Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokamak-teapot | Hacker News Reader

Did the question about Apple’s new laptops and their apparently high writes in general usage get resolved? And was it incorrect/misleading reporting, or somehow not a problem (life of SSD still likely to be ‘long enough’) or is it still potentially the case that the machines will be ‘bricked’ due to the non-replaceable SSD dying early?

I don’t mind having to have the SSD replaced by Apple if the cost is reasonable, just as I do with batteries, but would be good to know what to expect.

View on HN

According to the guy behind Asahi Linux, there was no misreporting. It was an actual bug and those excessive write operations happened. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1396374313591140357?ref_...

While I don't like it being that way, I can definitely see the benefits of non-upgradeable RAM. The performance of the SOC on my "lowly", entry-level M1 Air is out of this world.

But an SSD that's glued on to the motherboard has 0 benefits that I can think of and basically only serves to give any computer a hard coded expiration date. And thinness is not an excuse. There are computers as thin as the Air that have removable storage drives.

Not to mention that thinness is not a thing in case of Mac Mini.

"Thin" is also no longer a word I'd use to describe the current M1 Macbook Pros; they're significantly thicker and heavier than their Intel counterparts of old (bigger battery required to achieve that legendary battery life?)

> significantly thicker and heavier than their Intel counterparts

That's really hyperbolic.

The 13" M1 MBP is 0.7mm thicker and 30g heavier than the equivalent Intel of not so old, 2015-2019 when the dimensions dropped to the lower bound.

I have both a 2019 Intel and 2022 M1, and the M1 is more than 0.5KG heavier and more than 0.7mm thicker.

I was surprised to realize they'd made the newer machines significantly thicker and heavier. Both machines have their pros and cons, neither is perfect or terrible.

All specs are available here [0]. Even if you compare different sizes the 14" M1 is still just ~230g heavier than the 13" Intel. At the same size (13") the differences are what I put above. "More than 0.5kg" means almost half the weight of the laptop. You need a 16" M1 Pro to get there.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300

Oops, I'd meant to specify, they are both 16".

Thank you, buran777!

At 16" it would still put them at a barely noticeable 100g (at 2kg) and 0.6mm difference. Even after Apple rid itself of Ive's obsession with thinness they would never go for "significantly thicker and heavier" than the previous model in a portable device.

Can't really think of many (any?) laptops that have this mix of thin, light, high performance, and long battery life.

I agree, I'd prefer longer battery life, and better performance in a slight weight and thickness tradeoff.

Sadly, I've tried PC laptops (Surface tablet, Surface laptops and Asus laptops) and the performance (speed, thermals and battery life) are still nowhere near the Apple M1 hardware. I wish there was better price/performance from apple, but until the PC world has a strong contender, I don't see that happening.

At least Intel has strong competition from AMD now :)

People complained because the thin ones didn't have the ports they wanted.

And they're still complaining because one of the ports they wanted was the M.2 slot for the SSD.

Some things are worth more than saving 10 grams.

Yeah, that's what kills me.

And the only viable mitigation strategies involve giving Apple more money.

Spec'ing a larger onboard SSD to spread out the writes for hopefully longer endurance should be effective.

And, perhaps, opting for more RAM to reduce VM writes to disk? I'm not sure if that's effective. Perhaps the resulting sleep file will be larger as well, resulting on more writes overall. I'm sure somebody can chime in on that?

At least the newer models have SD card slots; can use SD cards for semidurable storage. They are obviously unsuitable for some things, but fine for others.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but how does non-modular RAM improve performance?

Less Physical Distance should create less latency, plus an optimized profile for one list of model of banks vs the diversity in the modula industry with different clock speeds and latencies.

Is there any actual evidence that this marginally lower latency makes any real life difference?

And why would the laptops suddenly ship with a variety of modules if they're replaceable? You can still ship it with the same modules in every laptop and get those benefits. And if someone upgrades it, that's still an improvement over no upgrade path, so this makes no sense to me.

> Is there any actual evidence that this marginally lower latency makes any real life difference?

Yes, compare the specs of DDR4 and DDR5 to LPDDR4X and LPDDR5X. The latter are significantly higher performance.

This is also the reason that Dell recently introduced CAMM memory modules -- it is an attempt to address the packaging bottleneck that is limiting the speed of DIMMs currently.

The amount of time that it takes a signal to go down a wire has been relevant for DRAM for a while now. If you look at the traces on the board of any relatively modern computer, you'll see some that take circuitous routes, for the purpose of having the signals arrive at the CPU at the same time. You can see this even on relatively low performance devices like a Raspberry Pi. https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Rasp...

> If you look at the traces on the board of any relatively modern computer, you'll see some that take circuitous routes, for the purpose of having the signals arrive at the CPU at the same time.

Having all the signals arrive at the same time isn't the same thing as having the signals arrive soon.

Correct. My point was to simply illustrate that the fractions of time involved are small enough that trace length matters.

High bandwidth, low latency unified memory is a central component of the M series architecture and a key reason those chips perform so well at their power profile.

I'm not sure what "evidence" I could provide that would convince you since we don't have high latency Apple chips to benchmark against. However, there's a reason VRAM is soldered onto GPUs.

Soldered RAM doesn't really help much with latency; most of the DRAM latency ocurrs within the chip itself. Where soldering RAM does help is with reaching higher clock speeds with lower power (in phones and laptops), or with reaching clock speeds that are impossible to shove through a DIMM connector (GPUs).

That higher frequency helps phones save on pin count by using a narrow memory bus, and allows laptops to have lots of memory bandwidth to feed the integrated graphics when using typical laptop/desktop bus widths.

> But an SSD that's glued on to the motherboard has 0 benefits

It's because, since the T2 chip and going on with Apple Silicon, they're not SSDs in the NVMe sense. They're an Apple-specific technology derived from their Anobit acquisition, that only look like an NVMe device to the upper layers.

> While I don't like it being that way, I can definitely see the benefits of non-upgradeable RAM. The performance of the SOC on my "lowly", entry-level M1 Air is out of this world.

It's not even clear that this has a performance benefit on typical workloads. At release the M1 was non-trivially faster than contemporaneous PC mobiles, but its competition was also using TSMC 7nm and DDR4.

Now we've seen Zen3+ mobiles on 6nm with DDR5 and upgradeable memory and they're about the same speed for nearly everything despite the M1 being on 5nm, which basically proves they didn't need to solder the RAM.

It was fixed more than a year ago in macOS 11.4

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/04/apple-resolves-m1...

The SSD is soldered onto the motherboard on all new apple laptops and has been for years, there is no replacing it without the whole board. Which can be 70% of the cost of a new laptop.

Whatever ram and SSD config you buy when new is how it will be forever.

That's reason enough for me to avoid these products. (I recognize that others may have different preferences).

I have several old (5-15yrs) laptops still providing useful service. None of them is on the original HDD/SSD.

This is the exact reason I am currently very uncomfortable with the idea of a new Macbook Pro for my own business use.

On the one had it absolutely makes life a lot easier and all the software I need runs great on it. On the other I would by buying into a device I simply cannot upgrade or maintain myself. This makes me extremely uncomfortable.

I dont want to run Windows as a daily driver since it is really jarring for my personal workflow etc. Yet Linux lacks quite a few of the essential pieces of software I need outside of development. E.g. (Krisp.AI, Reincubate Camo etc)

Rock <--> Hard Place

I was a windows user and thought the same thing for awhile about switching to Linux. I was heavily dependent on Adobe products to create PDF Forms. Then I realized I could use a CRM solution to handle the from creation for me. I wrote about my experience in switching to Linux and so far it is work well for me: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...

Nice piece!

For as often as I've had to upgrade a machine, or had a hardware failure, I'd just choose whatever works best for my daily workflow. An inconvenient fix that takes my computer out of service for a day while I run over to the Apple Store that only happens every few years at most is just not comparable to something that puts a drag on my workflow every single day.

Have you replaced SSD's because of failure or to upgrade? I personally have never seen an internal SSD fail. My 2018 MacBook Pro has had zero issues, and I still use a Samsung Evo 840 SSD from 2013 in one of my PCs.

I'm not agreeing with Apple soldering the SSD to the logic board. But they do seem to be significantly more reliable than hard drives.

Anecdotally, I did have a Samsung T5 go tits up on me not long ago. But that's an external drive. Not from physical abuse, either, it spent its life sitting on my desk.

I've never had any kind of problem with internal SSDs.

Usually to upgrade capacity, but I have had one personal SSD fail (I've used... 30? 35? in the last decade). It was an internal drive, 60 GB OCZ bought in 2012, failed in 2015.

I had 3 SSDs fail in the last 20 or so yeard, 128GB and 256 GB ssds from corsair and one 512, i think that one was samsung, not sure

I actually did have an old 256GB Samsung die on me a few months ago. I’d say it was from 2014ish and had double it’s write endurance.

Similar here - 256GB 830 Pro, lasted damn close to a decade and was in my desktop, then my sons and finally my daughters before it died. Very high writes as well - it was a great SSD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com