Using socketed M.2 SSDs introduces a class of problems ("the SSD isn't seated correctly") and also makes the device thicker. There are probably other reasons but I'll bet those are the two big ones.
Why so many tech professionals and hackers still swear by this company and feign surprise everytime they get shafted by proprietary design choices is baffling and frustrating.
If they wanted you to play inside, they wouldn't use torque screws. If they wanted you to replace that, they wouldn't have glued it together. If you were supposed to take the keyboard off there wouldn't be 60+ screws (literally) holding it on.
You're supposed to be a good consumer and consume this one so you can buy a new one.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348240/apple-right-to-r...
> If they wanted you to play inside, they wouldn't use torque screws
Torque screws are superior to Phillips heads because they are far more resistant to cam-out; which is a bigger problem than needing to buy a screwdriver kit for $10 off eBay once in your life.
I work at a repair shop currently, and can confirm this. Give me a Torq or a hex screw any day over a Phillips head.
You do have to be careful with them though, because once they do cam out, you're pretty much dead in the water, while with Phillips you can often hack your way around it.
Edit: I also agree with the rest of the argument. If you've got the budget (and I assume that if Apple is an option, you do), please consider buying something with Linux officially supported. Between Dell, Lenovo, and smaller scale setups like System76, there are plenty of options.
My biggest complaint about them is heat and performance: my MBP seems to be almost always ready to take off. Apple really did hit the sweet spot with the M1 and I don't see x86 laptops catching up anytime soon. If they release 32+GB machines, I'll be seriously tempted to get my Macs refreshed even though I know they are essentially discardable machines now.
Also, Apple is the only manufacturer I can count on offering US keyboards without any hassle. Lenovo does that with Thinkpads and with Dell you need to work to find the models that are available with that option.
I wish I could like the M1. I'm honestly really looking forward to ARM and RISC machines becoming more common, as long as there are manufacturers who make them at least somewhat reparable.
What OS would they run? Linux?
I wonder if Windows will ever run on ARM/RISC?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
Apple switched from torx to pentalobe screws because torx wasn't proprietary enough.
Also, they keyboard wasn't held down with 60+ screws, it was held down with rivets which is arguably worse. They could painstakingly be drilled, tapped, and replaced with screws if you were really masochistic.
What does this even mean, when you can easily buy both types of screwdrivers at any hardware store?
Reportedly Torx, and later pentalobe screws are used because of their tiny size and lower profile, a philips head at that scale (0.8mm) is instantly stripped.
Pentalobe is not an improvement over torx - torx was arguably working fine for Apple, but they decided to invent and start using a proprietary, non-standard screw anyway. The consensus at the time was that Apple did this to deliberately make it harder to get into their products.
The only reason you can find them now, 12 years later, is because third parties started to make the hardware, because it turns out getting into Apple hardware is something a lot of people eventually want or need to do.
Apple's attempt to lock you out of your own hardware didn't work, because ifixit and others spent tens of thousands of dollars on custom tooling. It was a big deal at the time, the hardware wasn't available anywhere, let alone at a hardware store.
It was an angry article by iFixit that started the whole controversy. They could very well have done it for reasons related to licensing, or machinering, or space savings, or who knows what else. The fact the MBP 17" never used them, while the smaller models did, hints towards that.
You may have taken the stories at the time at face value, but within weeks you could buy pentalobe screwdrivers and they surely did not cost 'tens of thousands of dollars' to develop - screws are cold pressed and very simple to produce.
I just replaced a keyboard in a Macbook Air. It is screws around the outside, then the dozens of rivets on the inside. If you're okay with the old keyboard being destroyed, you just rip it out: the rivets just pop out, and the replacement keyboard gets put back in with screws. So it was a pain, but the drilling/tapping isn't required.
Total cost $35, plus some quality time with my kid.
That was a simple and cheap change with clear benefits for Apple in terms of discouraging modifications to devices they support so the cost versus benefits actually makes sense for Apple there.
Whereas to suggest they designed a whole property storage controller interface just for the purpose of discouraging user servicing doesn't make sense at all. If that was the goal why not just use off-the-shelf NVMe modified to have some kind of secret power-on key or something?
Optics is the most important factor and it’s something Apple’s marketing department does better than most companies.
It would be a poor explanation, but even when there's a good explanation, as you can see it is still dismissed as just "good optics". So how do you tell the difference between "good optics" and features that provide real benefit?
When I need to use a screw thousands of times, in manufacturing processes, I buy 18-8 Philips.
I use Torx only for one specific application: for user-serviceable finished products that have previously had support problems with idiots who can’t be bothered to select the right screwdriver. Some folks simply can’t do it. So, the most problematic products end up with Torx fasteners, which problematic customers mess up by using the wrong size Torx or even hex wrenches, and my support guys have a script for these problems that goes through “you didn’t use a T-10 wrench; there is nothing more to be said and nothing to be done for it. It’s black and white. Sorry.”
Every building site I have been on almost exclusively used torque screws and every hardware store sells torque screwdrivers in every size. I wish more manufacturers would use torque screws since the heads don't show the same kind of wear.
And yes manufacturers aren't building their devices with them being repairable as primary design goal. This is understandable and there always will be a trade off. Even devices that are designed to be relatively easy to repair like Lenovo ThinkPads or HP Pro/EliteBooks have these trade-offs depending on the form factor.
So, this is likely just penny pinching the manufacture, and assuming the customer will bear the repair fee if it breaks.
Also, Apple never actually used M.2. All of their socketed SSDs are proprietary form factors, though there are cheap adapters you can buy that will let you use M.2 drives.
You know the other side of m.2 is screwed in, right? Anything that manages to "jostle" a m.2 drive out of the socket has likely also destroyed the machine.
I can't get around to how people say such stuff with a straight face - Apple is a 20-30 year old trillion dollar hardware company and its engineers can design high-tech processors, but apparently can't ensure that a RAM or SSD remains fixed in a slot? Do you really believe that?
> There are probably other reasons
Sure there are, and I'll list the major ones - planned obsolescence (soldered parts are harder to repair) and increased profits through price gauging on upgrades.
Neither of these really makes sense.
Planned obsolescence: Apple laptops retain their resale value for a very long time. Even if 8GB of RAM is no longer enough for you, there are plenty of people who'll still be able to use the device for many more years. The days are long over where computers became obsolete after a few years without upgrades.
Price gauging on upgrades: Almost everyone buys the base configuration, and almost no-one upgraded RAM or HD even when the hardware used to allow it. Whatever increased profit Apple are making from upgrades is going to be absolutely tiny.
If Apple really wanted to price gauge on upgrades, they'd at least stock the 16GB models in stores. My guess is that it's barely worth Apple's while to make these models at all, in a purely economic sense. What you're paying for isn't the cost of the RAM/storage itself, but the money necessary to make it worth the bother of making additional models which almost no-one buys.
Planned obsolescence here means limiting upgrades and repairs, and making repairs or replacement so costly that you prefer to buy a new device if the current model develops performance issues or has hardware failures. With the M1 this is even worse now as you can't even run other base OSes on it reliably, thus making its users susceptible to systemic obsolescence (not including hardware or software compatibility when the OS is upgraded).
It has nothing to do with the resale value of a product. (It is a humbug argument as nobody can predict what the value of your device will be tomorrow if some newer technology comes along. Moreover, soldered parts and non-user-replaceable battery actually make such laptops even less desirable in the seconds market because they cannot be upgraded, unlike the older Apple laptops).
> Almost everyone buys the base configuration, and almost no-one upgraded RAM or HD
I'd really like to know your source for this.
> What you're paying for isn't the cost of the RAM/storage itself, but the money necessary to make it worth the bother of making additional models which almost no-one buys.
Again, share your source for this really ridiculous argument - they wouldn't need to bother with all this if they didn't solder the parts in the first place.
In looking at repairs you have to factor in reliability as well as replaceability. We're seeing a trend towards laptops becoming harder to repair but also intrinsically more reliable. No-one complains that laptop CPUs can't be replaced, for example, because CPUs are reliable enough that it's not an issue. We're well on the way to the same being true of internal flash storage. On top of that, Apple is reaping significant benefits in energy efficiency, reliability and performance from closely integrating components. That is something that benefits everyone who buys a MacBook. Hardly anyone benefits from removable RAM or SSDs.
I think some people mistakenly think that Apple could just stop 'soldering down' the RAM and SSD, but they must not realize how closely integrated everything is in the M1 MacBooks. The idea that Apple did all of this extraordinarily expensive R&D just so that they could sell a few more RAM or SSD upgrades is bordering on a conspiracy theory. As I said, there is so little demand for 16GB MacBook models that Apple doesn't even stock them in stores.
Overall, I just don't see any evidence that Apple has bad motivations here. It seems to me that you are just speculating uncharitably.
The trends are separate and not related. I have a 10+ year old laptop with replaceable parts and it still runs great without any issues. With the European Union introducing the Right to Repair bill, I expect to see a reverse of this trend soon, and more repairable electronics in the future. If Apple and the others stop their selfish and unethical lobbying against the Right to Repair movement in the US, then the American consumers will also enjoy the same benefits and not be taken for a ride.
> The idea that Apple did all of this extraordinarily expensive R&D just so that they could sell a few more RAM or SSD upgrades is bordering on a conspiracy theory.
Perhaps it does for the ignorant. But it is already recognized that firms like Apple that indulge in this already know that the profit from such unrepairable devices offset the additional expense on the R&D required to create it. Even the wikipedia page on planned obsolescence specifically points this out:
Producers that pursue this strategy believe that the additional sales revenue it creates more than offsets the additional costs of research and development, and offsets the opportunity costs of repurposing an existing product line.
Sure, but as failure of any given component becomes less likely, the advantages of making it replaceable cease to outweigh the disadvantages. An M1 MacBook Air with replaceable RAM and SSD would not have the same performance, battery life or form factor. 99% of Apple's customers care way more about those things than they care about upgradeability.
>But it is already recognized that firms like Apple that indulge in this already know that the profit from such unrepairable devices offset the additional expense on the R&D required to create it.
I'm baffled by this claim. If all Apple wanted was to make their laptops unupgradeable then they could just solder on generic CPU, RAM and SSD components – no R&D needed.
I try not to use the term 'conspiracy theory' lightly, but the claim that Apple's transition to the M1 architecture is motivated primarily by 'planned obsolescence' really is a conspiracy theory.
citation please.
"Worse", but the insignificantly "better" one is landfill in a few years time when the battery/storage/keyboard/anything has a fault, or even just when it needs more RAM or storage.
Most consumers are just ignorant.
It's the usual Apple stuff, "we've put so much amazing into this laptop that it doesn't matter that it's starved of RAM!". New phones have the same amount of RAM as this laptop.
You will never convince me that an SSD sprinkled with Apple magic is better than having enough RAM. NEVER.
Also you will never convince me that a non-replaceable storage is somehow necessary, or better in some way than replaceable storage, even if it shaves tens of nanometers extra thickness from the laptop. NEVER.
Apple has been doing this ridiculous stuff for decades now and its victims just keep on falling for it.
Punched in the face over and over again - from dongles, to batteries, to proprietary connectors that are abandoned the next year, to lack of headphone sockets, to overheating GPUs because of inadequate heatsinks, to unibody that isn't actually unibody and bends when you tilt the screen, to needing to replace your motherboard because your keyboard got a speck of dust in it, to screens that crack if you look at them wrong, to phones that don't work if you hold them wrong, ad nauseum. Please sir, can I have some more?
They've been punched in the face for so long that now they get a headache when they're not getting punched. It's some kind of bizarre form of masochistic Stockholm Syndrome.
THE WORST PART OF IT ALL is that the market success of this consumer-hostile garbage influences the rest of the industry and ruins other products like a cancer, so now it's super hard to find a phone with a headphone socket or replaceable battery.
Fuck this shit, FUCK APPLE, and fuck their customers for not using their wallets to demand better, and thereby encouraging and normalizing the terrible behavior of this horrible company.
I personally would have liked to see Apple bump up the base spec to 16GB. But hey, the 16GB models are available if you need them.
Once that soldered-in SSD goes, that expensive fashion statement is just more e-waste.
I agree with the problem though. M2 is just a crappy answer to it.
The thickness thing - how thick is an M.2 SSD? 3mm? Get real.
Apple is consumer-hostile and their products are disposable, that's all there is to it.