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Comment by pabb | Hacker News Reader

Aha. You can spot the Apple fanboys rushing to contend this just by saying they don't use 128GB to begin with.

The entire point is that pretty much any other (read: non-Apple) laptop/desktop you buy nowadays is going to come with at least 500 GB, and generally 1 TB nowadays.

No need to get up in arms and whine that Apple is doing everything just right for your tastes.

edit: I obviously wasn't referring to 1 TB SSDs. The parent's comment said that 128 GB is pretty paltry for storage capacity nowadays, as the thread is concerning the rate of growth of SSDs.

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The entire point is that pretty much any other (read: non-Apple) laptop/desktop you buy nowadays is going to come with at least 500 GB, and generally 1 TB nowadays.

Is that the case? Most machines I've seen around the cost of the Macbook Air still come with hard disks or 128G SSDs - maybe a couple might push that to 256.

Indeed, I don't think I've even seen a laptop with 1TB of SSD, aside from the very-top-end-I-upgraded-it-especially Retina Macbook.

Well, I'm no fan of Apple at all and haven't owned an Apple product since the II GS. And I'd argue against storing any significant data on a laptop or desktop drive, as this is one of the most likely components to fail. Data should be on a storage server with RAID. All you should have on your primary drive is your OS, applications, and active working set of data. Any archival data or larger files should go on the storage server.

Glancing at amazon.co.uk's results for 512gb ssd laptops the cheapest non Apple on page 1 was £1,676.55 (Lenovo Yoga), Apple was actually a bit cheaper (macbook pro £1,213). Not really a scientific survey but they don't seem too bad.

> The entire point is that pretty much any other (read: non-Apple) laptop/desktop you buy nowadays is going to come with at least 500 GB, and generally 1 TB nowadays.

Which laptops are these which come with 500GB SSDs in the base models? Or are you suggesting that Apple should make a laptop with a 500GB spinning disk in the base model? Because funnily enough, they have one; the non-retina 13" MBP. Of course, no-one buys that, because it's worse than the cheaper Airs by all metrics but storage capacity, but it's there if you want it.

The new MacBooks boot in 1 second.

I'll take that any day over extra storage I don't need.

>The entire point is that pretty much any other (read: non-Apple) laptop/desktop you buy nowadays is going to come with at least 500 GB, and generally 1 TB nowadays.

That's for non SSD drives. So every other laptop/desktop you're gonna get with those storage sizes also has rotating rust disks, with are more volatile due to moving parts, have much worse read/write speeds and are noisy.

>That's for non SSD drives.

Yep, clarified in my edit.

>So every other laptop/desktop you're gonna get with those storage sizes also has rotating rust disks, with are more volatile due to moving parts, have much worse read/write speeds and are noisy.

That's cute. So now hard disks are so obtrusive, fallible, and out-dated that they're literally not an option anymore? I think some people have such a love affair for the acronym SSD that they forget, disk access is still hundreds of thousands of clock cycles regardless.

See: http://imgur.com/pQ8BriQ

SSD benchmarks are clearly better than HDD all around, but not by the orders of magnitude that you seem to believe.

>That's cute. So now hard disks are so obtrusive, fallible, and out-dated that they're literally not an option anymore? I think some people have such a love affair for the acronym SSD that they forget, disk access is still hundreds of thousands of clock cycles regardless

A time N improvement is still better that no or marginal improvement, even if it's not 2 orders of magnitude better.

It makes all the difference between waiting for 5 minutes for some IO process to finish and waiting for 1 minute. 1 second would have been nice, but 1 minute is already a game changer.

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