OWC Blog

I've come to the unquestionable conclusion that Apple doesn't want customers inside their computers. Full stop. Apple views the personal computer as a device to be used for its serviceable life (until a major component fails), then discarded, recycled, and replaced with a new one.

I'm not defending this stance, btw, just stating what I've observed. Our household recently experienced a HDD failure in an iMac purchased late 2010. At 4 years old, the HDD was due for a failure (based on my experience with spinning magnetic disks). No problem, I thought. I'm an experienced hacker; taking this thing apart will be no problem at all.

I was right in that taking the iMac apart would be little challenge for me. Honestly, the iMac is a miracle of serviceability for such a compact computer. All of the connectors unsnapped as expected while using the correct tools. Nothing was terribly inaccessible, with the exception of the LCD driver cable. That connector terrifies me, but everything else was cake.

What killed me was the HDD thermal monitoring system. Apple uses the internal HDD thermal sensing equipment. Ostensibly (and probably true), monitoring via SMART requires an interrupt, which momentarily halts HDD communication. I/O on a HDD is bad enough without these interruptions, so hats off to Apple for prioritizing performance.

The down side of this is that there is no standard for the thermal sensor pins in the connector provided on the HDD. You have to 1) make sure to buy a HDD of…

- Battery life is going to be a trade off for performance. Things like the 4k screen as well as the DDR4 (vs LPDDR3) RAM are going to come at a cost to battery life.

- I don't know about the screen, but having owned both, viewing angles are not an issue on either. I _believe_ the MBP has better color accuracy, but the blade is no slouch with full sRGB coverage and 75% Adobe RGB [1]

- I travel a lot by airplane and weights are going to be a personal preference, but I don't notice a difference...and I take public transit for 40 minutes and have a 2 mile walk to work. But again, personal preference.

- Perhaps I am not in the know, but the Razer Blade has USB type-C (TB3) as well as USB type-A (ostensibly serving 3.0). MBP has 4 TB3 ports if I understand it correctly, so it has more, but I don't think it fair to say the Blade has none.

- I don't know if the SSD is "drastically slower"...but it might be slower. Both are PCIE nVME SSD drives, the blade specifically has a Samsung SM951. Not the top of the line, but certainly not a bargin bin drive[1]. And for the price difference, you could replace the drive in the Razer with something better if you want...whereas the MBP is soldered on[2].

- I don't know, I am not terribly impressed by any laptop speakers in 13" form factors...but personal preference. I would have to agree, owning both, that I think the MBP has a slight edge as they don't distort at Max volume and the Blade does slightly...but I wouldn't say the…

If you want to downvote, that's fine, but please provide an explanation. My comment was not derogatory, rude or against any of the HN guidelines.

Recent iMacs have been known to have their harddrive fans spin at full after a stock harddisk is replaced with an aftermarket replacement. Rumor is circulating that recent MacBook and MacBook Pro models are similar. Apple has hijacked some unused SATA wires to use for onboard temperature control on their branded drives. Unless you have access to genuine apple parts, any harddrive replacement on those models of computers won't work well.

http://blog.macsales.com/10146-apple-further-restricts-upgrade-options-on-new-imacs

Long story short: To Apple, Harddrives are not user servicable components, thus to Apple, "no one should care", because the computer will come back to the consumer after any repairs to a failed harddrive with a clean copy of the new OS.

I don't agree with that, but this is how things will be. I'm just a messenger with an opinion.

I understand from the macsales page (http://blog.macsales.com/39345-owc-makes-macbooks-pro-again-with-game-changing-product) that it has space for a couple 2.5" and M.2 drives. But that obviously doesn't take up all the volume. I don't know about a battery.

But rectangular prisms are nice. Why does everything need to get shallow around the edges or the middle? So they can run some marketing-speak and say that their device is 1.7mm thick[0]? I'd hope for a large battery, but even empty space would be fine.

An eGPU would be pretty neat, but hot, expensive, and complicated. I'd love one with an ordinary battery expansion and some I/O ports.

[0] (May be thicker in locations other than the far corner where it tapers down to a sharp edge)

Since Snow Leopard MacOS has also had a local versioned file system (separate from Time Machine) but not all apps use its API and since it auto-saves and screws up "Save As..." capability I find it annoying and usually just turn it off and pretend it doesn't exist. It's one of those features Apple added that could have been useful but since they never got the UI right, most people don't know it exists.

http://osxdaily.com/2015/06/16/revert-to-prior-version-file-mac-os-x/

https://blog.macsales.com/47415-auto-save-and-versions-an-often-overlooked-mac-feature

Both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show the opposite [0] [1]. My own experience and unresolved performance bugs that I've filed show the same [2].

I want Firefox to be faster and superior to chrome in every way. Ignoring it's problems won't make them go away and definitely won't make them a priority for the devs.

[0] https://blog.macsales.com/46993-rocket-yard-testing-lab-which-browser-is-fastest

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox-webrender-beta&num=2

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699