15-Inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar Has Non-Removable SSD | Hacker News Reader

15-Inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar Has Non-Removable SSD

macrumors.com

14 pointsshortformblog14 comments

Every new piece of information I learn about the new Macs - whether the Macbook Pro these past weeks or the Mac Pro desktop a few years ago - is all along this trend. It's a trend that lost me as a customer, having owned a mini, the Mac Pro desktop, and two Airs.

But what do I matter? People love these new things.

Good thing that Apple is _very_ concerned about environment and the reduction of the electronics waste...

I hear the sarcasm. But I wonder what the total environmental cost of the connectors and separate manufacturing is, for a replaceable part that is rarely (I'm guessing+) replaced?

+No need to tell me you replaced yours. So did I. I still bet >90% of units are not replaced.

I have no idea if there ever was an env. study that show one way is more friendly than another, but having to replace your computer just because you don't have enough space anymore, it's a bit crazy and it just produces waste, one way or another.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Touch+Ba...

> it just produces waste, one way or another.

It does, but it might be the least wasteful way to do it.

Manufacturing a modular machine is more costly than a single integrated board. If almost nobody exploits the modularity then all those connectors are wasted. A few million unneeded connectors traded off against a few hundred upgraded laptops is not a good deal.

I like upgradability, but most people don't care, and the economics and environmental impact are dominated by most people.

So if the SSD breaks I can throw away my >2.5k$ Laptop? Wonderful.

MacBooks have long been tending towards disposable computers. That's why Apple have been working hard to make them recyclable...

Still, Apple targets the hipster market who think nothing of blowing $2.5k on a computer every few years...

(disclaimer: some sarcasm was used writing this comment)

If that happened to me I would probably have Apple either fix it or give me a new one, but you could throw it away if you wanted.

SSD's life expectancy shouldn't be a concern. It's more likely you'll have to replace a fan or screen before the SSD if you want to keep using the laptop.

That really depends on how often you write to the drive. I don't have specs for the mac SSD, but the EVO 950 pro which is in a similar category has an endurance of 400TB. Quite a lot but you can use up a surprising amount of data on temporary writes.

400TB adds up to writing more than 200GB, every day, during 5 years. That's a lot.

On top of that, manufacturers are conservative on these ratings. There's a test somewhere on the web where they tested life expectancy of an EVO 840, and it took 800TB before failure. The new one could be even better in that regard.

A full build at work generates over 200GB of output, and that's before considering things like intermediate writes to the page file or temporary files.

The codebase is very large so this is unusual, but its not a trivial concern for people with large workloads. I imagine video editors have disk usage of a similar magnitude.

> A full build at work generates over 200GB of output

Impressive.

This is the true thing to be angry about with the new wave of Apple laptops.

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