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Maybe when you can buy a 1 terrabyte SSD for $150, then you might talk about the death of a hard drive. Even then, recovery from SSD's is different than spinning platters isn't it? Can you recover flash data as effectively? What is the fail rate of a flash drive? My iPad has had to be restored twice. I have lost images on my camera and been unable to recover. What are the implications of storing things on a flash drive?
I like the idea, but I would want to know more before I start replacing hard drives that to date have been fairly reliable. In 20 years, I have only lost 2 hard drives, and one of them I was able to recover the data.

Good! And certainly the death of the SuperDrive, too. I can finally throw away the last two DVD disks and ~20 CDR's I have in my box in my garage!

To think, I've been carrying that SuperDrive around for years and the only time I use it is to upgrade my OS.

I'm going to bet on Jobs and get the basic 11" 64 MBA with 4Gig of RAM....Use DropBox and sell my ext. HD (one less item in my office, one less cable, one less pwr chord, and one less pwr brick!) and use the cloud.

Enjoyed the article! Thx

Best

This post has been edited by clh126: 25 October 2010 - 04:06 PM

mrbach, on 25 October 2010 - 03:19 PM, said:

Good questions/concerns, mrbach!

I would be interested in the answers, too!

Best

This post has been edited by clh126: 25 October 2010 - 04:07 PM

"64GB is plenty of capacity for most users"

Uh, what decade is this guy living in? I know many people that have more than 64GB of media files alone!

IMHO the Mac App Store has removed the last obstacle to eliminating the DVD drive as well. In Apple's future 1) download software 2) exchange documents via the Internet; 3) backup your SSD via the Internet; and 4) enjoy omnipresent thin and light personal digital devices. This sort of high risk view of the future is exactly what Jobs is famous for.

Macnutjohn, on 25 October 2010 - 05:41 PM, said:

Media files are going to take up the most space on the disk for most people though. The vast majority of people I know are able to put their entire media library on an iPod Nano and still have room to spare. The reality is that while many of us do have very large media collection, most people do not. Even for those of us with large media collections we tend to be able to cope with smaller capacity devices like iPads and travel laptops. We don't need to take our entire media library with us everywhere we go. For those that do obviously the Macbook Air doesn't work (unless an external hard drive is acceptable), but for most people the storage capacity is going to be OK.

I also have to keep in mind that my last Macbook I purchased (four years ago or so) only came with a 60 or 80GB hard drive so we're looking at SSD storage capacities which are 3-4 years behind the traditional hard drive.

Thing is you can't really think the same way if you want to think cloud computing and lightweight computer: IMHO, the point is to get a light device that is used when you're on mobility. At home, you may need some more powerful device, and plenty of external storage capacity, even if just for duplicates if you have a failure.
So, 64 or 128 Go are plenty enough for a "daypack" type of computer. You don't have to carry around all your photos and videos from ten years back. Usually you will want to share the last vacations, or maybe the last year with people you seldom meet with. Same thing with work material, you need the current projects, and maybe one year back for tracking, you can share the current on the cloud, and have ten years on the company servers, that remains accessible when needed. I can definitely accommodate this way of life.
I've got a few concerns, however, regarding the lifespan of such embedded memory, what if it dies? I have to replace the whole device? This is something I feel uncomfortable with for now. It basically means that such devices are trashable… I don't feel I want to put $1600 in a trashable computer. (This being said, I think I might do it anyway, coz' I need to change my macbook pro, and the proposed models don't really give me the "pro" features it once did… So I might get a very portable for my travelling needs, plus a desktop when at home for heavy jobs, and enjoying my photos and videos on a nice big screen…)

The SSD part of the new MacBook Air is removable, using standard MicroPCIe connector, as iFixIt showed. If it ever fails, you could replace it, provided that you get around to opening it.

wesley96, on 26 October 2010 - 01:59 AM, said:

I totally missed this one! If this is not great news it's at least good news!! Thanks!
F

Macnutjohn, on 25 October 2010 - 05:41 PM, said:

All well and good, but do those people you know accurately represent the majority the prior poster was talking about, or are the in the upper tail of the bell curve?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if 64GB is, today, sufficient for most single-user general purpose computers. As time passes, or when machines are shared, that's a lot less likely to remain true. But I'd suggest that the Air is a machine not expected to be shared.

Some subtle issues ignored in the article:

"The $999 11-inch 64GB MacBook Air matches the price of the MacBook."

Sure, it matches the price. So did my last dishwasher. It also loses 75% of the (stock) storage, the option of even more internal storage, about 40% of the performance, half of the battery life, Gb Ethernet and the optical drive. The Air's not a useless machine but it's got a far different target market than the MacBook and isn't meaningfully comparable to it.

"On average, the price of NAND flash memory drops 40 percent per year. Today, SSDs cost about $1.20 per gigabyte.

Because of capital spending by manufacturers, which began in the second half of 2009, Handy believes there will be a significant oversupply by the second half of 2011. “By this time next year, the price per gigabyte is likely to be closing in on 50 cents,” he said."

If it's $1.20 today and dropping 40% per year, it's going to be nearly $0.75 at this time next year. 50% is a huge margin of error in a projection like that. Is the oversupply he expects really going to be that severe?

This post has been edited by bastion: 26 October 2010 - 06:27 AM

You'd think it was August with all the worthless articles about 'THE DEATH OF' going around after the release of the new MacBook Air. Incredibly wrong and boring. There has to be something better to write.

When will we see the 'death of laptop hard drives'? When solid state drives, aka flash memory, is CHEAPER or significantly more reliable than hard drives, which is NOT the case today. zzzzzzz

derekc, on 26 October 2010 - 07:54 AM, said:

In notebook applications, they are more reliable than HDs. (Also, in general, but portable applications magnify it). They also emit less heat and consume less energy. Again, serious considerations in notebooks. Finally: faster than spinning metal, which really counts when you start using the VM subsystem, which you're most likely to do on a lower-RAM system. Like, surprise, notebooks.

Now me, today? I'm not really interested in replacing the HD in my MacBook with a 64GB SSD for over $100. Next year when it's 100GB? Maybe. Sure it's like 8 times the price of HD (per unit storage) but with a notebook I've got concerns beyond simply how much I'm spending per byte.