Comment by aneutron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aneutron | Hacker News Reader

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You are arguing without any arguments.

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 !

Your assumption is incorrect. The SSD on any Mac with a T2/M1 is not like an NVME SSD you'd pick up from the store. The soldered modules themselves are just NAND storage, the T2/M1 is the actual storage controller. They're literally non-functional otherwise.

My impression was they were also going to try and move the T2 off being a separate (potentially replaceable) chip and integrate it with the M1 - did that happen yet or still to happen? But one thing you get on a mac is basically hardware level security for the SSD.

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?

Yep on M1 macs there is no T2, it's already been integrated.

You are not in the business of shipping a million+ devices.

* 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.

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