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Comment by beervirus | Hacker News Reader

It sucks that the SSD is (presumably) not upgradeable anymore. Apple generally charges a ton for the larger SSD offerings, but it used to be that you could just buy a base model and replace the thing later.

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Apple positions itself as being on the side of the consumer, and while they never really justified their soldered-down RAM (on laptops), one _might_ argue that it reduced failure rates. It's interesting that IBM discovered that soldering RAM to the individual compute modules in the Blue Gene/L (ca. 2004-2007) did improve reliability, in part because they had 2^16 modules in one cluster. I don't really buy that argument for laptop RAM, and especially not for SSDs, but I'm not sure if there's anything that can push back against Apple other than plain old competition, which they're trying to distance themselves from as much as possible, of course.

They're on the side of a certain type of consumer (doesn't even consider upgrading hardware down the line), and with these product launches they're making it more clear than ever that they don't want you to purchase their products if you don't fit into being that type of consumer.

Also good luck recovering data from a watter-damaged laptop. I have also seen some macbooks with broken SSD on eBay, sold for cheap. Soldered SSD is a ticking timebomb for your data.

Use external drives. They're cheaper and way larger.

And slower. And one bumped cable away from corrupted data.

No thanks, not for my boot drive.

NAS is a very established solution that is not expensive at all to set up at home.

Try editing 4K videos over 1GbE Internet from your NAS, because the mini doesn’t support more people 10gbe.

You still have local storage...

This is the same concept as L1 -> L2 -> L3 Cache -> RAM -> Disk.

When you need something, bump it up, when you don't, move it away.

I'd prefer to store my hot raw video footage on my disk, and my preferred way to do that is by buying a $350 2TB nvme instead of paying Apple $1000 or whatever for the privilege.

I understand that it's less convenient but you actually can buy that 2TB NVME SSD as external drive too. It should operate in the same ballpark as decent to higher end internal NVME SSD options.

Not slower, with USB/SSD speeds today.

Do you need a 512GB boot drive?

It only has two ports and multiport dongles are not reliable enough for external storage, you can only trust the single USB-C to USB-A dongles for that so it means giving up a port.

I have a base level 2 port MBP from work and having to do any work with large files has been a nightmare because of this, having to juggle power/monitor and storage constantly.

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