waffle

What am I waiting for? For my new laptop, I mean. I’m not planning to buy one immediately, or even soon. But first I had a PowerBook G4 (1.5 GHz), which I knew was slow and had a horrible frontside bus speed (167MHz) when I bought it, then I upgraded to the very first, very lowest model MacBook (1.83 GHz Core Duo) which was still, on paper and in reality, several times faster. Well, except for the built-in graphics (comparable to that, as I’m apt to say, of a cardboard replica) which led me towards upgrading to my current MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo), and which I’m very happy with.

This time, I can’t claim to know that I’m hobbled with an outdated processor or a cheap architecture. The industrial design, and the associated rigidity, of the new MacBook and MacBook Pro series is impressive, but I’m not a huge fan of the black bezel or the accordion-looking keyboard — not the keys themselves, I love them, just not black on alumin[i]?um. And there are no planned huge improvements to CPUs in the immediate future; maybe quad-core processors, which will have to hang around for a generation or two until their power usage (and therefore battery drain) drops below “help, all the lamps just started blinking” levels. I kid, but I wouldn’t want to stick one of those onto my lap right out of the gates.

So what is it then? In 2009, a young man’s fancy might well turn to solid state. There are currently three movable parts in the average laptop — the optical drive, the hard drive and the fans. The MacBook Air may have been a bit extreme and a bit early, but in the near future, a laptop that outsources one and eschews the other will likely be a big hit. Here’s what I’m envisioning:

• A cheap (let’s say $300 or less) 256 GB or higher capacity solid state drive.
• 8 GB of RAM.
• A wireless external optical drive. Wireless USB or upcoming Bluetooth protocols, which both use Ultra-Wide Band and can handle the bandwidth, can provide a lower maintenance wireless support than Wi-Fi networks. You could charge by an ordinary USB cord, or by lending it your laptop’s charger for a while. It’d work silently and effectively to, once it saw that you were hitting a lot of the disk, transfer a cache copy to the laptop itself if the capacity was available. Saves battery and plays faster. The wireless deal is simply because you don’t want it dangling near your laptop in the first place, and because if it didn’t have to be within cable range, it could sit on a stable surface somewhere else.

The optical drive is a pie in the sky, but the rest you can already get for the 17″ MacBook Pro. The difference is that you can’t get it on the cheap.

Think about it. Removing the movable, non-fan parts eliminates every other source of internal reverberation, and quite often a lot of heat and noise. And even if SSDs don’t tolerate a lot of rewrites, that’s that many rewrites per cell. You can rewrite an awful lot of times, there are spare cells put aside for when other cells wear out, and the rewrite limit is raised constantly. And if you really do have to, say, log that many times, there are special SSDs whose cells do last a lot longer. And with all this, essentially, all you have is lots of memory, of which 8 GB is RAM, and of which the rest is significantly faster than the hard drive you’d have instead.

My point is simply this: We’re at a time where speeding a laptop up dramatically doesn’t necessarily have to include the processor or even the system bus anymore. I’m interested in comments from people who are already working off of SSDs. Is there a noticeable difference? Where is the difference most pronounced? Does anything run slower thanks to the lack of really fast sequential writes? Tell me, and the rest of us, your experiences.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.