15″ MacBook Pro 2011 shipped in May 2011:
Kevin’s 15″ Macbook Pro that shipped in March 2011:
Last week our in house hardware guru Chris mentioned that he had read that some of the 2011 MacBook Pros were shipping with 6Gbps optical drive connector while some only shipped with 3Gbps. We can now confirm this as poor Kevin has a lowly 3Gbps connection on his two month old 15″. I just unboxed an entry level 15″ that has the 6Gbps connection. What does this mean for most people? Absolutely nothing. What does this mean for the few that want to install an SSD into their optical bay? Pure SATA III speed demon goodness. So you could essentially install two 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSDs then RAID them together and have nearly 480GBs for about $800 less than a 480GB drive.