's SSD now. And the computers are going that way too.
- grimmfang 12y ago
  Surprisingly, Apple doesn't even offer SSD or their "Fusion Drives" in store. I was at an Apple store last week trying to buy an iMac with a 256 GB SSD and had to have them order one for me. It is worth going to the store though, they gave me a fair discount for buying it as a business.
  - egypturnash 12y ago
    Huh. I only get laptops for myself; looking at the online store there's all of one stock Macbook Pro config that offers a HD instead of SSD. Even the default config of the Mac Pro is SSD. All the default iMacs and Minis are HD, though. We're not in the "SSD only" world yet by any means but there's a definite change from just a few years ago.

SeanLuke 12y ago

> Apple once thought carrying your life (your Mac OS X home directory) was a good idea when they publicly announced "Home on iPod". They quickly reversed course. FWIW, this was also the original pitch of the NeXT computer. As a student you'd carry around all of your stuff on a single magneto-optical disk (a predecessor to CD-RW), and stick it into any available NeXT on campus to continue doing work.

egypturnash 12y ago

When's the last time you saw an iThing with a spinning HD in it? Everything's SSD now. And the computers are going that way too.

grimmfang 12y ago
Surprisingly, Apple doesn't even offer SSD or their "Fusion Drives" in store. I was at an Apple store last week trying to buy an iMac with a 256 GB SSD and had to have them order one for me. It is worth going to the store though, they gave me a fair discount for buying it as a business.
- egypturnash 12y ago
  Huh. I only get laptops for myself; looking at the online store there's all of one stock Macbook Pro config that offers a HD instead of SSD. Even the default config of the Mac Pro is SSD. All the default iMacs and Minis are HD, though. We're not in the "SSD only" world yet by any means but there's a definite change from just a few years ago.