[stoppingdown]

If the lens "is" de-centered return it for another. 

 

 

 

I should have run more tests earlier... The lens was bought at the beginning of 2015 and it's out of warranty. I'll try to contact the assistance and understand what they can do and how much will it cost... But it will be scheduled for 2017: a week ago my MacBook Pro broke and I had to buy a new one 1-2 years earlier than expected... 3000€ :wacko:  + VAT that have killed the photo budget for quite a long time (and bye bye to the Sony a6300 for a while). 

[JJ_SO]

I should have run more tests earlier... The lens was bought at the beginning of 2015 and it's out of warranty. I'll try to contact the assistance and understand what they can do and how much will it cost... But it will be scheduled for 2017: a week ago my MacBook Pro broke and I had to buy a new one 1-2 years earlier than expected... 3000€ :wacko:  + VAT that have killed the photo budget for quite a long time (and bye bye to the Sony a6300 for a while). 

 

Bummer!

 

You know there are also refurbished MBPs in the Apple store? Also, it can be expected there will be new MBPs in autumn (with slightly brushed up specs, I don't expect spectacular news). So maybe and hopefully you can push the price a little bit down.

 

Oh, just saw: "I had to buy a new one", so it's already done?

[stoppingdown]

This is, in short, the story. My current MBP was bought at the very beginning of 2013 and it was a late-2011 model - the last one before the "retina" models. It was deliberate: first, because it made me save quite a few money; second, because I didn't like the fact that the 2012 models didn't allow to replace parts. 

 

It was good for my needs, but unfortunately it was plagued by a massive hw failure, that happened to many: the discrete graphic card soldering, with time, tends to fail. It already costed me 600€ for repairs. Fortunately, some people menaced a class action in the USA so Apple reckoned its fault and I got refunded. After a few months, the replaced mother boards failed again in the same way; fortunately the repair was under warranty and I spent nothing. But of course it was twice a big annoyance for my business. Even though I still have the previous 2008 MBP, which is kept as an exact clone of the primary, and that I can switch in every moment, the problem is that the backup is painfully slow, mostly because of disk encryption, so it is a really emergency backup - I mean, I can work, but efficiency dramatically drops. I can tolerate a laptop failure as a rare event, not so frequent as the problem happens.

 

 

The scheduled replacement for my MBP was at the beginning of 2017 and two weeks ago I started looking around. I first concluded that it was not meaningful to spend 3000€ for the newest model, and I probably could live up to the beginning of 2018 without big hassles. In the meantime I could eventually look at special offers, refurbished stuff, or eventually buy a not-so-hot model as in the past and save money.

 

The past Sunday, the day before leaving for the holidays, the hardware failure happened for the third time; two months after the expiration of the warranty of the latest repair. So this time I'd have spent 600€ without refund; to have a repair that, clearly, is not reliable. Furthermore, in the countryside where I am now, there's no trusted repair shop as at home; and while I'm officially in vacation for four weeks, I've still got a number of assignments to do, that can't be practically done with the backup laptop.

 

It happened in the worse moment ever. The only feasible solution was to immediately buy a replacement (it will be delivered tomorrow). I also searched first for refurbished models etc..., but this approach fails if you're in a hurry, because they are not always available. Furthermore, I need the version with 1TB of SSD, and that's not easy to find (I mean refurbished, used, etc...).

[Brightcolours]

It is easy to upgrade the Macbook Pro with a 1Tb SSD, but not to do that on short notice (parts need to be ordered).

[davidmanze]

I should have run more tests earlier... The lens was bought at the beginning of 2015 and it's out of warranty. I'll try to contact the assistance and understand what they can do and how much will it cost... But it will be scheduled for 2017: a week ago my MacBook Pro broke and I had to buy a new one 1-2 years earlier than expected... 3000€ :wacko:  + VAT that have killed the photo budget for quite a long time (and bye bye to the Sony a6300 for a while). 

Ouch, the agony!  May the Lord have mercy upon your wallet!   

[stoppingdown]

It is easy to upgrade the Macbook Pro with a 1Tb SSD, but not to do that on short notice (parts need to be ordered).

 

True. But, AFAIK: the cost of the replacement 1TB is more or less the same money you save by ordering a model with a less capable SSD. And, most important, you invalidate the warranty... I did in the past with my oldest model, but it's not something I'd like to do nowadays at day 1, with my previous experience of broken things...

 

It is an interesting option that can be considered in future, when the warranty will be over, in case 2TB replacements appear.

 

Anyway, after several hours of disk restore, I'm with the new MBP. This morning I'm going to calibrate/profile the display and then I should be fine...

[JJ_SO]

There's already a 4 GB SSD for 1400 €, I read last week.

 

This ghost of "loosing the warranty" is one of manufacturers best beloved technique to cook their customers and make them responsible for failures which are cause by poor design or manufacturing.

 

It's not entirely correct, even if there are seals: If a replacement of the HD is done properly by you or a service institution, that can not be made responsible for the failure of a motherboard. Within the first half year the manufacturer has to prove it as your fault. After that, but within the first two years you have to prove that the failure was there from the moment you bought the device. That's customer protection law in Germany and I think, in EU as well, but with the latter I'm not sure.

[stoppingdown]

 

This ghost of "loosing the warranty" is one of manufacturers best beloved technique to cook their customers and make them responsible for failures which are cause by poor design or manufacturing.

 

It's not entirely correct, even if there are seals: If a replacement of the HD is done properly by you or a service institution, that can not be made responsible for the failure of a motherboard. Within the first half year the manufacturer has to prove it as your fault. After that, but within the first two years you have to prove that the failure was there from the moment you bought the device. That's customer protection law in Germany and I think, in EU as well, but with the latter I'm not sure.

 

You're right, but they rule. For instance, consider the replacement of the optical drive in older models with the Optibay for mounting a SDD/HDD. I did it myself, as many, when the warranty was expired. AFAIK, after reading some posts in users' groups, some repair shops "tolerated" this, after inspecting the quality of the job, and didn't consider it voiding the warranty. Others did.

 

<p style="font-size:12px;background-color:rgb(247,247,247);"> 

<p style="font-size:12px;background-color:rgb(247,247,247);">There's already a 4 GB SSD for 1400 €, I read last week.

 
 

 
I suppose it's the Samsung one, SATA bus. Unfortunately, Apple uses SSDs with the PCIe bus (well, this has a reason, the form factor and it's much faster (*)) - as Brightcolours mentioned, they can be found but only at specific dealers; they are much more expensive, and I'm not aware of pieces larger than 1TB at the moment.
 
(*) One might wonder what's the purpose of all that disk speed in a laptop. I mean, it's a "wow" thing when you run the typical lab benchmark, such as copying a 4GB file to /dev/null. But in the real world? There must be an application which processes data at that speed, and the most powerful MBP - the one I've bought - can't do that e.g. with Lightroom batch processing. When generating 1:1 previews or exporting JPEGs are the heaviest operations I do and I see that the bottleneck is the CPU. The SSD is accessed at speeds much, much slower than the maximum available.
 
My little tool to compute fingerprints of photo files to verify their integrity is actually much faster now - still it doesn't reach the maximum I/O speed, but I could probably upgrade it - but it's not something worth the extra costs...
 
Perhaps it's meaningful for video makers.

[JJ_SO]

First thought: Is LR supporting multithread processing for preview-generating?

 

Btw., I don't do 1:1 previews on Aperture. Preview size is limited to 2560 pixel (7360 would be the 1:1 output of  D810) and so far this was sufficient. Except for one photobook-manufacturer (Fujifilm) who set up his sofwtare to use the preview JPGs instead of 1:1 JPGs. They had to print that book twice.

 

Second thought: Writing speeds of SSD variy more than read-speeds, but this is no news for you.

[stoppingdown]

LR supports multithread processing, at least up to a certain point: I see that most of the CPUs are engaged, even though far less than 100%. I suppose it's deliberate, to let the computer be responsive. In any case, projecting the CPU engagement at 100%, the related I/O figure is still far below the top speed of the SSD.

 

I don't use 1:1 previews all the time: only the first time I work on a batch, because I do a lot of pruning among similar shots, and it's much faster to have all the previews pre-computed (when I do something else) and then going quickly through the comparisons. After this phase, I delete them.

 

The same considerations about speed hold true, just changing numbers a bit, for writing.