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Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

> already well-known that Apple sources SSDs (as well as other parts) from a variety of suppliers

Ah. Why would they do that? Someone could spend $3000 on MacBook Pro 16GB + SSD highest spec and risk the chance of getting bad parts? I never knew this was a practice. Is this even common in the industry otherwise Apple?

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It's risk-aversion. Think of it this way: if drive-models are assigned to Macs in a round-robin fashion, then if there are three drive manufacturers and one has shipped a buggy drive, at most 1/3 of customers would be sending their laptops back for repairs. On the other hand, if their only supplier gave them buggy drives, then everyone would be sending their laptops back.

It also lets them have a stronger negotiating position to drop a crap supplier. They can only maintain that negotiating position, though, if they buy drives from all of them; if they only used drives from whoever was the at-the-time "best" supplier, then if that supplier started to suck, all the others would demand a king's ransom for the "privilege" of switching to them.

Interesting. I could also imagine that the inverse of that point is also true: if one of the suppliers is really good and reliably so, if Apple depends on them more than the others, the cash inflow will help that one supplier more than the others, which that company could put back into R&D to widen that quality gap. And if one supplier is far superior to the others, then the comparability == competition between suppliers lessens, and so does Apple's bargaining power.

Yeah, companies have been burned in the past for relying on too few suppliers of disks. For example, Amstrad.

Apple would probably argue that all the SSDs provide acceptable performance and some of them provide bonus performance beyond what was promised. The specs only mention "PCIe-based flash storage": http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html

Apple has done this various times in the past, like shipping a 16x DVD drive when they advertised 8x. More problematic was the rMBP where LG LCDs were noticeably lower quality than Samsungs. http://9to5mac.com/2013/03/20/macbook-pro-with-retina-displa...

Wow, that's unfortunate about the LG vs Samsung screens. How could you tell what screen you have? I'd like to spread awareness about this to my friends.

Use it at your own risk, but I found this test from Marco Arment to be one of the most popular ones to determine if your retinaMacBook Pro has ghosting / burn-in problem.

http://www.marco.org/rmbp-irtest.html

I am not sure which one of two manufacturers display is faulty, but per discussions on Apple's support Communities (https://discussions.apple.com/message/18669644#18669644), rMBPs carrying display panel from LG tends to suffers from this problem more commonly compared to those from Samsung.

EDIT: Just ran this test on a retinaMacBookPro to determine if I have a LG or Samsung Panel and found it to be working.

http://geeksblogs.com/lg-or-samsung-heres-a-little-guide-to-...

This was pretty easily fixed, though. The technician took one look at it, nodded, and I had it replaced for free while on Christmas + New Year vacation.

Maybe in the US. But in the Philippines, we're out of luck.

EDIT: I mean about the replacement part. Sure, they'll probably replace it after a several back and forth, plus the replacement will take serveral weeks.

If their displays are faulty, there will be a noticeable ghosting effect when a window is left in the same place for a long time and then moved somewhere else on the screen. A faded "ghost window" will remain in its place. Another issue is stuck/bright pixels, there may be several bright white pixels that never change.

If your friends aren't seeing noticeable problems though, there's nothing to warn them about. It's not that one display is inferior to the other in terms of color accuracy or brightness or quality. One display (I think it's the LG) has a noticeable ghosting and bright pixel problem in some cases.

Oh ok. That's not too bad. And it sucks you can't just look up the hardware specs or something.

> I never knew this was a practice.

All the component manufacturers that supply Apple are also supplying other contracts.

An example is the high-definition screens; 'Retina' Apple laptops use interchangeable screens from Sharp, LG and Samsung as availability permits. There was a run of returns last year due to some issues with the LG screens.

This is why I've stuck with my 2012 13" unibody. You can get 16GB and gobs of SSD into one for way cheaper.

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