The new SAS 12GB/s will offers up to 2.4GB/s per peripheral in 2013, and the bests SAS RAID controllers will be able to provide 16GB/s, the equivalent of 16 Thunderbolt ports! This is a breakthrough for SSD storage systems.

Blurb is another kind of player, they won’t print your vacation photos at a bargain price, nor send you huge posters from your photo, they just do photo books. Only photo books, of great quality, not oriented toward bargains, they are targeting photographer and their friends or clients that want to have a pro-quality photo book.

You have a clear choice of quality paper as well as end-sheet and hard-cover, choice is yours, and it’s even easier with their Swatch Kit, that contain each of their options, paper having black & white photo on one side and a color photo on the other. Not only you see the visual difference in finish, contrast, light, but also you will touch and feel how great their feel. This is quality photo book, and I think that with their choice of materials, the ability to check it by yourself before ordering your book, you just could not be wrong!

I am a Fashion/Beauty/Hair Styling photographer, and blurb is the service I was looking for to be able to create my own photo book, because showing artistic work is always better on a premium book with a nice finish, than on web galleries, especially given than most of them don’t have calibrated screen, nor the chance to use a 27inch iMac

Ivy Bridge CPU have been benchmarked and as expected, they are not really faster clock-for-clock than Sandy Bridge (say 5% average), but draw less power (up to 30% less!). They are perfect CPU for slimmer MacBook Pro thay may look like big MacBook Air, with integrated SSD, no more Duper-Drive (not a typo!), no more room for 2.5″ hard-drive, lightweight and stylish laptops.

Radeon HD7700M & HD7800M are the perfect fit for slimmer MacBook Pro that will include a discrete GPU, drawing much power only when necessary (3D Games, OpenCL Pro applications or virtualizer such as VMware). With the ZeroCore™ technology, these GPU draw 0W when not used so autonomy will be real great on office/internet work, aqnd their performance-level is impressive, the Radeon HD7850M being as fast as desktop HD7750, and thus as fast on OpenCL application than a nVidia GeForce GTX680 desktop!!!

Hope the new MacBook Pro line will be available soon, with quad-core CPU for all, and some with discrete HD7700M or even HD7850M GPU, as fast or faster than existing MacBook Pro, in a smaller package (and probably no more 17inch MacBook Pro)…

This is in line with our own analysis of the trends of Apple Computer, that go into consumer device, content distribution and is finally dropping Mac Pro and MacBook Pro, while offering a Mac OS X Mountain Lion that is an iPad-ified OS! 2012 is a really interesting year

Some Mac website pretends that a 15inch MacBook Air could offer as much pixel as a 17inch MacBook Pro, but the 17inch MacBook Pro is not only a count of pixel. It’s also a big screen where it’s easy to use Photoshop or LightRoom to do editing (and no, same resolution on 15inch or less is not comparable for a pro!), ExpressCard/34 port to use eSATA or USB3 drives, capture cards, the ability to use up to 2 SSD or HD, or even have one boot SSD and one big HD (as on mine!), up to 16GB RAM.

I fear that the next generation Apple laptop will just be big MacBook Air, without the storage capability, without sams expandability options, and will let the power users without any other option than a Windows PC!

Now, the first Thunderbolt PCI-express box is in pre-order (will be available in a few months! lol!). There is a reality check here, against all ideas colported by mainstream websites, that happens to have Apple or Apple reseller ads…

Magma ExpressBox 3T is a Thunderbolt connected PCI-express extension box, with 3 PCI-Express slot (theorically 2×8 lane and 1x4lane but they are kidding!).

• not 2×8 lane + 1×4 lane, but 4 lanes shared between all the PCI-Express peripherals
• low performance with graphic card, due to the 4 lane where all GPU expect 16 lane, or 16 lane on PCI-Express 3.0 (2X bandwidth). So it’s between 4 times and 8 times less bandwidth than GPU need!
• few graphic cards are available on 8-lane or 4-lane PCI-Express port
• NO SUPPORT FROM MAC OS X for graphic cards
• WORKS ONLY WITH WINDOWS for graphic cards
• Only 150W- graphic card, no middle-end GPU

So this is the dream come true, for the price of a real computer with quad-core CPU, 16GB+ RAM, SSD, and modern graphic card, you may buy an empty Thunderbolt enclosure that don’t enable you to use any graphic card on Mac OS X (due to Apple not willing to develop drivers!) !

When reality hit dreams, someone may choose the dream

Why new Mac Pro were difficult to create

You could think that putting a new Xeon and Intel chipset will be enough to create new Mac Pro, but that’s all but true, and the worse thing is that it was Apple choice: Thunderbolt!

Thunderbolt mix audio+video output and PCI-Express 4x tunneling. If you want to have a Thunderbolt-enabled Mac Pro (as all other Mac!), you need to be able to send audio, video and PCI-Express bus to a Thunderbolt connector. On a Mac Pro, you expect to have 3 Thunderbolt output at least.

The problem is that PCI-Express graphic card use all 16-lane available, and there’s no way to send them the 12 lane necessary to have 3 Thunderbolt port on the card. If you just decide to keep only 4 lane for the graphic card, you will seriously limit it’s performance-level, and anyway you will need a totally new design for few graphic card sold. And anyway there’s no Intel chipset that support to split PCI-Exress x16 into logically 4-lane + 12 lane!

It’s worse if you enable people to put 2 graphic cards on the Sandy-Bridge Mac Pro, a kinda architecture nightmare!

Why Apple doesn’t need Mac Pro

Apple don’t need Pro or Power-user anymore. Simply put, it’s that.

iPod then iPhone and iPad are promoting the Apple brand, and the change from “Apple Computer” to “Apple” reflected this simple fact. iOS devices are driving Mac sales, not the other way around, and they are consumer devices, we could even tell “appliance” for iPod or AppleTV.

Mac Pro have confidential market share, don’t generate so revenue for Apple, are hard to maintain, doesn’t really need Thunderbolt with their 4 hard-drive bays, are usually expanded with third-party parts without any licence for Apple (contrary of Thunderbolt peripherals), and with their generic Intel chipset are usually good base to develop Hackintosh distributions!!!

As XServe history demonstrated, Apple could cut a line whenever they want without warning, putting some IT professionnals and organizations in troubles. Mac Mini server or Mac Pro server wasn’t an option for hosting, they are just consumer computers in disguise, not redundant servers built with hosting facility in mind. No way!

What’s your options

I know YOU may need Mac Pro, for teir ability to have 4 fast hard-drive or even 4 SSD, that beat Thunderbolt storage in any way, especially with lower access latencies. The ability to put 1 or 2 fast graphic card, and drive 4 huge displays or more. To be able to be expanded to 96GB RAM, offering 24 simultaneous thread of professionnal software running.

Mac Mini is a toy compared to a Mac Pro, and the 4-core Mac Mini could not store as much data, have as much memory, drive 3 or 4 displays, etc. iMac is a great computer but thus could not compete in term of raw power, ram, storage, etc. They are not option compared to high-end Mac Pro, and could be compared to entry-level Mac Pro when you do not plan to extend it’s configuration!

If you are a pro that need Mac Pro, there’s probably no other options than continuing to buy actual Nehalem Mac Pro. Without any ability to have Thunderbolt (Intel and Apple promised they won’t be any Thunderbolt Expansion card, never, on the official presentation, at least a promise that was true!).

If you could go the Linux way there’s huge possibilities with PC platforms and pro Intel platforms, at worst you may consider Windows 7 64bits, but some of you may have programs that runs only on Mac OS X. This is problem.

The only way to have the equivalent of a Senday-Bridge Xeon-equipped Mac Pro might be to go the hackintosh way, but it’s a not the way professionnals wants to follow usually: they just want something that work and get the work done!

At this point, I could just invite you to wait a little, and be prepared to buy the latest Mac Pro, eventually trhough Apple’s refurb, because there might not be any future Mac Pro generation.

As for other Thunderbolt storage peripherals, this new interface using Thunderbolt is largely slower than native SATA, while costing 2X more!

It’s a desktop box, with it’s own power, with 2 Thunderbolt ports for linking, and 2 eSATA interface at 3Gbps, each one able to deliver up to 250MB/s with LaCie external eSATA hard-drive. LaCie stated that performance may vary with other external hard-drive, and as they have an extended history of briding their Mac controller or driver to limit bandwidth when connected to third-party storage peripherals, it’s possible that a non-LaCie eSATA hard-drive connected on the Thunderbolt-eSATA adapter could be real slow. Another explanation is that LaCie use a slow SATA 3Gbps like the one that impair performance of Thunderbolt Little Big Disk, even with 2 SSD inside?

Anyway it’s a great new for people owning the supported LaCie eSATA hard-drives, the other must wait until performance would have been checked.

PS: So it’s $467,95 for 2TB LaCie 2TB d2 Quadra connected in Thunderbolt on a Mac, and $219,95 for the same exact 2TB hard-drive connected natively on a  eSATA-equipped PC (the vast majority of model), alternative is LaCie 2TB Little Big Disk that is natively Thunderbolt but cost a mere $628,95 including cable! This is Thunderbolt tax!

Haswell will solve this problem using a new GPU architecture, labelled GTx, which not only will improve largely in raw GPU performance (probably 2X over Ivy Bridge and 5X over current Sandy Bridge), memory bandwidth, but will also integrate between 64MB 32MB and 128MB of dedicated memory, on the same packaging! Dubbed as Crystalwell by SemiAccurate, and presented as a framebuffer, I think it will be also able to cache textures or act as a graphic cache in a similar way to older nVidia TurboCache or ATI/AMD Hypermemory.

That will give Haswell an edge on GPU memory bandwidth, to support at least 5X acceleration compared to Sandy Bridge, and enable Retina Display to be offered with on-chip GPU, as well as correct gaming performance without Retina Display (or dividing resolution by 2X for gamers). Haswell will be a real hot platform!

The battery indicator hypothesis
Simply put, this is *NOT* a battery charge indicator, as Apple reported that it’s displaying 100% when the battery is under 100%. As a side effect, if you unplug your iPad when it reach 100% as indicated, you may gain between half-hour to a full hour of charging, since dependending on charger (Apple’s one, Mac USB, classical PC USB) there’s a huge difference in charge time.

The autonomy gauge hypothesis
As the iPad is nearly at 100% of the full charge of the battery, some may say that it’s at nearly 100% of it’s autonomy and it’s false.
If it was an autonomy indicator,m it should display variable informations depending on battery status, with and older iPad displaying maybe 80% or 60% at full charge, to reflect the loss of autonomy of an used battery with many usage cycles.

False toy gauge reality
It’s just a fake indicator, that helps Apple to pretend that iPad doesn’t take too much time to refuel it’s battery, and indicate a fake 100%, that doesn’t take into account battery status (age, number of cycle) and thus real world autonomy, nor doesn’t really indicate when the battery is fully charged.

What Apple should have done
When loading, Apple should have given an indicator of remaining charge time, to a nearly 100% (the fake 100% we actually see on iPad display), and charged, simply a charged status (power plug).
When used on it’s battery, instead of a percentage that is already false, an estimate of the autonomy of the iPad with it’s current remaining battery charge.
That’s most of us choose to display on our Mac, instead a percentage, a meaningfull and usefull information!

We will know how much time a nearly-full charge will take, we will be able to know how much time we could continue to use it with our current pattern of usage, that is much more usefull than a percentage. With remaining usage time, we will also be able to see how changing backlighting, 3G or Wifi setup could affect the autonomy, and thus takes the right decision on our own to extend autonomy and battery life!
But there’s one major inconvenient for Apple, that explain why they remain with a fake percentage: you will see your fully charged iPad have less and less autonomy when battery cycle count increase, and more facility to go to Apple to claim for a battery change! Or see how much autonomy you loose when switching from iPad 2 to new iPad!

And that’s probably why we all have only fake percentage displayed on iOS devices!