Hacker News Reader

Comment by el_cujo | Hacker News Reader

>the 2018 one I have right now since they can't be opened with a screwdriver and the internal SSD is soldered.

I'm going a little offtopic, but I cannot believe this. I haven't owned a Mac since having a 2010 MBP (which I loved dearly for 6 years), but I cannot imagine owning a laptop that doesn't allow me to switch the internal drive. It was annoying enough with all of the screws on the 2010 model.

I'm sure there is some justification is for this beyond "we want you to buy a new one if something goes wrong", but I'm coming up blank.

View on HN

A little more off-topic but my work laptop is a Panasonic toughbook (CF-C2), and I was impressed to find that I could swap-out the storage drive with my bare hands (no tool!). That was pretty cool. You just unlock the tray holding the drive, pull it, unplug the drive from it, plug the new one in, and push the tray back in. Super simple.

The arguments around why laptops are becoming less and less modular are usually that having mechanisms to attach and detach these parts take space, and so if people want thinner and thinner laptops, they need to remove these mechanisms. Personally, though, I can't see why I'd want a thinner laptop. The toughbook is thick, even by pre-ultrabook standards, but it's still very, very comfortable.

> I cannot imagine owning a laptop that doesn't allow me to switch the internal drive.

+1. One of the (many) reasons I'll never own a Mac.

I have a tiny usb-c 1TB M.2 external HD and a Mega sync service running 24/7 which backs up all of my important files. Plus I've got various 'MacOS bootstrapping' ZSH scripts which install a hundred different Homebrew packages and other configs, which I built up over a couple yrs and across ~5-6 Macbook fresh installs.

I could get a new Macbook pro rolling within an hour of work and have it 99.9% the same as my current one. Which has happened often enough for me in my job as I always get Macbook Pros from my work or upgrades them. That wouldn't be any different if they gave me new PC laptops where I'd prefer to do a fresh install of Archlinux every time for security reasons instead of dragging around some M.2 chip for years.

The missing 0.1% is usually the most painful and the time it takes to update sucks. I love my mac but it has a long way until it improves this.

Ideally I should be able to swap the SSD and have it working 100% (besides a few software that fingerprints your machine for licensing reasons and it's another pain) in a couple of minutes, or have the machine replicated 100% (with no update process or whatsoever afterwards - besides perhaps things stored in the secure enclave) in half an hour...

I’m getting closer and closer filling that 0.1% every time I get a new macbook. But you are correct. The tiny differences are annoying. Fortunately they are almost always automatable to fix via a shell script.

It’s been genuinely worth the effort to make these 4-5 scripts.

Me too. I used to use Linux before and anytime I'd move to a new computer I'd decide whether I should swap the hardware or do

df to list devices, then: dd if=/dev/a of=/dev/b

if I decided to migrate to the new storage device.

Either way, I could do it in about 3min and go do something else. When I was back, everything would be ready.

And back in the FileVault 1 days, I discovered [almost the hard way] that my machine wasn't backing up properly because I was not logging out my user account (and you had to). Since this experience, I'm always suspicious of Apple's approach to backing up data (and data resilience - admittedly due to some other factors involving weird interactions between iPhoto and Flickr).

I don't want to minimize the work you've done with your scripts, but perhaps you don't know that all of that can easily be accomplished with TimeMachine.

From your new mac, during initial setup select "Restore from TimeMachine" and you are back in business as soon as the data is transferred back.

This is a key factor for me not getting a mac. Not so much that I couldn't swap the hard drive, but that I couldn't recover data if the motherboard goes bad.

And the keyboard.

> but that I couldn't recover data if the motherboard goes bad.

Perhaps it goes without saying: If you don't back up your data you can lose it at any time for any reason.

>I'm sure there is some justification is for this beyond "we want you to buy a new one if something goes wrong", but I'm coming up blank.

"We want you to use our cloud storage for all data storage, and our cloud services for all application use."

They can be opened with a pentalobe screwdriver.

The 2018 MBPs also have a T2 security chip now, which intermediates all access to the drive. It has internal unremovable encryption keys which are paired with the drive, so even if you could move the drive to another machine, the data on it would be useless anyway.

Your data should never be held on the internal drive for more than a few seconds really. With a decent MDM solution, restoring the standard settings and applications should take no more than a few minutes. As such, in modern times, there should be no real use-case for moving the drive - just set up a new machine instead, more like the Chromebook way of thinking.

Yes... soldered RAM, hard drive and everything into a pricy motherboard so if any of the cheaper components fail, you can pay for a whole new motherboard.

writing this on an ancient macbook air, on my 3rd self installed battery. I have a battery swelling damaged but still working trackpad. Can't bring myself to buy a new Macbook if it's not upgradeable...Apple you need to fix this with a user upgradeable model

Yeah, you need a 2012 Macbook. Get the best CPU possible, add a cheap SSD, max the RAM

Other than the GPU on the 2012's will randomly fail with no other fix than to disable the discrete GPU via firmware hacks.

I'm here w/ my Mid 2012 MBP that's maxed out w/ everything--no problems ever.

Isn't anecdotal evidence wonderful?

The 2012 13” at least didnt have a discrete gpu (iirc earlier years did).

MacBook Air (13-inch, Late 2010)! Really old but still servicable. For the last 5 years no Apple product has enticed me like they used to...

Yes it is a workhorse for me, still running strong though. would be great if more memory and SSD that could be removed. My worry is when the current SSD dies.

Simply not true. The ssd can be removed / swapped. Only the ram is soldered.

Huh? The SSD has been soldered on the MacBook Pro since the 2018 version afaik.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com