Cutting Through SATA Naming Confusion

I’ve been suffering from Product Confusion Fatigue (PCF). It happens a lot in the world of computing. You want to upgrade something simple like a hard drive. Instead of just looking for the best price, you find a half-dozen different product descriptions – and now you don’t know which one is compatible with your computer.

17″ MacBook Pro (Late 2006)

On 2006.10.24, Apple moved the MacBook Pro line to Intel’s newer Core 2 Duo CPU, claiming “up to 39% faster” performance than the model it replaced. Part of that comes from the more efficient CPU, and part from an 8% faster CPU.

15″ MacBook Pro (Late 2006)

On 2006.10.24, Apple moved the MacBook Pro line to Intel’s newer Core 2 Duo CPU, claiming “up to 39% faster” performance than the model it replaced. Part of that comes from the more efficient CPU, and part from an 8% faster CPU.

iMac (Late 2006)

Industry watchers had been anticipating Apple moving the iMac to Intel’s Core 2 Duo processor, which is “up to 50% more powerful” (according to Apple) than the Core Duo used in the Early 2006 iMac. As if that wasn’t enough, Apple added the biggest iMac to date to the line, a whopping 24″ model with […]

17″ iMac (Mid 2006)

Apple surprised a lot of people by introducing a scaled back version of the 17″ iMac Core Duo in July 2006. To shave US$400 from the 17″ Early 2006 iMac’s retail price for the education market, Apple replaced the SuperDrive with a 24x Combo drive, used an 80 GB hard drive instead of 160, and relied […]

17″ MacBook Pro (Early 2006)

In an unusual Monday product announcement (Apple usually reveals new products on Tuesday), Apple introduced the 17″ MacBook Pro (MBP) with a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo CPU. It’s the first MacBook to support FireWire 800, and it also has a dual-layer SuperDrive (vs. single-layer in the 15″ MacBook Pro).

15″ MacBook Pro (Early 2006)

To the pleasant surprise of the Mac community, Apple began shipping the MacBook Pro (MBP) the week of 2006.02.14 – and with faster CPUs than originally announced. The US$1,999 MBP ships with a 1.83 GHz CPU instead of 1.67 GHz, and the US$2,499 MBP has a 2.0 GHz CPU instead of 1.83 GHz.

iMac G5 (iSight)

Innovation has come back to the iMac. Just as the original iMac introduced USB to the Macintosh and eliminated the floppy drive, the October 2005 iMac G5 introduces the PCI-Express bus for video, DDR2 memory, and an integrated iSight webcam while eliminating the internal modem. Apple took the popular iMac G5, built in iSight, made […]

iMac G5 (2004)

Where did the computer go? It’s behind the flat panel display in the iMac G5! And the mouse and keyboard are available as wireless models with Bluetooth (which remains optional and can only be installed at the factory) – that means less cable clutter than most users are used to. Not just smaller and lighter, […]