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Comment by ericpauley | Hacker News Reader

Watching this video I just assumed the logic board removal was some aside, not necessary to replace the battery. Nope! Looking at their 13" guide this entire process is necessary to perform a battery replacement. Given everything else is solid state and will probably never fail it makes even less sense to block battery replacement behind them. The Air is an awesome device to use but wow... what a terrible design for battery replacement.

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>Given everything else is solid state and will probably never fail

Huh? Solid state drives do certainly fail, especially consumer parts.

Ideally, IF Apple were to source the best NAND silicone for reliability, and IF they had the best wear leveling algos implemented in NAND controller FW, and IF MacOS had optimal IO for write calls, and IF the soldering, temperatures, and voltage regulation to the NAND and controller were to be kept within ideal spec, then we could safely assume they might never fail, but that's a lot of IFs, and is why SSDs still fail quite a bit despite no moving parts.

Which is why I refuse to buy PCs/laptops with soldered storage. That's like buying a car with the brake pads permanently attached to the chassis.

Not often these days, and if you want them to really last the trick is to oversize them. If you need 2TiB get 4. That’s because wear is a function of amount written divided by the size or the drive due to wear leveling.

For most people this advice doesn’t matter but if you do work on your laptop that involves tons and tons of writes (e.g. local Docker work with lots of huge container builds and multiple VMs) then over provisioning is good.

It’s also very good advice for any server deployment you want to be reliable. If I were deploying a good old fashioned database box to be super reliable I’d oversize the SSD as much as possible (coupled with hot swap and mirroring).

“Just buy 2x what you need” is not exactly equal to “it’s super reliable and never fail”.

Redundancy is a perfectly reasonable way to achieve reliability

Yes, it’s a reasonable way to achieve reliably of the whole system, as long as you have infinite money.

They do, but it's uncommon. Having been using SSDs since at least 2011 or so, they've had a vastly better track record for me than HDDs have. In fact I have yet to see a single SSD of mine fail, whereas plenty of my HDDs have corrupted files or died.

This probably varies from person to person though. Someone who's shuffling around tens or hundreds of gigabytes a video per day for example probably burns through them much more quickly than I do, with the most disk intensive thing I do being software development.

Opposite experience from me. Never had a HDD fail ( I still have drives from the mid '00's running), but seen many SSDs fail, especially among the fleets at the companies I worked at, less so in my private life as I don't upgrade that often to have a large sample size.

And the SSD fails were AFAIK never due to excessive wear from the user side but simply the SSD giving up the ghost out of nowhere probably due to faulty FW or faults in the NAND fabrication of RAM of the cache. SSD have enough points of failure despite no moving parts.

HDDs would also fail more gracefully, like you'd usually get SMART warnings, crashes, strange noises before they'd inevitably die, but SSD simply just stop working one day out of the blue.

I wonder if make and model of SSD factors in. Generally I've only purchased SSDs that have been proven reliable and don't try to cut costs by going for cheaper options with mystery meat controllers or cut rate NAND.

As far as failing gracefully, for me HDDs have been a mixed bag. Some have shown warning signs beforehand but I've had a few that just up and died one day with their performance up until that point having been business as usual.

MTBF of samsung flash parts is allegedly around 1.5Mh. That's one in 171 years. A battery, on the other hand, is (almost) guaranteed to need replacement after ~2000 cycles, or 32kh. That's a difference of 46x.

SSDs fail not because of their NAND reaching MTBF. That would be the perfect world if that was the only variable.

This is MTBF of the entire drive (I used a Samsung 980 MTBF for reference). I think it's pretty clear that, barring accidental damage, the battery is by far the most likely failure point on macbooks.

It is, but I've seen enough laptops go back to the IT department due to SSDs randomly dying on them way before their batteries died or them reaching their claimed MTBF which mostly applies to laboratory controlled conditions, not real world usage.

Same with my old corporate HP. SSD (SK Hynix) died within one year.

That's the point of the M in MTBF: it's a mean. Some drives underperform, others overperform. One sampling from Backblaze shows this MTBF to be (roughly) accurate: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2022-drive-stats-...

Another comparison (by proxy): https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

... for replacement. Batteries have sensitive thermal requirements, so im sure there is a reason for the layout the wayy it is.

The reason is most likely just that there was no consideration in the design process for designing for serviceability. It’s surprisingly easy to design for repair without sacrificing other attributes if you include that in your design goals from the start.

On what basis do you say easy to repair doesn't involve sacrificing other attributes? I've seen the Fairphone and it's a chunky one.

We sell a laptop that is the same thickness and weight as a MacBook Pro 13-inch, in which every part is trivially replaceable using one tool.

I was going with "oh yes? Show me what you sell" then I clicked on your username. You are doing an amazing job!

And is it as capable as well? Because I can also put some shitty decades old hardware and shitty battery into any thin case, that’s not a meaningful comparison.

Does it also have the same build quality, performance, battery life and price?

Do you also sell tens of millions of them per year?

There's been enough HN threads where people bought framework laptops only to ditch them a few weeks after as they are nowhere near a macbook no matter how much you try to oversell it.

It’s unclear if you’re looking for a discussion in good faith, but, here are The Verge’s reviews of the most recent MacBook Pro 13-inch and Framework Laptop as reference points:

https://www.theverge.com/23177674/apple-macbook-pro-m2-2022-...

https://www.theverge.com/23725039/framework-laptop-13-2023-i...

Those links only serve my point. Macbook destroys framework in terms of battery life and dominates in performance benchmarks. Oddly, also in games. Though I wouldn't play Shadow of Tomb Raider on either of them. Also, it has better build quality than the framework laptop.

Yeah bit strange with the future EU rules calling for user replaceable batteries.

This would likely still pass muster under that ruling. They don’t specify that it has to be trivial, just that it has to be doable without specialty tools.

Batteries should last for years more than previous generations. Battery life is so good I only charge at most once a day.

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