A little over a week ago, Saturday June 13th to be exact, I reported on a performance bottleneck in the new 13-inch MacBook Pro. According to many owners of the new notebook, the SATA interface to the internal hard drive was reporting a maximum speed of 1.5 Gbps, which is half the speed rate of the SATA interface used in the 17-inch MacBook Pro or even the white MacBook.
Courtesy of Apple
It was later determined that the new 15-inch MacBook Pro suffers from the same bottleneck. This makes sense, since both the 13- and 15-inch models use the same new motherboard, which includes the SD memory slot addition. Some feared the new design uses an older SATA interface chipset, while others hoped it was just a software driver problem that would be easy to correct.
After initially keeping mum about the problem, Apple stepped forward today to announce a MacBook Pro firmware update that returns the new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros to the expected SATA II specification of 3 Gbps.
Owners of the new MacBook Pro 13 and 15-inch models are encouraged to download and install the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7.