16GB RAM default on the new 15" Macbook Pro Retinas

(source: BBS.feng.com)


According to the various Mac Blogs and Rumors, the 15" Macbook Pro Retina is going 16GB as standard. I don't think I'll be uprading unless there is an option for 32GB RAM. Since I already have 16GB of RAM, I don't see a compelling reason to upgrade. I notice the NVIDIA GPU is now 2GB which will be handy.

I don't think it is a worthwhile upgrade to my 2.7GHZ, 16GB RAM, 760GB SSD build. It is still the best laptop I've owned and is still plenty fast.

However, I'm yearning for 32GB RAM which I have on all my workstation desktops.

16GB is bare-bone minimum when you run a lot of VMs. I can definitely feel the need for more RAM. 2GB of video RAM would be good at driving two 27" monitors. I can definitely feel some lag right now.

Storage wise I'm still good. I've only used 300GB of my 760GB. It is good to have 40 terabytes accessible via Thunderbolt so I've kept local storage to mostly scratch work.

I've thought about going back to Lenovo but I want stick to a Thinkpad over their consumer Yogas. A Thinkpad W540 is out of the question due to the mammoth size. And Linux's HiDPI isn't still as good as OSX. So for now, I'm going to stick to 15" Macbook Pro Retina.

OSX 10.9 Thunderbolt Bridging Follow-up. Three Way Bridge

A few post back, I broke the news about IP Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt bridging. This is a follow-up post. I decided to see if a multi-computer, multi Thunderbolt bridge was possible using just cables.

I finally installed Mavericks on my 27" iMac and decided to do a multiple Thunderbolt bridge tests.
Here is the set-up.

In short, "it WORKS!" It is really plug-n-play. In my initial trial, I assigned IPs. It is not necessary to manually assign IPs.

I connected a 2012 13" MacBook Pro, 2013 15" Macbook Pro Retina, 2012 27" iMac. Both the Retina   Macbook and iMac have dual Thunderbolt ports.

The Retina MBP acted as the hub for both the 13" and iMac. Once connected, all the machines can see each other. The 13" with it's single Thunderbolt connected to the 15" could see and access the iMac.


13" Macbook Pro

iMac

15" Retina

The 15" shows both my Thunderbolt ports active

Now for the tests.

On the 13" Macbook Pro, I could ping, mount and connect to my 27" iMac which was connected via the Retina 15".

As I mentioned above, I didn't need to assign any IP addresses. I called the machines up by their host names and IP address. So, for the 13", all I had to do was type in afp://169.254.216.89 or afp://iMac27.local and I was accessing the iMac.

Unfortunately, there is a small penalty loss when you go through another machine.

The first two iPerfs were the 13" connecting to the iMac.
5.24 Gbits/sec and 650 MB/sec.

When accessing the 15" Retina Macbook directly, iPerf jumped up to 7.16 Gbit/sec and 859 MB/sec.

I then pulled one of the cables off from the Macbook Retina and connected it to the iMac's second Thunderbolt port. Voila. It works. However, both the 13" and iMac's IP address re-assigned themselves. This was completely plug-n-play. I did not have to assign routes or anything to get the machines to see one another.

Still, these are impressive numbers no matter how you look at them. Now, this is definite proof a multi-user Thunderbolt IP network is viable.

Someone needs to make a Thunderbolt IP switch, hub, router ASAP! Lastly, Thunderbolt cables are dropping in price. I've gotten a few for under $25-30.

Edimax AC1200 USB 3.0 802.11ac Wi-Fi Dongle review for OS X

Do you have 802.11ac envy? I did and I cured it with a USB 3.0 dongle.  802.11ac is the next generation Wi-Fi and has been billed "Gigabit wireless" with speeds up to 500 Mbits/second or in short, around 62 MB/sec (theoretical). They claim it gets 867 Mbps (108 MB/sec) which is almost triple the 300 Mbps of 802.11n. However, in the real world, 500 Mbps is what you'll likely get.
The 802.11ac spec can be found on wikipedia.

Today, I am going to give you my short review of the Edimax AC1200. They claim it is the world's first USB 3.0  Wifi Dongle that supports 802.11AC. I don't know if that is true or not but they also noted they had OSX drivers so I decided to take it for a spin. It goes for $40 street price.

So if you are a USB 3.0 mac user who hasn't bought a new summer 2013 Haswell Macbook Air, this is the dongle for you.

I also recently upgraded to a TP-Link AC1750 (Archer C7) dual-band AC Wi-Fi Gigabit Router that supports the new 802.11AC standard. This would be a good test to see how the TP-Link router fares in "AC" mode.

First of all the build quality of the Edimax dongle is very cheap. I has a very flimsy build. Next, they did not supply a cap. This is something I don't want to throw in my backpack as I head out the door in the morning. Lastly, it is a rather bulky device. On either side of my Macbook Retina, it blocks either the HDMI or a Thunderbolt port. I figure this was designed more for stationary use than for mobile road warriors. The antenna flips our for reception but I didn't notice any gains with it open or closed.

Like many 3rd party Wi-Fi dongle for OSX, there is a separate application to control the Wi-Fi connection. It is not built into the OS and the OS merely sees it as another NIC. This basically means, you can't switch networks in the top menubar. Furthermore, in the past, most 3rd party Wi-Fi apps I've dealt with were buggy and problematic. The jury is still out on how the Edimax's implementation differs from others in the past. Time will tell if the drivers and apps will be continued to be fully supported.

As you can see below, I am running at 5GHZ channel and the Link speed is 867 Mbps (which is 802.11AC's spec)

The system profiler reports it as a USB 3.0 device that uses up the 5 Gb/sec bandwidth so everything looks good.

Now for the testing.

Connected to a standard Apple Airport (I believe it is a 2.4 GHZ 802.11g), I didn't see any real gains compared to the built in Wi-Fi on my 15 inch Macbook Pro Retina. I am running iperf to my Thinkpad which normally reports 112 MB/sec when connected to a gigabit switch.

I then took it home and tested it on my new TP-Link AC Wi-Fi router. I ran a few tests.

The first is in my basement of my 3 story house. This is where I would need the speed the most as it is farthest from Wi-Fi router. I ran two sets.

From the screenshot below, I ran the following: Edimax 802.11AC, the built in Macbook 802.11n Wifi, and the last is the Thunderbolt to Gigabit adapter.

The Edimax did so-so at 6.5 MB/sec. This was an improvement over internal which ran at 4.5 MB/second. Connected to a machine that is directly wired via CAT6 gigabit in the same basement room, the Thunderbolt gigabit dongle easily hits gigabit's theoretical ceiling at 112MB/sec.

It appears that 802.11AC suffers the same fate as 5GHZ 802.11n. Performance degrades when you are not in line-of-sight. I think I might be better off just getting a 802.11n 5GHZ repeater in the basement so all my portable devices benefit.

So,before returning this dongle, I took my Macbook Pro to the main floor where the router is and re-ran the test several times. I was able to hit over 50 MB/sec. Not quite "gigabit" speeds but clearly a strong showing. All devices will have some overhead and hitting 50 MB/sec is pretty impressive. The last 25 MB/sec reading was a test as I was on the stairs; walking down another floor. Impressive indeed.

Conclusion

Your results will definitely vary depending on many circumstances. You definitely need to re-invest in new routers that support 5GHZ 802.11AC. Using an old G/N router won't yield you any gains. Furthermore, 5GHZ vs 2.4GHZ has its pro and cons. 2.4GHZ is more heavily trafficked and congested but it does have better range. For example, on my third floor, it doesn't matter if I am running 2.4GHZ or 5GHZ. I don't know if I can recommend this product yet.

The jury is still out on reliability and long-term usage.  Customer reviews have been mixed. I'm personally used to wired Gigabit and where I need the speed the most (my basement), the dongle doesn't give me any significant gains for my uses. I'm impatient and when I need to copy large files over the network, I simply plug in wherever I have a wired port.



Links: Edimax Product page, Amazon Product page

Running ESXi5 as a VM guests inside a Macbook

I really didn't think this was possible - running a VM hosting another VM.

Yep. That is a few layers deep.

I was able to run VMware ESXi 5.0 Hypervisor server inside my Mac via VMware Fusion. Virtualized ESXi was able to host and run an Ubuntu LAMP server. I managed the ESXi server from a VM Windows XP. Under XP, I could easily load up and deploy my OVA provisioned guests in a virtual network.

Impressive.
If this is all greek to you, I am running a Virtual data-center off my Macbook. ESXi is an popular Hypervisor server that hosts VM (Virtual machines).  I can do all my development on a Mac platform and test my provisioning virtually. The VM runs fairly responsive due to the fast SSD and Thunderbolt.

A portable data-center and development environment right here folks! I am making use of that 2880x1800 resolution screen as you can see below!

From the loo no less.

5 minutes to clone a factory fresh mac

So I got myself a new Macbook Pro Retina 15". I cloned the factory image using Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode. It took less than 5 minutes to clone the entire factory new image. 

That is fast.That is more than fast. That is insanely fast.

Bootable Thunderbolt on OSX 10.8

I had to use an external Thunderbolt bootable mac drive for the past 2 weeks and the experience has been great.
If you ever booted off Firewire or USB 2.0, the experience was horrible. You often felt like you were using a 2004 Macbook with a 5400  4800 rpm hard drive. Even USB 3.0 operates fairs very poorly due to random reads/writes. Thunderbolt doesn't seem to have those lag issues and feels nearly native to me.

My early 2012 27" iMac went kaput so it went into service. Before it went in, I cloned the drive to a SSD. While the iMac was in the shop, I booted off the SSD via the Seagate (STAE121) Go-Flex Thunderbolt adapter. I simply plugged the drive into another iMac (and Macbook) and it just worked like usual. No need to install different drivers for different hardware or re-configure anything.

Booting off Thunderbolt is a dream. In fact, running off an external SSD was faster than booting off the normal internal 7200rpm hard drive. Mountain Lion boots in about 10 seconds off Thunderbolt.

Carbon Cloning (ghosting) a Mountain Lion OS with the full Adobe CS 5.5, MS Office, GIT, MySQL suite took less than 10 minutes. My working OS build was approximately 40GB in size so this is pretty fast. I did not suffer any sleep issues or drive disconnecting. The typical usage was 9-10 hours a day.
The only thing that was a slight concern was the Thunderbolt cables warming after extended use.

This is an ideal setup for someone who wants to run different versions of OS and Apps. For example, you can keep up to date with FCP X and have a fast bootable OS with just Final Cut 7 when you need it.

13" Retina MacBook Pro 2560x1600

So here I am working and watching the Apple keynote live event of the unveiling of the new Retina 13 MacBook on my 30" WQXGA screen.

I've been running 2560x1600 for over four years and it blows my mind that a 13" laptop has the same resolution as my (once) $2-3,000 monitors.

Just for reference, this is what you can fit on with a WQXGA display- Full page browser, a MySQL client, a text editor., a terminal console, a Firebug debugger, a File Manager, and a music player.

Another screenshot of WQXGA real estate. 

Macbook Pro USB 3.0 RAID ZERO with USB sticks

What happens when you try to stripe two USB 3.0 sticks together in a RAID 0 on a 2012 Macbook with USB 3.0 support?

I decided to find out to see if there is any tangible benefit gains.


Here, I have two Patriot Supersonic Xpress 32GB USB 3.0 sticks for my test. I used Disk Utility to make a stripe set and had the set formatted HFS+. I ran Black Magic Disk Speed Test to see the before and after differences.

Single USB stick benchmark.

Striped Zero RAID benchmark.

In short, you will get twice the speed in RAID 0. Pretty cool!

Newer Technology USB 3.0 to eSATA adapter

Here is a 2012 Macbook friendly accessory to stuff in your travel bag. A Newertech (Newer Technology) USB 3.0 to e-sata adapter. This device retails and sells for about $30. You can probably find other adapters cheaper from other brands but Newertech has a great reputation for Macintosh capabilities.

My only real gripe is the short USB cable with both A end piece connectors. You can't simply use a different USB cable if you want to.

The reason I got this cable is that many of the current/existing e-sata/usb 3.0 combo boxes are flaky with USB 3.0. I've looked at over a dozen different makes (Mediasonic, Sans Digital,etc) and models. I've read hundred pages of forums and reviews (Amazon/NewEgg) to know USB 3.0 raid enclosures are iffy at best. They drop connections, sleep causes issues, transfer speeds are problematic, there are chipset incompatibilities,etc. I have a few boxes and docks where my Macbook Pro's USB 3.0 port does not work. An example is the Voyager Q HDD dock.

I tried this cable on various e-sata devices and it works great. I get about 180 MB/s reads and 160 MB/s writes which is about correct. Most e-sata boxes in RAID or SSD top out at 200 MB/s. With some USB overhead, 180MB/s reads is pretty respectable. The only thing faster for a Macbook is Thunderbolt.

Overall, I am happy with this device.


A short summary for those interested:

• Plug-n-play operation. No drivers needed for OSX.
• Not bus powered. Does not support esata-p
• Respectable USB3/e-sata speeds.
• USB A to USB A end cable.
• Does not support port multiplier.

Macbook Pro and 16GB of RAM

I'm going to dispell some myths right now concerning the (non retina) MacBook Pro's maximum RAM upgrade. Apple only officially sells 8GB upgrades.

Since 2011, Sandy Bridge architecture allowed you to install up to 32GB depending on processor. Most of the processors had a max 16GB ram limit. It is supported by Intel's chipset.
Apple does not officially support it as well as many other manufactures. Since there are no dual 32Gb sticks, the most you can install is 16GB (2x 8GB sticks).
This holds true for the Ivy Bridge mid-2012 updates.

I have a mid 2012 i5-3210M MBP 13 running 16GB. The sticks are running DDR3 1600MHz (very fast RAM) and the total cost was $115. My other 16GB sticks running 1333 MHz can be as low as $80 discounted.

I have four or five Virtual Machines running concurrently without a sweat. With my M4 512GB SSD, starting Win8 preview and Win 7 with 4GB each is no problem.

Here are some picture proof. Apple may not officially support and sanction 16GB but it can run.

2012 Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro 13 short review

With the retina 15" Macbook Pro stealing the show, the best selling MacBook Pro 13 gets very little fanfare. In fact, there are not many reviews on the net for the new Ivy Bridge refresh. It isn't as exciting as newer laptops on the market and the resolution of 1280x800 is very dated with newer machines now sporting full HD. However, if you are a mac user, this machine is still a viable option for those who prefer the OS X operating system.

Frys recently advertised the 2.5ghz i5-3210M, 4GB Ram, 500GB 5400 rpm hard drive model for $999. This may have been a price mistake but nonetheless, I had Best Buy price matched it. I had about $900 in Best Buy gift certificates and $115 out of pocket, I got myself a new 2012 MBP 13. I already have extras SSD, extra 2.5 drives and memory lying around so I chose the MBP 13 over the Air due to expandability reasons. I now have MBP13 with dual drives (512GB SSD and 7200 rpm Seagate hybrid HDD in cd bay) and 16GB of RAM. No Air can match this. This will be my secondary Mac while I wait for a corporate issue Retina MBP 15 to arrive.

Here is my take on the new device. This machine is a nice welcome upgrade. I'm going to mostly cover expandability/upgrade and the new USB 3.0 performance.  This post might come in handy for those considering 3rd party upgrades for the Macbook Pros.

First of all, I want to comment that Apple has excellent packaging. Compared to my Dells and Thinkpads, no one comes close in terms of packaging. Opening the box, you get a very good first impression. Not that it matters for geeks like us but I did take note.

Compared to previous MBP 13, the only noticeable exterior change are the Thunderbolt port and the new USB 3.0. Otherwise, it looks exactly the same as the previous models.

And pictured below is the reason why I would get an MBP 13 over an comparable Air. Expandability.

Opening the interior, you can see the precision engineering Apple puts into its products. The interior is a fine piece of industrial design.  This corroborates what I've said earlier, Apple takes packaging very seriously and the quality shows. The interior is tight and I can see why Apple decided to go soldered ram/daughter card on the new Retina Macbook Pro. You can't get any smaller with off-the-shelf components.

I replaced the CD burner and place an SSD into the bay. You can get cheap adapters on ebay or use something like the OWC data-doubler pictured below. With every Macbook I've owned, I usually toss out the CD burner for a second drive.

I'm not going to go into CPU and graphics benchmarks because I'm not qualified to do so.With Google, you can probably find reviews of the i5-3210M and geek bench scores online. Coming from a Core Duo 2.5 (circa 2009), this machine is almost two times faster. 

Most important for me is disk I/O. Everything about it is better. SATA 6 all the way (even the CD bay is SATA 6), UHS-1 SD card reader, Thunderbolt, and USB 3.0. I'm going to be using this machine for Lightroom photos, minor final cut editing and managing my 500GB or so music library. I'm usually backing up and copying hundred of gigs worth of data so the fast I/O is important to me. 

Lets get started with my review.

I got a Crucial M4 512GB SSD as my OS drive. Street price is roughly $350 if you know where to look. You can't get this price and performance in any Apple upgrade. I also have a 7200 rpm HDD in the main drive.

Internal Storage Speeds.

The SSD produces an average 512 MB/s read and 250 MB/s writes. This is smoking fast.

Boot times takes less than 8 seconds. Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom starts up in less than 2 seconds. Cycling through 100 20MB Raw Image files is buttery smooth. Again, CPU processing doesn't matter for my needs but with fast I/O, you can clearly see the benefits. Couple with 16GB of RAM, I can now open 5-10 Gigabyte TIFF files with ease that even my old Mac Pro struggles with.

Now for the Seagate Hybrid 750 Momentus XT hard drive. This is a 7200 rpm Hybrid drive with a 32MB SSD cache. Retail is $179 but if you hang out on slick deals and discount forums, you can find them for $80 street price if you know where to look. If I didn't have a few SSDs lying around, I'd probably use this as my primary drive. It is probably overkill for my needs as it is mostly for storing music and videos. 

When you are used to SSD, HDD benchmarks aren't so impressive any more. Still, this clocks better than 80% of the users out there still using 5400/7200 rpm drives. It clocks in at 108 MB/s read and 104 MB/s writes. My old 2009 Macbook with a 7200 rpm drive and SATA (1 or 3) interface could only muster 80MB/s.

External Drive Speeds

Now for the external drive speed observations. How does USB 3 fare? Well, I decided to find out using a Crucial M4 128GB SSD w/ SATA 6. I've tested this drive and normally get 500MB/s reads when plugged in internally. I am also using another Seagate Momentus HDD for the external HDD comparison. All the devices will be connected via Go Flex SATA controller adapters.

Seagate Go Flex drives comes with a variety of SATA adapters including esata and pricey Thunderbolt. I have a few of their adapters - USB2, USB3, and FireWire800.

It is not going to be an accurate comparison because each controller have different characteristics. It is also hard to know which brand of USB2/USB3 controller is the fastest. However, I think this is going to be fair comparison since all the controllers are made by Seagate. I will do a review of the Seagate Go Flex devices in another post. If I can pony up the money, I will also follow up with a Thunderbolt adapter review. After reading many reviews on the Thunderbolt to SSD benchmarks and comparing with my own USB3 benchmarks, I may just stick with USB 3.

Here it is in action. 

USB 3.0

I have to say, I was a big fan of Firewire 800 for years. Before eSata, I only used Firewire 800 due to its inherit advantages over USB 2.0. With the arrival of Thunderbolt, I was hoping manufactures would come up with Thunderbolt docks and enclosures. That hasn't happen yet. USB 3.0 is the most economical external I/O connection. In my general use, it is by far faster than USB 2 and Firewire.

From the screen grabs below, we have 204.4 MB/s read and 152 MB/s reads. This is fast but not as fast as native SATA 6. You also have to remember this is USB 3 connected to a fast SSD. 

USB 3 to HDD won't get these speeds. Also, USB 3 to HDD is very close to Firewire 800 to HDD that I think it is a toss up. So if you are using a portable drive enclosure, your usage may vary.

Here is is with a HDD. 90MB/s and 83MB/s write and reads.

Firewire 800

As you can see in the following screenshot, there is no real benefit to connect a SSD to a Firewire 800 controller or enclosure. You will get the same speed as you would connecting Firewire 800 to a 7200 rpm hard drive.

73-80 MB/s read is typical of what you get from Firewire 800. I've seen  Firewire 800 go up to 80-90 on some high-end controllers but I wanted to stick to using Seagate GoFlex adapters for these tests. Using different controllers, you can get the same speed as the USB 3.0 to HDD I pictured above.

USB 2.0

Like Firewire 800, there is no advantage to connecting a SSD to USB 2.0

38 MB/s read and write is on the very high end of USB 2.0's bandwidth threshold.

So what do these benchmarks tell us?

For mac users, USB 3.0 is a very cost effective and fast I/O. Thunderbolt's advantage that I've seen only comes when you have fast RAID setups. The SSD-Thunderbolt reviews I've seen on the net are in the high 200 MB/s. ESATA still rules for external I/O. Unfortunately, there is no ESATA on macs and it is harder to come by even on PC. I've even had problems with ESATA on my Thinkpad with drop-off and connectivity issues.

If you are using HDD (standard platter based hard drives), Firewire 800 is still a good platform. If you are like me, I would not rush to dump your existing legacy Firewire 800 for new USB 3.0 drives yet. Those docks, enclosures are still good for standard platter drives.

About these benchmarks, I have the luxury of having 4-5 fast SATA 6 SSDs lying around and it is great to see 200+ MB/s speeds. However, for the majority of people, HDD is still a way more cost effective solution. You can pick up 1TB drives for $80 versus $120 for 128GB SSD.

Going forward, I will be investing in USB 3.0 for future proofing.

UHS1 SD Card Reader

Now for the SD card reader. As most photographers know, built in SD card readers on laptops are woefully slow. Most people I know get expresscard/PCMCIA adapters to get a fast SDcard reader. I had to do the same thing for my Thinkpad T420 because the the SDcard reader was so slow.

The MacBook Pro since 2011 now have UHS-1 (Ultra High Speed) readers. If you have a UHS1 card, expect a pleasant surprise. Using a SanDisk Extreme 45 (rated at 45MB/s), I got the rated speed of 45MB/s of my card. I wish I had a 90MB card to compare but I don't.

As you can see by the screen grab, it reads as fast as the card and you don't need to invest $30-40 for a new high speed reader. It is faster than many USB 2/USB 3 sd card readers.

As for the writes, I assume that is the limitation of the card or formatting of the card as FAT32 which causes problems for mac based disk benchmarks. Furthermore, I hardly ever write to SD as I am usually reading files that have been written by my camera.

In conclusion, the MackBook Pro 13" Mid 2012 Ivy Bridge is a great machine. The I/O improvements are very tangible for a mac users who want a portable lower price macbook. The expandability of this machine is more attractive to me than the portability form factor of ultrabooks or Airs. 16GB RAM is my minimum requirements and this book is capable of it. The only drawback is the 1280x800 screen resolution. It is very antiquated. I don't mind so much because I will mostly be docked into a WQHD Cinema  Display 90% of the time.  As I said before in another post, anything is better than 1336x768. 768 resolution doesn't cut it for me.

Now, I can't wait for my Retina MBP 15 to arrive to compare this with.

Retina MacBook QUAD-head 14 million pixel display

I nearly had a nerdgasm when I saw this picture. Impressive. The Macbook Pro Retina is pushing about 14 million pixels right there. All of those monitors are greater than 1080p resolution.