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Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

Has a Lenovo part # on it, so I suspect this is the PCIe SSD inside the new ThinkPad X1 released as CES 2015, and there was a nice discussion on HN about it yesterday [1]. In that article, the author mentioned that in the tests "read speeds reached 1350 MB/s", which is pretty freaking awesome for a laptop!

Update: Yeah, the SM951 (shown in this article) is in the X1 [2 - see specifications heading].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8847411

[2] http://www.thinkscopes.com/blog/2015/01/06/lenovo-thinkpad-x...

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That's amazingly frustrating. I bought the second-generation X1 Carbon last year, on the theory that Lenovo had killed off mouse buttons permanently so there was no sense waiting for a new system that had them; now they release the third-generation X1 that not only has the mouse buttons back, but kills off the insane touch-strip in favor of real function keys again.

I was waiting all of 2013 for that X1 refresh, and spent a whole day swearing at random inanimate objects after seeing what they actually built. Bought an ASUS Zenbook instead. I would LOVE to have somehow lasted this year without a new laptop and sprung for this fixed-up X1, had I known they would correct course. Alas I only buy new laptops every 4-ish years.

So Lenovo lost me as a customer for a 7-8 year span because of those asinine touchscreen keys. I loved Thinkpads as reliable Linux workhorses, but the phrase "Will change their usage per app!" might as well say "Will never work in Linux!".

The "adaptive" strip actually does work in Linux; hitting the Fn key toggles between F1-F12 and volume/brightness/etc. It's just not fun to use, since it has no tactile response.

The trackpad/keyboard change made me so happy, because I can now buy a Lenovo laptop again. Now they need to bring back the Ultrabay (so we can have 2 spindles (1 swappable) + M2 SSD in a 14" laptop) and get rid of non-removable batteries.

The customer backlash must have had a substantial financial impact for Lenovo to reverse course. Other than Blackberry, has any technology vendor trumpeted their own course-reversal in launch marketing for a new product?

Apple... The iPhone 6's screen size.

The entire history of the iPhone is one instance of this phenomenon after another. "Nobody wants big screens." "You don't need cut and paste on a smartphone." "You don't really want multitasking, you only think you do." "Web apps are all you're going to get, and you'll like it."

The first instance is the only real case of that phenomenon, the others Apple openly framed them as temporary compromises.

I might be mistaken, but my impression was that the "web apps only" thing was real and not a temporary compromise. They may have spun it that way retroactively, though.

I can assure you that the iPhone as originally announced was never going to allow third-party native apps; it was to be web-apps only forever, and this was not intended to be a temporary position. Even though their language was often cagey, it is my clear recollection that Apple's general attitude around/beyond the release of iPhone OS 1.0 was that web-apps were essentially "as good as" any native app could be, and were therefore everything developers would ever need. As I recall it was some 13 months before they finally relented and began to talk native third-party API access.

I was at WWDC 2007, here's what Jobs said at the time -

"The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today."

Additionally -

Apple board member Art Levinson told Isaacson that he phoned Jobs “half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” but, according to Isaacson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”

The following article discussed this http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-i...

And yet, didn't they also say that the the built-in apps couldn't be equaled by Web apps? I wonder how Jobs reconciled that.

No it was not 13 months, it took 4 months from WWDC 2007 to announcing the SDK, which was then released another 5 months later.

Jobs was being slippery because they had nothing to show at WWDC 2007, but here is the timeline:

iPhone revealed: January 9 2007

WWDC 2007: June 11 2007

iPhone released: June 29 2007

SDK announced: October 17 2007

SDK released: March 6 2008

App Store opens: July 10 2008

From the iPhone being announced to the App Store opening was about 18 months total, quite a pivot if "iPhone as originally announced was never going to allow third-party native apps; it was to be web-apps only forever, and this was not intended to be a temporary position."

Jobs was being slippery

It was always Jobs' M.O. to trash-talk any important feature(s) they didn't have at any given time. It was and is a valid marketing technique -- I can't really blame him for employing it -- but at some point it stopped fooling me. It required me to assume that Jobs was a dumbass, which regardless of what we might have thought about him was never the case.

As I understand it, the App Store had been under active development for some time, but for the iPad. The iPad was always going to run native third-party applications, but the company was caught off guard by the demand for them on the iPhone.

In retrospect, the apparent speed of their pivot on the App Store policy should have been a very strong indicator that a tablet was in the works. It did look suspicious, but I don't think Jobs was actively lying when he said the iPhone would rely on web apps.

Certainly not in my recollection.

> Now they need to bring back the Ultrabay (so we can have 2 spindles (1 swappable) + M2 SSD in a 14" laptop) and get rid of non-removable batteries.

Perhaps in the T series, but those choices actually make sense in a thin-and-light laptop/Ultrabook. If you've ever looked inside one of those laptops, it becomes obvious why they don't have replaceable batteries: they put battery cells in every spare space, not in one encapsulated area.

Yes, I meant the T-series, e.g. the relatively thin and light T400S has a swappable Ultrabay Slim which can accept a hard drive, battery or optical drive.

The 8GB ram limit on the X1 and X250 is still pretty crazy.

I have virtually no reason to upgrade from my X220 (i5 2410, 8GB/SSD+HD) unless it breaks. Sad.

I'd agree except the X220 screen resolution is idiotically bad.

Bad for what ? If you had a full HD resolution on that size you would lack proper display on Linux for high DPI screens (it's still not perfect at this stage).

No kidding; even my 2010 X61s had 8GB and my 2 year old X230 has 16GiB.

That's the only thing holding me back to upgrade my 2012 X1 Carbon. As soon as they release an X1 with >8GB RAM I buy it

Same boat. I finally bought one, after trying out someone elses and deciding that I could live with it.

Ugh. It's almost unusably bad. Fortunately I already don't use the mouse much, but it's gotten worse with more use not better. :(

It also has severe overheating issues under load; fullscreen video or compilation will hard-hang it, and it won't boot up again for a while.

This brings them in-line with the 2013 retina MacBook Pro's PCIe SSD speeds though which I believe we're just below at around 1GB/s?

You have no idea what kind of performance you'll get with an Apple SSD. My almost brand new Macbook Pro has the worst SSD I've ever used, we're talking sequential speeds comparable to a hard drive. But it still works, so they refuse to change it.

You should blog about it. Write a simple article, post it everywhere. Submit it to hardware review sites like Anandtech, they might get interested. They definitely jumped on the recent EVO 840 issue.

This has been common knowledge since Apple started selling Macbooks with SSDs. They simply refuse to do anything about it unless you can prove that it's not working.

I'd shortcut the SSD if that didn't mean being without my laptop for a good two weeks.

shortcut?

Drive higher voltage into it to burn a few wires in it? No need to open it up to void warranty or whatever.

I think this is because Apple uses two or three suppliers, so if you're lucky you'll get a Samsung SSD, but if you're unlucky you'll get a slower Toshiba SSD.

We need a class-action lawsuit that results in a cryptographic hash manifest of all hardware components being delivered with every purchase, or made available for lookup online by unit serial number. Alternately: labelling regulation, or voluntary disclosure.

Amazon could design a "showrooming" mobile app to augment the reality of Apple retail stores, with photos of the supply chain casino options on which the buyer is gambling, while they promote Amazon items which have guaranteed transparency on components.

The only ones over-promising and under-delivering are independent hardware reviewers who publish benchmark numbers Apple isn't guaranteeing.

Barring a recall, nobody cares which manufacturer their RAM comes from or the hard drive or optical drive or the battery cells or the WiFi chip (except for Linux users) or the LCD or even the NAND behind the SSD controller. The controller itself is the only component that Apple switches out with alternatives that aren't functionally indistinguishable, but I can't see any way to regulate that without also harfully restricting Apple's freedom to multi-source components in a ways that are strictly beneficial to consumers.

Consumers can decide (with non-vendor advice) what's beneficial for their goals (which are unknown to the vendor), but only if there is transparency on the ingredients inside the device. Vendors can change components as much as they want, as long as they disclose the components.

But who decides the granularity at which the components must be disclosed? Do they have to update the documentation every time they switch sources for things like capacitors? The overhead of doing that would cripple the supply chain and hurt everybody for the potential benefit of almost nobody.

Reasonable people can draw reasonable lines. We can use the last 20 years of the PC industry to come up with an initial list of consumer-impacting behavior.

If the behavioral targeting industry can fingerprint every possible aspect of browser behavior, and run subsecond auctions, OEMs can track a subset of BOMs on an annual cycle.

The main purpose of a hard drive is to read and write data. When one is much worse than one of the other alternatives they use, that adversely impacts the performance of the whole computer. Things that directly affect the user like that should be disclosed.

Would you be okay with one screen having twice the resolution of another on the same model laptop with the same part number?

They can source the items from where ever they want, I don't really care that much. But when they advertise that their Flash-based PCI-Express based SSDs are 1.6x faster than the comparable SATA-models they are demonstrably lying. I don't like that.

This was a laptop in the $4k range, which puts it in the really-fucking-expensive line. I expected more, at the very least that they'd be more than willing to change it. But it powers on, so no problems according to Apple.

If Apple were forced to standardise on a single SSD spec do you think they'd standardise on the higher spec component or the lower spec one? Clue - the higher spec components are almost certainly under supply constraints. You could even end up with higher spec components being intentionally crippled to match the performance of lower spec ones to comply with uniformity regulations.

Congratulations, you've now made the world worse for everybody, but at least it's 'fair'. Good job!

Any vendor is free to sell lottery tickets, but if they call those lottery tickets something else (e.g. a computer with fixed specs, rather than a range of possible specs), customers may be less than satisfied with the transaction.

There is nothing new about manufacturers sourcing parts from multiple suppliers. This is routine practice across many industries. Often it's necessary due to limitations in availability.

If you receive a computer from a supplier and find that it's higher-than-advertised spec parts have been intentionally downgraded to comply with uniformity regulations, would you be more satisfied with the transaction than if they had not been or less than satisfied?

The post that started this subthread was about disclosure of component identity, nothing was said about sourcing origin or uniformity.

you've now made the world worse for everybody

So you don't mind when Apple ships you an 800x600 display with your MacBook because, sorry, we ran out of Retina screens this week?

Oh please. Nobody's talking about delivering products that are under the advertised specification. If they were doing that, they'd get sued in an eyeblink and rightly so.

My late 2013 rMBP with the 1TB option sees sustained read and write speeds of around 900MB/s, indeed. Useful when dealing with uncompressed video.

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