Back in the fall of 2010, Apple made all of their MacBook Airs SSD-only. They were made by Toshiba, and worked well for what was needed.

However, the MacBook Airs now have made an ever bigger leap. They are now packed with SSD drives made by Samsung. These SSD drives are on average 20% faster at reading and writing than the ones made by Toshiba.

All of who have reviewed the MacBook Air, even last fall, noted its incredible speed, especially for its size. However, it would be just like Steve Jobs to want to increase the speeds even more. What gives me this idea?

When the Macintosh was first being introduced, Steve Jobs wanted it to start up 5 seconds faster than it already did. He said it would save at least 5,000,000 seconds if 1 million people purchased it. Then, the iPad was clearly the dominating force in the tablet industry. However, Jobs introduced the iPad 2, which completely shut out every other tablet.

It’s the perfect story for Apple to do something like this, so it’s incredible that they have improved their already impressive speeds by roughly 20%. My hat is truly off to that.

Source: Ars Technica

The post-launch teardown has been completed of the MacBook Pro. iFixit overall liked the design and modifications/updates, though they did find a few things that left them questioning Apple’s quality control.

It isn’t a huge deal if you aren’t going to be messing with the guts of your device, but this revision of the MacBook Pro allows you to disconnect the battery without having to completely take it out of the laptop. If you’re wondering how they explained it, it went something like this: “The unibody design also allows for easy access to most of the other components, so it won’t be terribly hard to replace things on the machine,” said iFixit. And yes, I know that I said something and then used quotes; I’m just having fun.

The previous “version” of the MacBook Pro had a 8-9 hour battery life, and this one is said to have the battery life of approximately 7 hours. Why the change? Well, Apple has blamed the newer tests, as they use more of the battery than did the past test. This is actually very plausible, as they aren’t the only ones who have been complaining of that very thing.

This new MacBook Pro also has the highly-anticipated Thunderbolt implemented. It was known already that the input/output would support a 10Gbps port. However, iFixit has discovered that both PCI Express and DisplayPort get their very own 10Gbps data port. iFixit says that the benefit of having separate ports for PCI Express and DisplayPort is that your external hard drive and display won’t compete for bandwidth.

iFixit also points out that users can chain up to six Thunderbolt devices to one another, which could pose a problem in the future should Thunderbolt-compatible devices take off. (By comparison, USB can connect up to 127 devices at once through a hub.)

iFixit usually has something that they dislike, and they definitely weren’t impressed with the insides of the device. The subwoofer enclosure was being held in place by a stripped screw and “there was an unlocked ZIF socket connecting the IR sensor,” which iFixit said wasn’t up to their standards for a machine costing $1,800. They also found excess amounts of thermal paste on the CPU and GPU.

Though, some of the problems with the insides may have been unique to that specific machine. Many teardowns would have to be done and compared in order to make the assumption that Apple’s quality control is actually lacking. But, we do know that the hardware is looking pretty nice.

Source: Ars Technica