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Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

My biggest complaint about Apple and self repair is that it’s nearly impossible to upgrade RAM or storage on the new Apple Silicon macs. This allows Apple to charge high prices on upgrades. Additionally, I would argue that it lowers the expected life of the device as you have no ability to upgrade in the future.

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On the plus side, embedding RAM into SoC is one of the magic tricks of Apple for such massive performance, due to short path lengths. I assume SSD got a similar treatment.

An 16 GB MacBook Pro can live as a development machine (at least for what I develop) for almost a decade, so getting a 64G machine today will not make it obsolete for me till the machine itself dies.

Also, an 16GB MacBook is pretty enough for running a lot of applications, incl. Electron based hogs. MacOS manages its memory pretty well.

> On the plus side, embedding RAM into SoC is one of the magic tricks of Apple for such massive performance, due to short path lengths. I assume SSD got a similar treatment.

Neither RAM nor SSD is embedded in the SoC. The RAM is just soldered on the package. While this makes for slightly shorter path lengths, the only real gain is motherboard footprint.

You're right about RAM, that's my mistake. I never implied that they also embedded SSD into the SoC. I just said that they may have tried to minimize path lengths.

As an old overclocker, I don't believe that this compact soldering is only due to motherboard footprint. It would allow them greatly push the RAM chips to their limits.

> While this makes for slightly shorter path lengths, the only real gain is motherboard footprint.

Well, that and the ability to use LPDDR5 in the first place. There’s no such thing as a pluggable LPDDR5 stick; the design decisions around low voltages & high signaling rates make it physically impractical to survive the longer traces and discontinuities involved in the signal traversing a connector.

> Well, that and the ability to use LPDDR5 in the first place.

You can solder it on the motherboard, you don't have to solder it on the package.

Ah yeah, I was speaking to the soldering part and missed the SOC part.

Abandoning the common slot/sodimm design also lets them play with the channel configuration, which they'd need to do to achieve the bandwidth they claim for the Pro and Max chips.

Has reading comprehension entirely abandoned this platform?

SSD speeds have gone down in the past with a huge perf hit: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/27/23184515/apple-macbook-pr...

And because this is soldered down, you can’t fix this like how it would be doable on other laptops.

The low performance because of SSD geometry is bad design, that's true (that shouldn't have happened).

On the other hand, I still think that having slots adds a lot of bulk to system design. Considering SSDs have limited life spans, being able to change them makes great sense, but when you dedicate 90% of your footprint to battery, it becomes hard to make them replaceable.

One might argue that HP, Dell and Lenovo offers this, and I suggest buying these machines if that's importance to you. I'm fond of all three companies' higher end designs, but Apple provides more at the same price point, at least for me.

I’m sorry but anyone with an entry level pro is not going to be using the ssd enough to notice any perf difference.

This is really nitpicking.

It’s only huge in one synthetic benchmark which doesn’t represent what users do: sustained linear writes to storage on the lowest-end model where it went from two chips to one. How often do you need to completely fill the disk in 2 minutes rather than 3? If you did have a situation where you can meaningfully write data that quickly, you’d presumably also have enough data that you’d buy the larger models or you’d be using external storage.

Random I/O is the number most people are affected by and there’s a reason the clickbait commenters never mention that: you don’t see this large an effect and these machines are all more than fast enough for the vast majority of buyers. That will not get you a ton of YouTube impressions so it’s all about a use-case these machines don’t have.

The SSDs aren't any faster than consumer NVME M.2 drives. Apple does get to save some pennies because the the SSD controller is in the SoC instead of being on the board with the NAND chips. They've also neutered performance on the M2 base models by only including 1 NAND chip on the board instead of 2 so you no longer get the benefits of striping and faster speeds. To top it off they then charge you $200 to bump a base model 256GB to 512GB which is absolutely ridiculous when you can get a very good 1TB M.2 NVME SSD at retail for less.

While their absolutely is benefits to how they handle their RAM the upgrade prices are nuts. $200 extra for 8GB more, 64GB requires a CPU upgrade and costs $400 extra over 32GB. I've heard the CAMM modules Dell developed and seem poised to replace SO-DIMMs in laptops will allow for faster speeds and replaceable LPDDR too with less Z height and eaiser board design so hopefully we will see an uptick in PC laptops with replaceable memory again.

The way these arguments always seem to end is that the main issue most people have is not the impossibility of upgrades so much as the cost of buying the well-equipped machine in the first place.

I don’t know why manufacturers charge so much for spec bumps (this isn’t limited to Apple). Is it really only because they can?

One reason historically was that the knuckle on the price curve shifted between the time the machine was released and when you upgraded. When a new generation of RAM came on the market, prices often fell rapidly as the process matured and competition set in.

This also played into sale or discount strategies: if the same model becomes cheaper over time but list pricing doesn’t adjust, you’re making a good bit more from everyone who isn’t price sensitive even if you allow resellers to discount it periodically or offer better pricing to business orders (“free RAM upgrade”).

Because that is how the business model works: You have the entry model to create a customer. Then those who really need more, are gonna pay substantially more. See basically every SaaS product.

> They've also neutered performance on the M2 base models by only including 1 NAND chip on the board instead of 2 so you no longer get the benefits of striping and faster speeds.

This is addressed in TFA, which suggests it's a side effect of smaller 128GB modules becoming scarce — or maybe more accurately, "not reliably available at Apple volumes".

The article asks "why is Apple even bothering with a 512GB version?", and the two answers are: (1) To create a cheap-ish "price anchor" config, and (2) as a reasonably-priced choice when price is paramount.

Also, for those who want to do 4K video editing or whatever, it's easy to throw a couple M.2s in an external dual Thunderbolt enclosure¹ to create very large, very fast local storage to complement the 512GB boot/apps/documents drive.

¹ https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1635760-REG/sabrent_e...

So they should have just boosted the 256GB models to 512GB and 512GB to 1TB. The only model where it makes sense to be this agressive on price is the $600 Mini. Considering you can get a decent 512GB SSD like the 980 at retail, with the SSD controller for less than $50 so you have to wonder how much they're really saving on that $1300 MBA and $2000 MBP? $5? $10?

> should have just

Have you ever done supply chain and/or pricing work? Nothing like this is ever “just”. Especially at Apple’s volumes.

I still wouldn't be impossible for them to throw a DIMM socket in there. Even if the expanded memory is at a higher latency, there would still be many perfectly good applications for it.

It seems like there would be a lot of added complexity in the memory controller for this to happen, if it’s even possible. LPDDR5 is not and will never be available in DIMMs, so you’d be talking to two different signaling standards for the onboard vs the expanded RAM. You could switch to DIMMs across the board, but to keep performance equivalent you’d trade-off a significant chunk of battery life.

I can’t off the top of my head think of any CPU that’s ever supported running different DDR standards side-by-side simultaneously (there were some dual DDR2/DDR3 boards back in the day, but it was an either/or proposition).

A standard SO-DIMM together with the socket to add it is thicker than a MacBook Air's (or Pro's) bottom part, when measured outside to outside.

It's cramped inside, so no go.

I think it is be possible to add a slot for RAM and SSD expansion slots inside the body. Let just say the current embedded RAM is an L3 Cache.

*I’m no expert just a wild guess

Stats from the e-commerce vendor in Germany show that Apple's laptops have a fraction of the "in warranty" repair rate, roughly 1 in 200, with many laptops at 1 in 20 or worse.

It's pretty clear that Apple's decisions about manufacturing approaches are not to make iFixit's job harder or easier, but to avoid needing iFixit at all for most users.

Because a lot of Apple users go directly to Apple for warranty claims/repairs, not back to the retailer. That's apples to oranges comparison.

I would imagine if Apple machines are all fixed at Apple, but $other machines are not necessarily fixed at $other, then $other’s rates should be even lower.

That makes no sense. The retailer can't tracks service returns made to Apple or $other.

Storage isn't as much of an issue with Thunderbolt 4.

The connector exceeds what even the fastest NVME SSD can deliver and the form factor of enclosures are small enough that you can simply carry it everywhere.

Thunderbolt 4 is a fast port but a slow bus. It's effectively 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0. High-end consumer SSDs typically expect PCIe 4.0 x4, or twice as much bandwidth. Thunderbolt 5 is supposed to provide that once it's finally released, but by then PCIe 5.0 SSDs will also be out, doubling the bandwidth requirements again.

I noticed from the article the amounts of storage included with these are so paltry that the chips are becoming harder to source. Yikes.

Perhaps, but it's being done for a real reason (beyond Apple's bottom line)--without sockets, Apple is able to achieve drastically higher memory bandwidth/latency at low power consumption, and the architecture is built around this.

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