Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed
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This setup has a benefit; namely, it is now impossible to brick the system with a bad BIOS/EFI flash, and you'll never need to use a hardware SPI flasher to recover. Just like the iPhone, you can enter Boot ROM DFU mode, which can't easily be overwritten, and restore all of the firmware on the system that's writable.
This is great for restoring systems to a known good firmware state, including SSD, EFI, BridgeOS, RecoveryOS. On a normal system, there is plenty of non volatile storage that is difficult to recover or reset.
The primary argument against soldering the SSD, or really any other part, down like this tends to be that "Oh, now you can't just save money by upgrading it yourself|replacing it when it breaks". On the other side, these machines are engineered as appliances that should achieve a certain degree of reliability. The SSD is reasonably considered to last the "lifetime" of the product, and should it fail, I don't consider the inability to externally boot to be a huge problem, since whatever failure damaged the SSD is statistically likely to compromise the reliability of the rest of the board. Any failure is grounds for "rework" of the board on a hardware level if necessary,up to and including repair/replacement of the onboard flash, and not just a simple workaround in my opinion. Note that they don't force you to actually USE the internal SSD - you can still netboot or USB boot I think. It just has to work.
Trivia: -At least on T2 systems, the flash memory itself (the NAND chips) on the mainboard can actually be swapped between units after a DFU restore by unsoldering them and transferring them.
The person that did this on YouTube notes that a common reason for SSD failure on T2 machines is due to SSD power regulator circuitry being located close to the intake vents on the side of the MacBook Pro. They recommend that users of these machines open them and clean the dust out often, since dust buildup on the actual power regulator combined with moisture sometimes causes a short circuit, sending high voltage to the SSD and damaging it.
This kind of failure (high voltage parts close to low voltage ones, close to liquid damage prone areas, without any underfilling) is documented by Louis Rossmann. It is, however, not always feasible or possible to entirely prevent.
It can be observed that even T2 systems will fail to power up the Intel CPU system if the BridgeOS cannot be read properly. The system will only power up the T2 until it is reflashed through Apple Configurator.
Sorry, but how? That's just reads like BS.
SSDs have limited lifespans due to the limited write cycles of the NAND chips. So no, what damages NAND does not damage the rest of the board. The more you write and swap to flash, the faster it wears out, taking your Macbook down with it when it dies.
Granted, I expect the controller to keep moving your data around to the cells with the least ammount of wear and isolate the ones that have worn out, reducing your storage space and speed of the drive over time.
8 Gb should be enough for everyone :)
You can't wear-level against blocks that are in use, only blocks that are free.
If every person I've helped socially and professionally is any indication, people keep their storage anywhere between 80% and 95% full.
At 95% full, all your write cycles are focused on just 5% (plus spare provisioned blocks.)
Think about how browsers consume all available memory and then readily push the system into using a lot of swap. I have to restart my browser regularly because of how much ram it uses even if I've closed every tab.
Think about how whole-system file content indexing is the norm, and all the write operations that occur every time a file is added or updated.
Think about how a lot of applications are just electron apps and they routinely update themselves.
Think about all the filesystem metadata changes.
Etc.
It only takes a bit of arithmetic to prove that this cannot possibly be true, or else all of those 95%-full drives would have long since failed, and QLC SSDs would have been a disaster and never would have been adopted by system OEMs that provide multi-year warranties. (And if it were true, then SSDs prior to TRIM wouldn't have been viable.)
You can include static data in wear leveling, and all SSDs do. It does lead to some write amplification, but that's already factored in to a drive's endurance specs.
Actually, even more than that - here are some examples:[1]
Intel SSDSC2KB019TZ01 ("S4520") with 8.8 PB of lifetime writes
Intel SSDSC2KB019T801 ("S4510") with 7.1 PB of lifetime writes
Seagate ZA1920NM10001 ("Ironwolf[2] 110") with 3.5 PB of lifetime writes [2]
Samsung MZ-76P2T0BW ("860 PRO") with 2.4 PB of lifetime writes
[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notes/2021-q3-rsync.net_tech...
SSD wrote endurance is an unavoidable ticking time bomb. But it is nowhere near as unpredictable or imminent as many people assume. It's a failure mode that doesn't sneak up on you, and usually takes real effort to trigger. Other failure mechanisms are much more important.
Granted, been a while, but I do nightly full-disk backups due to the first such experience (so was well prepared for the second).
In general, you should be aware that the "life remaining" indicator may merely be the "warranty remaining" indicator. If the unused reserved block count isn't approaching zero, a drive can usually keep operating long past the official write endurance rating. However, in addition to the above bug, Intel is also known for putting a kill switch in their SSD firmware tied to the "life remaining" counter, so you might have actually experienced the SSD going read-only when that hits zero.
I don’t know how much time do you expect your mac to last, but write cycles on your firmware should not be much of a concern.
Sooo that means the wear leveling had better be ahead of whatever lifetime writes you throw at the system, or...
Also, it is not possible for an SSD to decrease your usable storage space over time. That would break any partition table format or filesystem that expects an ordinary block device. It also wouldn't win you any significant increase unusable lifespan, because when your drive starts retiring large numbers of blocks, all of your blocks are on the verge of failure. (Though keep in mind that "failure" here is defined as "only able to retain data for one year" for consumer SSDs).
That's not true. Blocks degrade when written to. Most files are written once and read many times.
I hadn't considered that. Make sense. Better to move never-changing data to blocks that are still good but not worn out so those available writes can be utilized.
It totally could be possible. For Windows/Linux, you could have a daemon that creates a 'ssd_wear' file which grows in size as the SSD wears out, and messages to the SSD which physical blocks it occupies. Mac could obviously do a deeper integration directly into the OS.
> all of your blocks are on the verge of failure
A failed block still stores some information (in an information entropy sense). It's totally possible to store one blocks worth of information across two, four, or eight failed blocks (with extra error correction information).
Combining these two techniques, an SSD should never fail. Instead it slows down and gets smaller. Sadly as far as I'm aware, no consumer drive vendor has implemented these.
One of my graduate students experienced this, the hard way: writing up his thesis, his mum plugged in "the wrong USB C" charger. I don't know exactly what happened, but the board was utterly fried. The problem with the soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery. On the M1+ models, you literally can't do anything except semi-fix the motherboard as the flash and its controllers are integrated and the keys are cryptographically securely stored. This video [1] shows what data recovery is really like -- I don't often link to YT videos, but it is an hour long, involves an awful lot of BGA de-balling and re-balling and the scouring of spare chips from other donor dead machines, as Apple doesn't let manufacturers sell the chips separately and datasheets are all NDA'd.
We're very much in the part of the curve where you'd need a lab and a lot of serious work to get data off these things without either sacrificial macs or luck (e.g. one blow voltage regulator). Of course, the flip side of this is that your data is really, really secure. You just have to be damn sure that you back it up correctly.
Most somewhat serious NAS appliances offer being a TimeMachine server which is more than enough for most people.
Well, that's kind of the point.
> You just have to be damn sure that you back it up correctly.
Exactly. And that's as easy as plugging in an external hard drive occasionally, or storing critical files in the cloud.
>Well, that's kind of the point.
Not that I don't appreciate a security-minded platform, it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them, and do nothing but cause heartache when the internal SSD fails. And fail they do. it's rare, but I've had several SSDs (Toshiba and Crucial, if it matters) fail within 1-2 years of moderate usage. No warning there was an issue, the drives just disappeared one day and I was left looking for backups.
I think you underestimate this number. Most businesses are going to want security/encryption over ability to recover data to prevent leaking secrets in the case of a lost/stolen laptop.
as for everyone else, backups really need to become the norm for everyone because as you say any HDD/SSD can fail for any reason anytime beyond any possible recovery apple laptop or not.
No man is an island. If my mom is insecure, then all the messages I sent her are leaked, too, no matter how secure I try to be. If my boss is insecure, then I'm even worse off than that.
Also, if high-security stuff is normalized, then you don't wind up stuck in a place where you have to choose between "the secure option" and "the option that can actually run the apps I need." E2E encrypting the whole world is also the best defense against the government passing laws that make E2E encryption illegal.
The government doesn't need to pass laws to ban encryption (at least in America) since they design the encryption standards themselves. It's basically common knowledge at this point that everything NIST cranks out is vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis beyond the domain of public understanding. Apple, Google, Facebook and the other top dogs all help create the illusion of choice in exchange for keeping the SEC off their backs.
What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
And what's really annoying is that you are doing a bad job of arguing for a position that I actually kinda agree with. NIST has published a backdoored elliptic curve-based RNG[1]; don't trust them. Encryption algorithms need some sort of verifiable provenance for where those numbers came from.
There are many places in the world where information on your laptop even criticising the government can end up in you going missing e.g. China, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar etc.
It took about 12 hours to decrypt it, and restore sanity.
Availability is part of security, if it's encrypted, and you don't (or can't) boot just the way Microsoft wants, all your data is gone.
/s
That combination has broken just about every modern cloud backup application I've tried to use over the ~10 years that meets a short list of minimal features I require (locally stored encryption keys for one). It actually breaks $OTHERBIGVENDOR in its default configuration as well, but I've collected a pile of tweaks/etc that keep it functional although I've managed at one point to cause my account to go into a reindexing mode on the servers that didn't complete for months too.
So, maybe at some point. I've got some experience in the space :) and I've considered writing my own when I eventually give up on $OTHERBIGVENDOR. So many of them are written in "modern" languages and the clients are outrageously slow, or get exponentially slower as the data set grows.
I've looked at tarsnap in passing in the past, but haven't gotten around to trying it because from their description of what appears to be a traditional referenced counted global dedupe. I suspected it of having problems when the hash map need to track 50T+ unique hashes from all those video files across backups.
PS: That doesn't mean there aren't good tools, my local backups are via rsnapshot to an offline USB+RAID I plug in once in a while.
There was another simple option. You're free to use that one.
> Well, that's kind of the point.
Great; how do we opt out?
It has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is obvious: few options. But the advantage is that they can make a consistent ecosystem, with sensible choices, and not dragged down by compatibility issues. It "just works". Not my thing but I totally understand those who love Apple.
The way you do recovery with Apple is via Time Machine backups, use that.
Desktop Linux is the opposite, lots of options, but perhaps because of it, it doesn't have the same polish as Apple, and even Microsoft products, or, using your words "it is annoying".
Being able to yoink the SSD from the original machine, plug it into another compatible one, and decrypt the contents with your password, is not a vulnerability, it's a feature.
I mean, why even encrypt it in that case?
It’s not like the drive is a web service that will detect and block your password attempts…
Or, well, fine, let there be an active element. But let me export the master key then. It's my device, I have root access to it, I should be allowed to do that. And, yes, do still put the SSD into a slot.
> I mean, why even encrypt it in that case?
Yeah because your time machine backup drive that's encrypted with "just" a password (you did encrypt it, right?) is somehow more secure than an internal SSD encrypted in the same exact way.
You can do this encryption shindig with the ability to export by not using FileVault and using your own encryption software - Apple just doesn't allow this by default. In fact, why only store it on the computer? Rclone can upload and replicate an encrypted (via a long salt + password) copy of your data to dozens of cloud providers. Your encrypted data could be on 3 cloud providers in 10 physically separate locations on 30 different hard drives at once, possibly even in separate hemispheres. Or chuck it into S3 replication and be in all 81 availability zones if you so wish.
I don’t think you grasp how the encryption keys are generated, derived, and stored.
And I doubt you are using a password the length of the key. Well, maybe you create a USB human interface device that fits on your keyring to type it for you. I do have something like that for one time codes, but if that is your sophistication level, then we wouldn’t have this discussion really.
I feel for the “it’s mine, I bought it” logic, and I miss the days when our rights were more absolute. But that’s not today.
> I don’t think you grasp how the encryption keys are generated, derived, and stored.
And you're wrong.
And if it is encrypted with a secret with sufficient entropy, then making your hardware design non-repairable serves no reasonable purpose.
Not security. There is no additional security here
You can't just physically remove the SSD from the machine, place it in another and brute force the encryption.
It's another story, a part of the encryption is stored in yet another place on Macs, which it'd be still stored there if the SSD could be moved in/out.
There is not much overlap between these use-cases:
* I need an easy way to recover my family pictures because I didn't make backups
and
* I have state actors interested in my data
If you really have state actor threats, you probably like that M1 Macs are very hard to perform data-recovery from.
Everone should consider state actors as a threat because they are. They maybe are not specifically after you. But every now and then some big box gets popped leaking all kinds of personal information (including yours) and the actors are probably state sponsored. Also it is not state actors scanning your data, many cloud providers do so.
If you have a state actor as threat model you probably want to remove iCloud backups (see link):
"Apple’s iCloud, on the other hand, can be searched in secret. In the first half of last year, the period covered by Apple’s most recent semiannual transparency report on requests for data it receives from government agencies, U.S. authorities armed with regular court papers asked for and obtained full device backups or other iCloud content in 1,568 cases, covering about 6,000 accounts."
If you think it is a realistic scenario that the US would serve a warrant against you, then yes, your iCloud backup will probably be disclosed to the authorities. But if this is a real concern of yours, then you probably have much bigger things to worry about than whether your SSD is soldered to the board or not.
Whether you consider those actions to be a threat would depend on an individual person's or organization's assessment of the impact of those actions.
Threat assessments are purely an engineering exercise. This is orthogonal to the ethical, philosophical, and political discussion of civil liberties. If you have ethical, philosophical, or political concerns about this topic, those are something to be addressed in their respective realms. It is naïve to believe that engineers have power to protect anyone from abuses of civil liberties. Apple hardware engineering team is neither capable nor equipped to be addressing these concerns in their designs.
+1. The part that fails on consumer SSDs is typically the controller.
So the M1 Mac lasts a year before the owner has to shell for an apple authorised repair to replace the disk ? Me thinks that may not be the story for apple or dell
What am I missing
SSDs are wear items. Especially when they're quite full, it is very easy to blow through spare writes and brick the drive.
Or did the entire module electronically fail, as distinct from the SSD "no more writes" case?
That’s a totally different reason, and afaik, they should be using proper caps to let the controller write/flush their buffers.
My last MacBook Pro was 7 years old, almost always full, and still works fine. Granted I’m not a video editor, but I had quite some write cycles.
Failure rate was much less than enterprise spinning disks, but at least with the spinners failed, you could still see them and get most of the data off, if you needed to. And they had reliable pre-failure indications.
TLDR: take regular backups and plan for storage to fail (which for soldered storage means plan to get a new device, I guess)
Particularly for "enterprise" equipment the expectations isn't that it fails, but that the failures are more graceful and understood.
So complain... that is why your paying the "enterprise" tax.
Although we did get a couple of bad batches on our single disk systems, almost all of those failed within 2 weeks of install and we had the rest replaced.
I also suspect firmware bugs, but it wasn't convenient to upgrade them, so who knows. I did have to upgrade some of the same disks on single disk systems with low usage; the disks would sometimes timeout for no reason and confuse some of our OSes. The upgrade procedure was more or less PXE boot the manufacturer upgrade utility and hope it worked with whatever disk controller was there (eta: 5 minutes) or let the hoster firmware upgrade script run and hope it upgraded the ssd firmware and didn't mess anything else up (eta: 40 minutes per run, probably run it twice).
Except as explained by the parent, when the SSD dies on an Intel Mac it can be recovered via Internet Recovery via EFI.
Only way to brick that it is to have a bad flash onto the EFI ROM.
On Apple Silicon when the SSD dies, it cannot be recovered as the firmware is also on the SSD and remains bricked which that is that.
Because it partly is. It's just a lame defence / justification of soldering SSD, RAM and other parts, the major advantage of which is to make modern electronics more complex, hard to repair and prevent upgrades (i.e. "planned obsolescence"). If SSDs were reliable beyond 5+ years, manufacturers would be highlighting that and even offering guarantees for such a period. (Hell, most RAM today come with "lifetime" guarantees, even though RAM modules too fail occasionally).
The modular design for computer hardware was chosen for a practical reason - that hardware can, and do fail. While electronic manufacturing has advanced a lot, minimizing failure rates to a great extent, the pros of replaceable modules absolutely still outweigh any of the alternative hardware designs so far.
So you can either go modular and have a slow PC, or you can have decent performance and just accept that everything is going to be soldered on and irreplaceable.
But we do know how far DIMMs can go. Mainboard memory trace layouts have gotten ridiculously optimized. DDR4-5200 is a totally "normal" XMP spec now, there are even 5400 kits out there I think.
This is unsurprising given what I already pointed out about power being more important than maximizing performance. Sure, you can overclock the memory controller on a desktop platform and with sufficiently expensive DIMMs and probably a bit of an overvolt for the memory controller/uncore you can reach higher bus speeds than any laptop CPU (though still not anywhere near as high as GDDR used with high-end mobile GPUs).
But take a look at the fastest memory speeds available through SODIMM slots vs the speed of LPDDR4x supported by the same CPUs. Within the constraints of laptop power levels and using standard grade memory parts rather than requiring premium binned chips, soldering currently corresponds to a 33% performance advantage.
Imagine 8 DIMMs next to each other, and then fitting that into a laptop form factor.
Also our PCs are not slow, modular or not. In many cases hardware is not the bottleneck.
Maybe the fan was more of a case fan and it simply ran air through the whole machine INCLUDING the CPU heatsink, which is AFAIK exactly how it worked.
It is now however possible to brick the system with a failed disk drive, which is vastly more likely
Except for simply running of out drive space.
So if you want to buy something and have it last 5+ years you need to spec it out from the start to have way more drive space than you think you'll ever use.
Or else when it runs out and you really need that extra space you're forced to upgrade everything in order to get the extra space since you made an initial mistake in specing out the machine when you first bought it.
(I also strongly question the idea that un-removability provides much better lifetime over simply removing the spinning parts. That seems of questionable benefit to the end user, while taking upgradability away creates planned obsolescence that increases someone's financial metrics at apple and takes away consumer freedom).
> So if you want to buy something and have it last 5+ years you need to spec it out from the start to have way more drive space than you think you'll ever use.
Yup. When I bought my MBP M1 2020, I foolishly went with 256GB of storage.
Installed Xcode and that was like 15GB of available storage space gone right then and there. The simulators take another few GB on top of that.
Add to that all of the other software that I use, another significant portion of storage space is taken.
And with my own files on top, I routinely have only about 10-15 GB of available space out of the 256 GB, which is quite annoying. And it also means not being able to install some stuff that I use only sometimes, because with the limited amount of space I have I cannot waste it on things that I only rarely use. But that means I don’t get to use those things at all unfortunately.
Not being able to do anything about this is about the only gripe I have with this machine. So all in all I am still very happy with it. But not as happy as I would’ve been if I wasn’t constantly running out of storage space.
And I even thought I was giving myself enough room for everything, because my previous computer was a MacBook Air 2018 model with 128GB storage, where I was also running out of space all the time, so even though I really wanted to buy the 1TB model of MBP M1 2020 I landed on the 256GB thinking that hey it’s still twice what I had so it should be enough right. Well, no, not quite enough as it soon turned out.
That made someone's numbers at apple like $400 better at least.
And it would probably be better for me financially to wait 4-5 years until I really needed 4TB before upgrading (if I ever needed to, which I might not).
Same thing with RAM. 16GB is proving to simply not be quite enough, so I would have gone with 32GB, but instead I went for 64GB for future-proofing.
I'd much rather have bought 32GB now, and then upgraded to 64GB maybe multiple years down the road when I needed it.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08Q54GHTC/
I'm certainly not enthused about being stuck with current market capacities, but at least I don't feel gouged on price.
Apple-branded SSD module failures are pretty common. Bricked BIOS/EFI images are not.
I've been supporting Mac users for two decades and the only time I've used a hardware SPI flasher was when I needed to pull my firmware image, modify the EFI bootloader to include NVME drivers, and flash it back. It wasn't hard. I attached a clip to the motherboard that connected the chip to a Raspberry Pi.
Seriously, my first mac was an LC. I've never seen a Mac brick itself doing a firmware update.
I had to do that because my Apple SSD died about 5 years into owning the system. That system uses an m2 PCIe port but it's a weird pinout. Apple doesn't sell parts, the local apple authorized shop wanted $250 just for diagnostics, the only thing on ebay were used drives of the same and, and only one company makes an overpriced replacement aftermarket drive for Apple's weird pre-NVME pcie storage connector and they have compatibility issues, underperform compared to much cheaper standard NVME drives, etc.
Thankfully, you can plug in a standard NVME drive via a $10 adapter from ebay.
I was back in business for a fraction of what a used 512GB Apple drive would have cost me, with twice the storage and even more speed over the already fast Apple module. But I had to pull NVME drivers from a later revision of the system and flash them to my ROM.
What pisses me off the most in the whole thing is that Samsung and Apple designed the drive such that when it runs out of write cycles, it completely fails; it doesn't even show up on the PCIe bus.
I'm typing this now on that very system, which is now almost exactly 8 years old. Do you think there will be 8 year old T2 macs? Not if they see daily use.
Repeat after me: user storage for a computer should never be permanently attached.
> This kind of failure (high voltage parts close to low voltage ones, close to liquid damage prone areas, without any underfilling) is documented by Louis Rossmann.
> It is, however, not always feasible or possible to entirely prevent.
It is 100% feasible/possible to entirely prevent.
Don't permanently attach storage on non-mobile devices.
Use conformal coating, something Apple could definitely afford to do with their profit margin on these machines. Even if they just coated the high voltage stuff. In fact, there's no reason T2 mac owners can't buy a can of conformal spray off Digikey or Mouser and do it themselves.
Don't put high voltage components near low voltage ones; especially ones that have user data and are non-replaceable. There's a reason Apple used to have a board for the DC input.
Every T2 mac has a finite lifetime before it becomes completely useless scrap thanks to SSD wear. And it's even worse for the M1 people because reportedly they do a great job of wearing out their SSDs.
This isn't about boot flash reliability or tiny increments in security-for-user-privacy. It's about slowly walling everyone in. Every new update of MacOS, every new hardware update - has put another brick in the wall.
Look at how much TLC NAND has improved in the last ~5 years, and ask yourself if QLC will improve as much. It probably will.
[1] https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000132453/how-to-re...
Are you trolling? The primary argument is data recovery. Anything on laptop can die: charging port, motherboard... With soldered ssd your data are gone! You need to resolder SSD into exact same machine type, it may take 5 weeks if you are lucky!
It takes 5 minutes to swap normal SSD into new machine and reboot! Maybe 1 hour if you have to go into shop!
Anyway, it is stupid argument. It is like saying car does not need spare tire, because wheels are welded to save 10 ounces on bolts.
Stop conflating the issue with backups, the 2 have nothing to do with each other. Even if you take regular backups you can and will lose critical data when any $5 part on your $3-4k machine goes bad.
Amazing how far people will go to defend Apple.
T2 could have been designed to store / recover the rom in an SPI flash too. It's just cheaper to store it on the SSD
I had to flash the T2 to do a Bug Sur update on my 2018 Mac Mini a couple weeks ago. The flash failed and bricked the machine.
Sent the machine in for service and the entire logic board was replaced under warranty, the machine was at least 2 years out of warranty as far as I know. This makes me think failed flashes are a known issue?
We've turned several potential failure points resulting in data loss into almost every component on the board failing resulting in data loss.
We all know how much they charge for a full board replacement though and why this change will reflect well in Tim Cook's charts.
If you don't back up your data outside of a single entity, you will lose that data eventually.
iCloud is the obvious choice for critical data, within the Apple ecosystem. Outside of one of the cloud services, it's the good old method of having some form of archival media to keep it on, which was the whole draw of the cloud services, when they first came out.
Its a ridiculous decision by Apple made purely for profit
The correct approach to data integrity is backups, not trying to scrape bits from something that smoke has escaped from.
If your data is on a single device, you will eventually lose that data. Some people haven't experienced it yet, but it's a known truth that whole industries have processes around.
…the flying fuck?!
I stopped reading here. I was all for your comment until I heard this nonsense.
…in what world is this acceptable? What computer have you personally purchased between 1980-2010 that could not have had this core essential part simply replaced if it did not function correctly?
I’m not sorry for complaining; either. I’ve been used to the $2k-4k machines I invest in to have replaceable parts that I can fix in the city or town (that may not have an Apple Store) I am in without any excess effort or extended time.
This has been the standard for decades. It is not unreasonable to ask for an offering from this company whom I’ve almost exclusively purchased hardware from for more than 15 years.
It’s a fucking huge deal if I can’t simply boot from an external drive if my main one doesn’t work - mainly because the internal one can’t be replaced!
I mean; I get defending Apple - I’m in their camp - but this is just absolute nonsense. Yes. That’s a huge fucking deal. A deal-breaker; even.
Furthermore, do you really believe it's a realistic scenario that a customer would be buying a top-of-the-line flagship device for which portability is a main selling feature, only to be carrying around some aftermarket storage everywhere to boot it with when it begins to fail?
I don't travel constantly, just occasionally. I am typically close to my external clone. If I was going to be on extended travel, yes, I would bring the external clone SSD with me.
That's a pretty big assumption.
The SSD is the component that is most likely to fail next to the battery.
So effectively this makes the lifetime of the computer the lifetime of the SSD, which is just one shade away from planned obsolescence due to the write limitations of SSDs.
edit: ChuckNorris89 wrote pretty much the same but four hours earlier.
I don't believe it. I've had several SSDs fail, and the rest of the system was fine in every case. SSDs can fail for lots of reasons. My wife's laptop had an SSD fail (Hynix). Unclear why it failed but the laptop was less than 2 years old. SSDs have super complicated firmware on them and can get in a permanently bricked state after sudden loss of power (for example). I swapped her SSD out with a WD one and it's been good now for 5+ years.
This is entirely unfounded. Storage units are expendable, but the rest of the system lasts a lot longer.
Why not feasible or possible? Laptops are not even used in any harsh conditions at all, they die off on the most minuscule water ingress. Take a washing machine - full of electronics with proper power lines and microprocessors - lots and lots of vibration and humidity. While washing machine PCBs tend to be silicone potted for instance, yet conformal coating goes a very long way compared to bare copper and solder joints. Putting high voltage power lines next to lower one is a rookie mistake, every single wall charger has an air gap between primary and secondary (or at least it should) and decent creepage distance. Alternatively they could have added protection devices (e.g. MOVs, diodes) to clamp down the voltages.
I work on embedded systems and even the really cheap memory never fails on quantity of thousands of devices if it isn't regularly written to. I has become extremely reliable. Self-checks are still in place of course.
In any case it should not prevent external booting or if it does Apple should just supply the needed files for sensible restore options.
Although, true, I suspect their modern stuff will never reach the same point.
They publish a full disassembly guide[0], so I'm reasonably sure the whole thing is repairable and upgradable if necessary. Lots of options for custom build at order time including coreboot. I'm a bit hesitant about a 1920x1080 display but otherwise extremely tempted.
[0] https://support.starlabs.systems/kb/guides/starbook-mk-v-com...
It looks almost perfect, but only having a single USB-C port is a disappointing choice :(
None of these swappable parts are unique aside from the processor (mine is soldered), I can replace all my parts and my laptop cost under $200.
Also while this was going on, they never did any of this to Thinkpads.
The computer now lives with my mom, who needs a simple but reliable device. The i5 was sold on ebay for a few bucks to some lad or lasse who may have needed it for a cheap laptop build. Decade old computers aren't vastly different from today in terms of day to day use. Capabilities and high performance is one thing, but using devices longer, and upgrading entire systems less frequently is both better for your wallet, and better for the environment.
How often does your mother use that computer? Did the performance matter to her at all? Even if you swapped it back to the old i5 with the SSD I doubt much of a difference would be noticed.
Between the fact that many of them work without issue for years, and the fact that an new equivalent to your 2011 i3 becomes exponentially cheaper over time, repairing it will never be worth it.
A Raspberry PI 4 is a functional computer but costs less than just the CPU of that i3 based machine while trouncing it in performance and power efficiency.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i3-2100 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16396722
The assumption that tech gets exponentially cheaper over time, ie Moore’s Law, only applies to a portion of the hardware, one the CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage. It doesn’t apply to the glue that holds it all together, the integrated display, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. In fact, a lot of webcams are actually worse than they were 10 years ago. AND Moore’s Law has significantly slowed. Apple Silicon is a big improvement, but this is a step change, and it’s not likely to be a continuation of the 18 Month Moore’s Law doubling time of years past.
x86 isn’t what it was, MS made Windows 11 be able to run android apps, consumers don’t care about x86 software anymore. That’s been true since ChromeOS had been used more often since browsers mattered more than programs that only ran on windows.
Do developers typically use ChromeOS to do development? I don’t think it can run, say, LabView or Matlab (the latter it MIGHT be able to, with some extra work, but not natively). It’s all a pretty big headache to use a device for serious work that is optimized for passive consumption and web browsing and social media. Everything you want to do that isn’t in a web browser is a pain.
Most people don't need to run those programs, they're niche, and the normal consumer doesn't care.
And the "extras" you mention also get cheaper due to economies of scale. 4k 30hz monitors used to run just under $1000. Now 4k 60hz monitors run just over $200.
-
At the end of the day you cannot compete with how much better we get at making things over time right now.
Broken hardware is only a leading cause of replacing smartphones, and even the most repair unfriendly device can generally be fixed in 30 minutes at your local mall.
Now I'm sure there are families with less money who might think differently but it's definitely not straightforward in general to hand down old computer-related stuff.
You’re stating effort like it’s hard to unscrew a laptop and seat in a new part, which you’ll need to do for framework too.
With two exceptions: - Freedom of choice over operating system - Freedom of choice over repair components
From the looks of it, there doesn't appear to be much of a detriment to it over other laptops.
Dell and HP have plenty of aftermarket parts and don’t limit my OS either.
They start at $999 and the base is 8GB, 256GB SSD, with an i5 and you need to wait with a deposit and it only has 1 year of warranty with no strong aftermarket products. None of these are incentivizing for performance, for repairable, or for cost.
Framework may not be for the purpose of upgrading a laptop incrementally for ten years, but it has the core competency of intending to let you repair every component of your laptop as needed, while having the profile of a slim but powerful machine. They are the anti-apple from that perspective.
Your $200 laptop is not as good as the Framework laptop. You either bought a Chromebook, or you bought used meaning someone else ate depreciation, or you're comparing apples to oranges.
If you're the type of person that needs the _fastest_ computer then yeah obviously you're upgrading every year. Or if you work on large codebases, etc.
But if you don't care about that, you can easily go 4+ years with your laptop. Yes computers have gotten faster, but the internet is still usable on a 10 year old machine.
I've replaced my battery once already, but consider your keyboard/screen are likely things to break at any point in time with accidents.
And we're comparing this to apple, a company that has been basically DRM'ing components - even if you can buy the replacement you can't use it without it being "programmed" by apple.
EDIT: Also note that the bare minimum models from 10 years ago are likely too slow nowadays, I mean to compare this to the medium-upper range devices of the time, potentially with relatively low cost upgrades like an SSD.
[0] https://mntre.com/reform2/handbook/parts.html#battery-packs
The thinkpads esp batteries from 2013 suck them most. DRM, and expensive, 2012 has no DRM and 2014 and up has way cheaper aftermarket.
I keep it around because it works as a kiosk in my recording studio, but that's about it.
We're at the point where computers, cars and phones are good enough and commoditized to the point where they should be lasting 10+ years. Instead, we're moving toward a 4-year maximum with everything sealed up and soldered, so you can throw it on the e-waste pile and replace it to keep "infinite" growth chugging. The iMac is particularly offensive.
What Foundation is doing should be the norm, by law.
Just because you don't personally see any benefit to the advancements being made doesn't mean others don't. They're certainly still performant enough to be useful but even something like h.264 decoding puts a huge strain on my haswell laptop, which is a trivial task to newer ones thanks to advancements in chips. This isn't even an uncommon task. Anyone who watches videos online probably benefits from this, especially when it comes to laptops which are concerned with battery life.
> We're at the point where computers, cars and phones are good enough and commoditized to the point where they should be lasting 10+ years.
Cars do last 10+ years. I'm driving around in a 17 year old vehicle and it works just fine. But I don't think that means we should halt all progress in vehicles. It's still using gasoline and not running on electric motors, after all. At some point down the road perhaps we'll see commoditization of batteries in the auto industry but that's not where we're at today, where the vast majority of vehicles on the road still run on gas.
> Instead, we're moving toward a 4-year maximum with everything sealed up and soldered, so you can throw it on the e-waste pile and replace it to keep "infinite" growth chugging. The iMac is particularly offensive.
If the iMac is offensive to you, then don't buy it. All these environmental arguments on this website always come off as extremely disingenuous when they pair it with their solution being imposing restrictions rather than creating a superior product.
> What Foundation is doing should be the norm, by law.
I can't stand these authoritarian takes. No one is forcing you to partake and there are options available to people that hold certain ideologies. The idea that you must impose that on everyone by law is absurd.
I never had that problem even before haswell. They have hardware decoding built in, thats probably caused by another issue. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration
I agree about not enforcing viewpoints on others. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
The X230 was having some weird power/sensor issue so I ordered a replacement motherboard for like $40 CAD in case it dies. It could be years before I need it, but like, this stuff costs peanuts and I am so much more comfortable using a computer I know I can easily maintain (and has excellent performance to boot).
Bit of a devil's advocate here, but by doing this they prevent themselves getting blamed when low quality replacement parts are cranked out on the cheap by companies who don't care if their customers' customers die in a fire.
The headline if an iPhone with a third party battery exploding and injuring someone will be "This iPhone Exploded, You Won't Believe Her Injuries", not "iPhone with Knock Off Battery Explodes".
Apple wouldn't be as profitable as they are if they weren't anticipating things like this and planning for it years in advance.
I beg to differ. I swapped my 2011 i5-2500k for a 2012 i7-3770 and it was a nice and cheap upgrade.
Used hardware is cheap, there is no reason to not upgrade it all the way.
This isn't like a desktop where all the parts are bought from different manufacturers and assembled by an OEM or by you. The laptop is a complete kit made by a single manufacturer.
It's a new company and have not been tested yet in terms of backwards-compatibility and ongoing inventory. But just because you can't swap parts in most laptops doesn't really imply that you shouldn't be able to.
Don’t be fooled by the marketing, many Dell, HP and Lenovo laptops have those benefits on top of a huge aftermarket which framework doesn’t have and can’t leverage. You can way cheaper buy a broken laptop of the same model and fix yours with it whereas framework will only have their niche market which won’t be cheaper.
suggesting that people who embrace "right to repair" have a psychopathology is the only psychological blindspot I see here.
wanting to enlarge your memory or your drive storage is completely normal in the present day as these devices increase in size dramatically well within the lifetime of a notebook computer
I put some of the old parts together with some old desktop SSD in my old E540 and gave it my gf, who previously used an x220 with upgraded SSD and RAM. The E540 already has a new display, too.
I do replace and change and upgrade all these parts to be able to use a cheap laptop over many years, just like I do with a desktop.
All my all Macs sold for great value after I was done with them or got a better one, even with an expired guarantee. It took like a week or two to sell them. I'm still stuck with Thinkpads because the used market is shit.
My last Thinkpad I got kinda impulsively as a workstation for Ableton is my deepest regret. It was a year ago, the Intel MacBooks where not cutting it, it's a great machine and was like 2600 and now I want to go back to an M1 MacBook Pro and it's impossible to sell it anywhere, I feel I just threw away money. A four year old MacBook Pro is worth more on the Apple exchange program than my Thinkpad, it's really sad.
I'm thinking about plugging it to the TV and using it as a Steam console or something like that, my girlfriend games. But it's a fucking expensive console.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Early+2015+...
I only comment because the jump between dual & quad core is a pretty big one, as is the presumed jump to newer chips with 6, 8, and 16 core processors in modern machines.
Dual core has remained surprisingly usable for light tasking though. Whether it is a well-loved MacBook or a battle-scarred ThinkPad from that era, Intel's dual core CPUs have held up well (even if it means they didn't feel the need to push their CPU design as much in the subsequent years.)
As for memory, DRAM doesn't really have a particularly long lifetime (iirc design life is something like 75k hours), and that certainly shows in servers - memory modules start to fail a lot after the four year mark. And here I don't think I ever had a machine where I didn't upgrade memory at least once.
Yes.
Personal laptops and desktops have become things you replace at car intervals now. And phones are starting to approach that too.
Then again, their tower is exorbitant, so...maybe not.
I assume that if your laptop wasn't working and all you had to do was take a single screw out then you'd do it, rather than taking it to a repair shop or buy another.
Or if the repair cost was extreme, but it was relatively easy to fix it yourself.
Your point of view is valid of course. At the same time I believe many people don't have sufficient money to allow them the luxury of never repairing anything themselves.
Having hardware that is repairable is rarely a problem for the end-user who doesn't want to repair it themselves. For users who DO want to repair it themselves, having hardware that's designed to be hard to repair is a huge burden.
Even a decade ago, the rewards for being able to repair computers were pretty substantial. Your computer was likely to have routine failures and you could probably save a lot of money doing piecemeal replacements. I think those things are still true for people who are trying to stay on the bleeding edge of computer hardware or use unusual setups, but for 95%+ of folks it is probably going to be a net loss.
For most people performing most tasks, they are better off taking the "one-screw" computer into the shop because it would take them hours and hours to do the research figuring out if it really is a "one-screw" problem. If you are wrong you could seriously damage your hardware. In addition, because hardware that is sufficient for most purposes and inexpensive is widely available - there is very limited utility in learning those skills otherwise.
If you want to learn about and repair computers as a hobby that's great! I do it and I enjoy it. But it's not a "smart financial decision."
I just leave it to the professionals because it saves me money/time. I have no doubts I could do my own repair but from this vantage point it's just not a sound investment.
Some people have more money than time, some have more time than money. And there are a million other factors too.
Not OP but I have a really high threshold for this. I don't want to own a house and rent because of this.
So the actual DIY repairability of laptops just doesn't matter for the vast majority of people. What Framework is doing is awesome amazing though and I hope it does encourage companies to make easier to repair computers to lower the actual cost of repairs.
My minimum threshold for reaching out to a repair technician is 1) the problem must not have a solution that is easily found through an internet search, and 2) the solution must require more time and effort than the time to get it to and from the repair shop.
What saddens me is how few people will do the internet search before giving up.
Yes, I'm tech-savvy so I'm speaking from a position of privilege, but if you're looking for "What's wrong with this thing?" how can you NOT think to search the internet?
Apple's laptop is really limited in this way. The older generation of Apple's laptop allowed you to upgrade RAM and HD.
Watching videos, browsing internet, sharing pictures and videos, video calling and basic spreadsheet/word processing needs no upgrades.
I use a 2015 MacBook Air and I don’t need an upgrade, and I probably do more on my laptop than 80% of people.
And also those who very frequently do backups, because restoring the data from a failed SSD would be problematic.
It doesn't matter whether you want to repair it or not, in the long term you can only lose when you don't care how hard it is to repair.
https://community.frame.work/t/free-the-ec-and-coreboot-only...
I hate the soldering, too. I'm just offering an explanation that may make some sense given the context.
This was pre-2013. So perhaps the proprietary connector was a reaction to the cable?
You could make it so there’s a break glass copy of iBoot on another chip, but then that’s something they can’t update if there’s a bug.
To be fair if you or your company are dumb enough to buy these devices your probably also of a mind to take it in for expensive repairs.
Its perfect business logic from the fruity chaps.
The SuperDuper blog says:
> Note that, as I indicated above, M1 Macs can't readily boot from external drives. There are things you can do, if you have an external Thunderbolt 3 drive (USB-C isn't sufficient), but even that won't work if the internal drive is dead. Unless things change, bootable backups are basically a thing of the past on M1-based Macs. [0]
in a January article, and I haven't seen anything that contradicts it in more recent articles. Mind linking?
(Note that booting from USB-C is now supported on AS Macs, but booting when the internal drive is dead is not)
[0]: https://www.shirtpocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/commen...
Instead of having a SPI flash memory with the firmware they’ve gone ahead and merged that into a single flash memory.
It’s weird because we are used to see disks as independent modules, but for these devices that’s simply a useless distinction, something that we keep for legacy reasons, not because it provides any meaningful advantage.
Storage tech is still advancing at a decent clip. In 5 years, there will probably be 4-6TB drives on the market with 2-4x the throughput for the same price as 1TB drives today.
Because apple products hold value so well, I just sell me 2 year old stuff and it can really knock down cost of the new stuff.
Apple devices will stop holding value so well the less repairable they get, which in turn will also increase your costs.
This is really the proof point.
This is a combination of apples total system engineering and software update story. You don't need applecare to get updtes on an iphone.
For example, looking at recently sold items on Ebay - Iphone 5S 32GB is going for $100. That's an 8 year old phone.
Take your 8 year old HTC - nothing close to that.
A 2021 iPhone will hold less of its initial value in 2029 than the mentioned 5S holds today.
For those of your who suspect that these types of claims are a lie, they basically are. If you have elderly relatives, they often DO NOT want to upgrade their phone once they've got it working. A great gift is actually to take it into an apple store and pay for the "impossible" battery replacement for them.
It's $49-$69. You get a fresh new battery, all labor as well. OEM parts. My wife also doesn't care about the new phone, this is a nice and pretty cheap way to keep her old one ticking over.
Happy to do a comparison in 6 years on a Huawei vs Apple phone in terms of resale.
One thing to be careful of. I've been burned by used apple phones with second hand batteries in them. Apple now gives you a warning - worth checking for that if you buy used.
I get that for some people swappable disks are great, but those people couldn’t really use pre-M1 macs. The only change is that instead of two different interfaces for non volatile storage, now there’s one.
I don't need a faster computer, I need air that will still be breathable in 20 years. My next computer will likely be whatever 5-10 year old laptop I can snatch up on it's way to the landfill. It definitely won't be an M1.
> The new MacBook Pro has been carefully designed with the environment in mind. The enclosure is now made with 100% recycled aluminum. And we use recycled rare earth elements in all the magnets in the product. MacBook Pro is free of numerous harmful substances and all the virgin wood fiber in our packaging comes from responsibly-managed forests.
Other notable objectives: 1. full carbon neutrality across their supply chain and services by 2030, inclusive of the use of the device. 2. Recycling and refurb program 3. Circular sourcing (e.g reclamation.)
You concerns are valid, but the princess is in another castle.
Many solutions have been repeatedly suggested to Apple to mitigate the e-waste damage from this without compromising their supposed dedication to iCloud-locking to prevent theft; they have fallen on deaf ears.
That iPhone torturing robot [0] that they demoed a few years back may have seemed a bit silly, but I don't think any other electronics manufacturer is concerned about finding a const-effective way of separating the screws from other metals before recycling everything.
I'm glad apple is exerting engineering resources to make their products recyclable and out of recycled materials - but I also can't ignore that linking the lifespan of the entire computer to the lifespan of the SSD is going to result in many unnecessarily discarded computers.
If 75% of the materials are recycled (generous, I couldn't find recent numbers but in 2010 they were recycling 28%) that means one landfilled mac for every 4 recycled. If a machine is killed by it's SSD, that's at LEAST a quarter of a mac in the landfill.
And that’s to say nothing of the extra materials that would be required to house a socket for a separate SSD board which 90% of users would never avail themselves of.
They have for sure increased the recycling rate massively since 2010. Lisa Jackson went from head of the EPA to Apple in 2013, and that’s also when they started to really focus on device longevity, and fostering the pass your old phone down to your kids or up to your parents plus trade-in and refurbish models.
> After taking into account drive age and equalizing it between SSDs and HDDs, we can see that the results have changed significantly. SSDs aren't that far behind hard drives in failure rate, with a 1.05% annualized failure rate compared to 1.38%.
But it hardly matters. If the failure rate is 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 - either way there are a staggering amount of M1 macs that will be trashed every year because of failed SSDs.
You are right, the standard on-board connectors are extra material. It'd be a fun engineering challenge to reduce the non-recyclable material cost of standard connectors.
A modular design means a failed SSD only sends the SSD - not the entire product - into the waste (recycle?) chain.
Apple has a lot of engineering resources, and the fact that they are not spending those resources to make a computer that will still be in service in 10, 15, or 20 years is the problem.
But just something else to keep in mind: at mass production scales certain choices that may seem less useful for repair, often greatly enhance reliability. eg soldered on componentry - such things don’t present an issue to the official refurbishment programme however they present a challenge to the incredibly small % of people who want to open their laptop for amateur repair.
That's some premium-quality snark, right there.
Too bad my next Mac won't be so flexible!
> iBoot is the main bootloader on M1 machines. It is small. It cannot understand external storage. It does not support USB. It does not have a UI. All it can do is boot from internal storage, and show an Apple logo, a progress bar, and a few error messages.
IIRC he’s said before that iBoot doesn’t even have keyboard support; it can tell if you’re holding down the power button to enter recovery mode, but that’s it. There is no workaround for this; it is not possible to boot over USB if the bootloader does not speak USB.
The bigger issue is that when the drive breaks, they are essentially unrepairable. The only option is getting Apple to swap out the motherboard with another one. On other devices, I'd just swap an M.2 drive. So it's more of a cost issue.
This article caused a bit more research summarised as: When that SSD dies the system is dead along with its contents. No particular recovery feasibly possible.
So, yeah, that SSD is a cache of the user data for editing local and a disposable boot device. The whole machine is a disposable client device with a built-in obsolescence time line.
Good to know.
(Add it to the list of other machines with the same design goals)
I've had a SSD fail and it was covered under warranty. Wasn't wear related and it was barely used. A month or so old.
So yeah, SSD failure is realistic for me as an issue.
YMMV
I'm not sure what else to say. I know that SSD fail from direct experience. This doesn't mesh with you. I get it.
So yeah a Mac or other device with a soldered SSD is less trustworthy.
I'm not even talking backup as best practice or some good idea. I'm actually saying that due to this pattern of unreplaceable SSDs, the cloud copy IS the primary copy. The local copy on SSD is now just a cached file. That is a very big difference.
This isn't even an Apple thing. But they are one of the first.
Don't forget external drives for data!
One was a windows box with a generic Kingston 480GB.
The other was in a 2014 MacBook Air.
In both cases, both completely dead with no data recovery possible.
There was a video of Louis Rossmann where he explained why he didn't want to do component level repairs on new macs if it was RAM or SSD. I trust his expertise on the matter.
I wonder how they will run their diagnistics in the Apple Store if they can't boot their diagnostics tool.
My 2013 Mac Pro had an SSD failure so I replaced it with a standard M.2 drive and an adapter. Can’t upgrade.
"Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed"
Cool!!
However, there is no reasonable justification (as far as I can tell) for why the SSD would have to be soldered onto the same SoC, and even less reasonable justification for why the iBoot stuff couldn't be located on an EEPROM or something of the sort, like a secondary BIOS/UEFI.
It just boggles my mind why Apple would go so far to limit storage options and even make a straight up bad architectural decision (SSD gone ? You can't boot the 4k€ machine. What ? You bought it 4 years ago ? Well, tough luck.)
Using these "stupid" and "unjustifiable" approaches, apple has delivered highly reliable / fast machines to lots of users. They come with applecare if you want, which gets you walk in fix/replace at their stores.
Note, they've already don't this on iphones - millions shipped.
They are going for as much reliability / speed out of this for the 90%+ of users who are not going in to manually swap out SSDs. They are also huge on part simplification, they probably got rid of the bios flash and are just using the SSD flash.
My own predication, as in many other areas others will COPY this "stupid" design - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. My guess is others will also stop shipping another set of chargers with everything (again copying apple).
They now also sell indefinite applecare, by getting normal breakage down low enough you can keep apple care as long as you want if you keep paying.
1) I agree that some integration is intimately tied to how well the machines performs. I also referenced this in my comment. What I don't agree to is the SSD being soldered on. It uses the same PCIe lanes it would use if it was swappable ! As for the "stupid" approach, it really doesn't make much sense to tie the capability of the machine FUNCTIONING to a storage that you cannot change (and that is bound to break eventually from wear & tear, because it's an SSD).
2) The iPhone are a different story. It's a different requirement all together. You have to fit EVERYTHING in a couple of mm2 of surface. That's a very tough requirement, and everyone understands that you can't have the ability of swapping an SSD and having the portability that the iPhone offers at the same time. The same is simply not true for a professional laptop.
3) I sincerely don't see how an iBoot-inspired design would replace UEFI anytime soon. The latter is more powerful as far as I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong).
4) The "support" plan you're describing is in my eyes extortion. If I can buy an SSD for 100€ on Amazon, and replace it down the line 5 years from now, it really doesn't compare to paying 200€ / year for an insurance, when all it covers is bringing your laptop to its original state. A swappable SSD can be expanded down the line when storage gets denser / cheaper.
All-in-all, I do agree and fully support a degree of integration that's backed by technical motives (i.e. Otherwise unattainable performance), but when the motives start turning into more lock-in and sell-up motives, that's where my support ends.
I genuinely do not understand how you could view this as a "good" thing. As for the 90% users who are not going to manually swap out SSDs, it would still be the same ! They won't have to touch them !
Bad news, data recovery will be hard / impossible. Good news, if you sell the thing on pretty unlikely next person will get your data or can remove the "drive" and try to crack it offline. Not sure how imaging a mac drive works these days either?
* Any connector is a potential failure point. Generally with a connector you double the connection points (ie, SSD -> Connector -> now soldered to board). So if you are soldering anyways, and can solder to board directly, then you save yourself both a part and a bunch of connection points. This is good news for everything (signal loss, noise / RFI / durability etc). When you warranty and offer applecare on expensive devices, you want these warrenty claims to be low.
* Apple's mode has been to integrate / tighten things up - that is their design philosophy. They are going to integrate as many chips into one as they can (ie, you won't be even able to unsolder a T2 chip because there won't be one). There stuff, again, is meant to be used as an integrated whole, there is no mix / match here.
* They are going to solder memory as well down - you won't be able to replace that either. Then they are going to try and integrate memory into same package as CPU / GPU. I realize this makes folks mad, but it's what they do and it's been very successful for them. I think some of their LPDDR stuff only comes in a solder on format (and M1 is going towards even more integration - I actually like mix and match on my desktops so don't use macs so not following so closely but I know they were thinking of literally not even soldering but integrating fully).
* I saw first hand a number of claims BTW where replacement batteries had been put into macbooks and iphones as part of resales and people then went and complained to apple or about apple online when those batteries had problems. I think even when replaceable, they've added warnings in these cases. But it goes to show the quality in the mix and match department is hit and miss.
Frankly, it's probably 95%+ of their millions / billions of devices that won't get an upgrade. They've done same with airpods, no removable batteries. A ton of companies, again, or COPYING these designs.
They are CONSTANTLY pushing down part counts.
The claim that there is "no reason" for this is ridiculous. There are at least 10 good businesses reasons, from part count / inventory complexity, to assembly time, to durability to get rid of parts, connectors, ribbon cables etc etc.
The best part is no part.
And yes, it makes folks putting in (often crap) replacement parts and reselling things (without disclosure) harder too. Does apple care about that? No. And there is a good business reason for them not to care, their users want a trusted device. Apple brand strength is at record highs.
As speeds scale, bus speeds scale, frankly apple is going to have the advantage if they can tie things in better. At some point you can't run PCI full speed over things like a replaceable cable, the tolerances are too tight (16GT/s etc).
On HN it's like reading of folks who are used to stone blocks, very modular and stackable and replaceable, yes, complain about something like concrete with rebar in it.
You really realize the mentality advantage apple has when you come here. While other companies are dumping tons of parts, connectors, EEPROM flash ships (which BTW can brick the system if the update doesn't work) Apple is streamlining and integrating.
Given the countless times I have warned about the risks of going 'all in' on an Apple Silicon Mac and now they realise.
Good luck with your files if the internal hard drive is dead. Consider creating regular backups otherwise your can say goodbye to your files.
No thanks and absolutely no deal to that.
If my MBP fails, I'll walk into the Apple Store and swap for a new one, hook up my TM backup and be back working in an hour or so.
I've always, always assumed that the internal drive can fail at any moment and take every last byte of data with it.
Beside theses laptop are designed to be used (if configured so) with full disk encryption using a strong key stored inside a secure enclave on the cpu. If something is amiss the data is lost, they could almost say it's a feature (but they probably won't as is would be seen as a bug by the majority of people hence this thread).