Apple is a company so highly scrutinized that every tiny decision, mistake or rumor is considered as an Area 51-sized conspiracy. So it was recently with the new MacBook Pros. When it became apparent that there wasn’t much wrong with the updated machines (other than an added FireWire Drive and better battery life), the complainers seemingly dug around to find something, anything, that they could whine about.
This time it was the the poor SATA interface, whose maximum throughput had dropped from 3Gbps to 1.5Gbps. You know things are desperate when that’s the best people can do. What next? Complaints that the power socket requires 0.5v less juice?
The trouble was, the hardware was the exact same hardware as in the previous MacBook Pros, and was therefore capable of the higher speed. Only the firmware was different. Apple has now fixed this with an update. Will this make a difference to most people? No. From Wikipedia: “the fastest mechanical drives barely saturate a SATA 1.5 Gbit/s link.”
And here’s a similar line from Apple:
While it’s nice that Apple is actually listening to customers now, we hope it doesn’t go too far. Otherwise we’ll end up with a multitasking iPhone with an SD card slot, a proprietary headphone socket and a five-minute battery life. What, someone already makes that?
Update page [Apple]
