Yeah, yeah. I remember when 16k of RAM was hot stuff and the amount of storage you had was limited only to the length of your cassette. Good times.
But my MacBook only has 256g SSD and, well, that got eaten up rather quick.
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Huh? I don’t use chrome but there’s no way it’s so memory-hungry. And if it really is it’s perhaps time to ditch it.
I have a i3 4GB laptop and run Firefox with 20+ tabs, it consumes about 70% memory.
Firefox consumes dramatically less memory, but it’s also slower. Much like any hardware acceleration, that’s the give/take.
It’s the same concept as streaming as a server – transcoding with hardware acceleration is better, but uses a lot of juice.
There’s an option within Chrome to eat less memory (to make the memory mgmt more like FireFox), but I’d rather take the speed if I can afford the memory ;D
PS, @Fei-Fan yea the Razer Blade Pro is one I looked at, too. During my research, I found that the skinnier rigs all have heat issues! Be careful 
you want it a little thick to have room for proper exhaust, if you plan to use it for anything intense like Unity or Witcher 3. Any 3D gaming or intense application processing, really. This MSI one, for example, is about 4.8lbs – anything less than about 4.5 lbs seems to have heat issues, esp below 4. Again, if aiming to use high-performance.
The Acer Predator Helios seems like a decent one with enough heat dissipation, too~ cheaper, from what I can see. Well, $1k in USA and $1500 in Taipei ;p but should come with an epic warranty.
Just a heads up ;D
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I got my friend great savings by buying his laptop on eBay. The usually hated global shipping program was a bonus in this case: the shipping fees weren’t horrendous, they included customs and duties (shipped by FedEx) and the thing was fully insured. Got a much better laptop than the Taiwan specced model and it was several hundred US dollars cheaper.
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The Surface pro is an anomaly. It’s the only laptop I’ve found consistently more expensive in North America than in Taiwan. My wife got hers with decent specs and RAM during a sale (yeah, in Taiwan - I was surprised as well) in which they also gave her the keyboard and a nice mouse all for free. Worked out really well.
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I’m wondering how to handle this with an iMac I’ll be buying soon. Almost definitely I won’t take the 1TB Fusion Drive. The 500GB SSD is affordable. I shouldn’t shell out for the 1000TB SSD, but I can. And I also have to factor in the two 4TB externals I’d probably have to buy if I went with the 500GB SSD. Right now my internal 1TB hard drive is 80% full, with music and photos on that internal drive, and movies/TV shows on a 2TB external drive that’s about 75% full.
To be on-topic: aren’t Apple laptops “reasonably” priced here? Still pricy, of course, but last I checked their prices were roughly on par with what they’d be in North America.
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If you do some PS/Illustrator design and some writing, then a 256G drive will be fine. But, if you use say, Logic which has libraries that can easily occupy a lot of real estate on the storage drive, or do modeling or CAD, those programs and files can also take up space. Not to mention iTunes and movies. Oh, FinalCut can leave you with some serious space issues. External drives are OK for project files, but Apples is making it more and more difficult to integrate libraries from external sources.
Comparing Apple Store online prices, MacBooks are about NT$6000 more than the US. (at least the 15" 512G 2.9GHz base model)
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This is my big worry. Documents and system files and applications will easily fit on 500GB, but I don’t think I could do that with the Photos library as well, and I’m not sure how well Photos will work if the library is on an external drive. (Stupid smartphone era, come home from a wedding banquet with 200 photos and ten videos on my wife’s phone, no wonder the library’s so inflated 
)
The current top iMac: NT$72,900 in Taiwan; US$2,299, equivalent NT$69,000, in USA. About NT$4,000 / 6% difference, which is OK but not great. (Yay for the education discount I get!)
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I was in the Apple retailer at Neo 19 looking at a new iPad last year. I told the staff I was going to USA soon and that maybe I should buy it there. They smiled and said yes it’s a lot cheaper in USA.
Definitely not working on commission in that store.
256G SSD works well for me. Photos library is on an external as was iTunes, I use iTunes Match so I no longer connect that drive. It depends on how you organize your work files, I only keep the projects that I am working on currently on the local drive, the rest gets archived on an external and our NAS. Selective syncing with cloud services is a decent strategy too.
I think you could of got a gtx 1070 laptop for 60k lol
You gusy got me really worried. Computer in Taiwan are more expensive than in the ol country so when I go home I take one or two as needed by the family. Alas, it would be nice to save but I don’t think they sel the latest models at the airport.
Mmm, maybe because it has practically no storage per se? I love it, but that was what prevented me from buying it last time it was on that special sale. Am I missing something?
And seriously, I do not want to pay 60k for something I use to translate, DL soap operas and do Supernatural memes.
It’s all about the hybrid drives, man. They’re really lightweight now.
Get a 256gb SSD (store essentials + OS + fav apps here), then +1tb or 2tb hybrid. Weighs more? Yes, but BARELY, in this day and age. Make sure your hybrid drive is 7200rpm, or it’s worthless. Many won’t show RPM and it’s like 5k
Uh thanks.
We got the 256GB SSD (other specs were 8GB and i5 processor).
Storage isn’t really an issue - it has a microSD card reader in the back of the device, and supports up to 128GB cards. You can basically expand the storage as much as you need, with cheap or pricey cards as you wish.
And it didn’t cost us 60k. IIRC it was NT$36k (including the keyboard and a wireless folding mouse) plus we went for the three year insurance plan for NT$4000 extra.
Hey you seem to know about current SD card trends. How fast are SD cards these days compared to non SSD drives?
Someone else might want to chip in here, but your hard disk will still be faster than the micro SD card, but not by much if you’ve bought a modern card and it’s using a fast i/o interface.
I don’t think you’ll notice your data is sitting on a micro SD card instead of the hard drive as long as you’re not running the OS from the card.
Of course, both of them are much slower than an SSD.
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Hehe, make sure the specs match the price! All of the places that sell them are NOT “Official Resellers”, they are curiously worded “Premium” resellers (not official).
The underlying technology is the same for all SD cards and SSDs (except for Intel Optane), and that’s NAND flash memory. The speed difference mainly stems from the I/O interfaces like spaint mentioned.
High speed and a large storage space is two contradictory attributes on NAND flash. The larger your SSD is usually means that it uses TLC technology, where instead of each NAND cell storing one bit of data, now it stores 3. The cell’s physical capability is the same, meaning that the amount of electrons a cell can store is the same.
When 1 bit of data is stored in a cell, you only need to divide the voltage threshold window by 2, and be able to tell whether this cell represents 1 or 0. Now the same voltage threshold wonder needs to be divided into 8 tiny sections, to represent 3 bits (2^3=8).
Think of it like this. You have a black box, and you can only count how many pebbles is in it by sticking your hand into it for 1 second without looking at it. If you just need to tell if there’s more than 1 pebbles in the bag, it’s pretty easy. If now you are asked to tell if the box contains exactly 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or more than 8 pebbles within 1 second, suddenly it’s not so easy.
NAND flash isn’t actually very good at accurately storing an exact amount of electrons or knowing how many’s in a cell. So it relays on ECC codes to correct the output whenever NAND gets it wrong. It would also need to write slowly and carefully so it doesn’t accidentally storage too many electrons in a cell, because to take electrons out (erase) is even slower.
So the larger your SSD is, the slower it actually is. To make it faster, the SSD would need tons of DRAM to act as cache. Even if that takes care of the speed issue (although introduces stability issues), storing more data in 1 cell also means you would need more writes to a device when you change some parts of the data. This write amplification wears out your NAND cells faster, and each NAND cell has an endurance limit usually within 10K erase cycles. Once the endurance limit is reached, the SSD stops working for you. The larger your SSD appears, the faster you wear it out by writing to it.
One more added bonus… NAND isn’t actually great at holding on to those electrons stored its cells either. Traditionally companies aim to provide at least a full 10 year retention period. However, technology “advancement” in this business means the cells you are getting holds less electrons and for a shorter period of time. If you add TLC technology on top of that, your data stored on the device slowly sips out from the SSD even faster.
Going back to the box metaphor, but replace pebbles with ice cubes, and the box isn’t a freezer. You have to guess how many ice cubes were in the box 10 minutes after the ice cubes were put in it. That’s what retention is like on a TLC NAND SSD.
I guess I just want to say… don’t put vital information on your SSD and expect it to still be there after 6 or 7 years.
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