Assorted thoughts on the Apple event | Hacker News Reader

Assorted thoughts on the Apple event

marco.org

  "Fusion Drive might be the most interesting announcement
  today for our day-to-day computing. Similar SSD-as-cache
  arrangements have been kicking around in the Windows PC
  market for a while, and the Seagate Momentus XT brought a
  large cache to laptop drives a few years ago, but these
  have only brought mixed success and mediocre improvements so far.

  With tight OS integration, larger performance gains are
  possible."

As someone that has used Momentus XTs in a few different systems, they make a very significant day to day difference when compared to a non-cached standard HDD of similar RPM. The improvement clearly isn't the same as a true SSD, but is is very noteworthy, especially given the price per GB of these drives versus true SSDs.

Also, I don't see how having "tight OS integration" will improve this sort of drive. The drive already knows which sectors you are accessing the most and can optimize the cache for that, how is involving the OS supposed to make a significant difference here?

The OS knows about entire applications / resource bundles / documents and can run stronger heuristics against your usage than a blind block-level controller.

I would be willing to bet a fair amount of money that all of those fancy heuristics would be easily beaten in almost every case by a simple adaptive cache which was based on how often and recently sectors on the disk were accessed. The disk drive knows more about the actual data layout on the platters than the OS does, and that's what really matters here.

Over time, you are probably right. I think an OS-driven approach could have quicker time-to-steady-state resolution though.

If you have a large document (a few hundred MB) in an editor, the HD may SSDize parts of the document over and over again until the entire document is moved/cached. An OS-driven approach could move the entire document in one go.

Fusion Drive is just flashcache with some sort of adaptive caching algo. There's zero reason to care about what the type of a file is. The reason they showed it like that in the keynote was because normal people don't know what a block device is.

Feel free to buy me a shiny new 27" iMac and I'll report back how their hybrid drive implementation works in excruciating detail.

You are not correct, it is _not_ a cache but instead something that provides the union of storage between two drives. Remember, the examples have stuff _only_ on the SSD.

Instead, this appears to be an implementation of so-called "tiered storage". This is novel in that is the first time such an approach has been applied to consumer grade solutions. Usually, one might find tiered storage as part of an extremely expensive solution that EMC might give you as part of an elaborate storage system.

I have the same drive and I'm also experiencing massive speed-ups, I'm quite happy with it.

But don't forget that with the Momentus, the SSD acts only as a read cache, ie all writes must still go directly to the HDD. With Apple's innovation, files that are heavily used profit from being fully on SSD for both read and write.

You are comparing "Momentus" a hybrid drive with "Fusion Drive" a tiered storage solution. Fusion Drive gives you a giant, huge SSD drive compared to Momentus' on-drive flash. We are talking about orders of magnitude in difference in flash size.

There are several reasons why OS integration could yield better performance. Notably, an understanding of what happens at boot time. While the machine is running, stuff useful for boot may not be used again. However, the OS can signal to the tiered storage "hey, we are shutting down. prepare the SSD so it will be fast for boot!".

The scenarios are endless. We could talk about hibernation, etc.

I can't believe they upgraded the iPad to version 4? This seems like only yesterday that the iPad 3 was announced.

Also Marco says at one point about the six different versions of the macbook pro for only 3 different size points. Is this a sign of the Jobs touch being lost?

The iPad mini is different in that the Nexus 7 was the first sub ipad size tablet to make a mark before Apple. This won't make a huge difference to mini sales, but it does reek off Apple chasing tails.

The 13" Pro can't be the perfect choice without discrete graphics. The Intel HD 4000 may be the best Intel graphics to date but a 4 megapixel display is going to bring that chip to its knees.

It'll be interesting to see what the reviews are like and how many people play down the occasionally poor UI performance that seems to plague the 15" model.

I'm itching to replace my MacBook Air with a machine that sports a Retina display, but as it stands I think I'll have to wait for the next generation with better performing graphics that can do the resolution justice.

What would be great is if Apple stops selling spinning platters all together and just sold SSD drives. This would probably drive the price point of SSD down further and more quickly. I put an OWC 6g extreme SSD drive in my mbp and it felt like a whole new 10x faster machine. I'll never go back to spinning disks.

Totally agree: http://youtu.be/H7PJ1oeEyGg?t=34s

"The Mac Pro will continue to lose customers to the iMac and Retina MacBook Pros"

I suppose that's true, but the point that appears lost on Apple is the number of customers that they're losing to other PC manufacturers altogether.

I really do wish they'd either kill the product so that we all know it's not part of their landscape moving forward, or upgrade it already.

> I don’t mind the lack of a Retina screen in the first version. As we can see from the iPad 3 and 4, lighting and driving a 2048x1536 screen just can’t be done well in a small, thin, light, inexpensive device yet. Maybe next fall, or maybe the year after that.

This is being presented as though the only two choices were "retina" or 1024x768, which is obviously not true. I understand Apple's rationale for using the previous generation's resolution, but it means they shipped a device which is inferior to the competition in at least one measurable way. I'm not a spec-driven purchaser. I don't care that the iPad mini has less RAM or fewer cores than the Nexus 7 (disclosure: I own this). But a tablet's display is a critical part of the experience and I find Apple's decision here to be a let down.

Don't over think it. They used the resolution of the original iPad and iPad 2 so no applications need to be modified.

Only low end devices engage in a nerdspec race. Personal status devices are marketed as experiences and life accessories. Who gives a flip what's inside if it makes you happy?

The display is on the outside.

The glass is on the outside, the screen is behind.

The retina MacBook is heavier than I expected. Appreciate chopping out an optical drive doesn't magically shave 1kg off but I'm still slightly disappointed, despite placing an order regardless.

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