[Updated] Did Apple Limit the SATA Bus to 1.5 Gbits/s in New MacBook Pro to Save Power?

A topic on Macrumors forum has been attracting a lot of interest. It is reported that the SATA bus is limited to 1.5 Gbits/s instead of 3.0 GBits/s normally for SATA II specifications, and on the previous MacBook Pro Unibody models.

Many hypotheses have been expressed to understand why the bandwidth has been divided by 2, however we do not find any of those valuable. It might also be a bug or an on purpose choice made by Apple to save power and extend battery life. So, with the new MBP, the SATA bandwidth is limited to 130 MB/s according to several tests. In other words, it does not make sense to invest in a ultra-fast SSD delivering 200 MB/s or more in reading/writing speed on such MBP.