SSDs and the death of 'save'

The 2011 MacBook Pro 15". Photo / Apple Inc

On the eve of the release of the second generation of iPad, it's interesting to look at the possibilities that new technology may bring to the next Mac OS and, more generally, to the way we all use our computers.

The most significant hardware that's changing things, to my mind, is Flash Memory. This is like RAM except RAM doesn't retain data when its power goes off.

Flash does, and it's what allowed iPods to move on from hard drives, and what led to the revolution posited by the iPhone (and other smart phones), iPad and iPod touch. Not just a revolution in speedy storage, but in design - Flash has also allowed for much slimmer, more robust devices.

Putting a Solid State Drive (SSD) into a Mac seems to break all reasonable speed barriers - the speedup is frightening. SSD breaks the bottleneck of CPU progress.

While CPUs only speed up incrementally slowly every few months, the only real solution for increasing processor power comes from putting multiple cores on the same chip.

Multicore processing helps make up for the dearth of significant leaps in CPU speeds, a principle Apple demonstrated last week by putting four-core CPUs in the latest MacBook Pro 15- and 17-inch laptops.

More cores equals better performance, sure, but nothing like what happens when your OS is running from an SSD instead of a clunky hard drive.

Every time you 'open' a file on a hard drive, the read-write head seeks out the data, feeds it through the CPU (crudely speaking), puts it into RAM and displays it on your screen for you to work on.

Since an SSD is solid state, access is way faster. It just needs current. It's smaller, much lighter, requires way less (if any) cooling, and it has no moving parts, unlike the round platter of a hard drive, which is typically spinning at 5400rpm in a laptop (and usually 7200rpm in a desktop) as you work.

An SSD needs no seeking read/write head, so there's no danger of a sudden jolt making the head contact the platter, which can result in data loss and/or head damage on HDs, which can be fatal to your files. This is particularly a factor in laptops since they're carted around a lot (seriously, stop carrying your MacBook around with the lid open while running a video! Ouch!).

And while MacBooks and MacBook Pros have the capacity to park the hard drive's head safely before it hits the deck if you drop it, do you trust that? Do you want to test it?

I don't.

An SSD, by comparison, is relatively shock proof, so it doesn't require a heavy cradle and shock-mounts. It's not subject to data-wiping magnetic fields the way a hard drive is, either.

Besides, hard drives seem to have almost reached a development plateau themselves as far as speed and capacity goes.

But the biggest advantage, as regards working with software, is that raw SSD speed. The reason a lowly-specced MacBook Air feels snappy is solely due to that SSD technology, and when it becomes to mainstream storage in other Macs, everything is set to change. For one thing, many of the design constraints imposed by hard drives on Mac hardware evaporate.

Prices are coming down, but you'd have to be pretty well heeled to swap your current hard drive for the same capacity SSD. But soon, economies of scale will assert themselves.

But the main thing is, SSD allows Apple to go further with something it's been working on for a few years: the death of Save.

This is already the case in the iPad. As engineer Michael Lopp put it, "With the iPad, there's no Save dialogue ... and for you and I, that's weird, but let's get to the basics there. Why is it even called 'Save'? Because operating systems used to be crap. They used to crash all the time. You needed to 'save' your file. The whole file system concept is left over engineering design from 20 years ago, when we were all still figuring it all out."

And part of all that, apart from buggy or overstressed Mac and PC systems, was slow hard drive access.

For several years already, Apple has been quietly dispensing with Save commands even on hard drive-based operating systems. For example, iPhoto does not have Save, nor does Aperture, and nor does the latest iMovie. Do something, and the file 'saves' itself in a split second. You don't even notice.

This might make Mac vets queasy, but out there in the real world, most people don't appear to notice.

This is partly why functions that used to be solely confined to Apple's Finder have migrated into the applications. iPhoto has to be open for you to easily find and work on an image, as with Aperture. iMovie is the same.

Meanwhile, applications like GarageBand, Numbers, Pages and Keynote pop up template and version browsers when you first open them, to help you find the files. This all pretty much bypasses OS X's Finder, which didn't used to be possible, or even imaginable.

When you choose 'Open' inside an application, the reveal of where that file might be in the Open dialogue is turned off by default - you have to press a little triangle to open its full capabilities up and show you the full-on, old-school Finder structure.

Even Adobe has been moving this way, putting Bridge on everything it installs.

Bridge allows access to files commonly able to be opened across the CS apps, like Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, plus access to common templates and toolsets and to resources Adobe hosts for its users online.

(In my experience, few people actually uses Bridge, despite Adobe's protestations to the contrary. Maybe this will all change as we get used to the concept, but currently Creative Suite users tend to be among the more experienced computer users - so they're used to doing things the traditional way.)

Part of the attraction of iDevices is the broad-stroke simplicity of the OS - swipe, touch directly and get an instant result. But there's very little you can do behind this interface to control what's going on.

There are a couple of things - tailoring Settings and basic multi-tasking. That said, I am still shocked by how many users still don't know to double-click the Home button trick to flick through open apps along a strip that appears at bottom. More importantly, holding your finger on one until it jiggles gives you a minus sign - touch it to quit.

Since iDevices 'remember' what was open when between shut-downs and start-ups, I meet people complaining of shortened battery life: one guy had 70+ apps running on an iPod touch, including pretty heavy-duty games.

But even this factor will become increasingly irrelevant as iDevices speed up.

But there's still a difference between the iOS system iDevices use and systems on Macs, even though there are visual similarities. And there are differences on Macs themselves, for that matter. A difference between 'normal' system-use and that of pro Mac users.

But exactly what Lion will bring, we are getting more and more hints from the developer builds.

As to the complete death of Save, we'll have to see.

But it's coming.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com