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Comment by fn-mote | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't read the article: it is not a complaint. It's a relatively detailed explanation including a number of reasons why rollbacks are not supported. It also gives a method to do your own rollback! (I am not knowledgeable enough to verify the practicality of this method.)

In short, the author's argument is:

- no method to roll back firmware updates

- the sealed system volume is huge and rollback capability would require keeping the whole old ~10GB around, which is a lot of wasted space

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>- the sealed system volume is huge and rollback capability would require keeping the whole old ~10GB around, which is a lot of wasted space

IIRC that's how Windows handles update rollbacks, by doing this. Though disk space tends to be much cheaper on Windows devices, on Apple devices you pay a premium for extra internal storage.

Get a better filesystem?

It seems the Time Machine was not designed for root filesystems.

> on Apple devices you pay a premium for extra internal storage

I know what you mean by this, but isn’t this the case everywhere? Or at least on comparable systems, e.g. tablets?

You pay a premium pretty much everywhere else too, it's just much less of a premium than Apple in most cases.

10GB is nothing nowadays. That much storage costs less than $1. That is a ridiculously small price to pay to be able to roll back from a buggy upgrade.

It is cheap but at the premium Apple charges for their storage it's a lot :)

If an item is not bought from Apple then Apple treats it like a leper.

You can never be sure with all those supply chain attacks those days. /s

Apps still sold 120 GB MacBook Air back then. Edit: sorry, you specified “nowadays”

They still sell 256GB models and have the audacity to ask $200 for another 256GB.

I thought you were joking, but just confirmed: a 13" Macbook Air M1 defaults to 256GB SSD, with a $200 upgrade cost to get to 512GB, +$400 if you want to hit 1TB.

More GB, more testing. They havevto make sure that the system does not become unstable with so many GB. /s

I was recently out for a desktop and for price I'll get abysmal 8 core/24GB/1TB Mini, I got a 13700k/32GB/1TB with 4060 and liquid cooling.

But it is not Mini and does not have a bitten apple on it. /s

> 10GB is nothing nowadays. That much storage costs less than $1.

Depends on the build quality. /s

Regardless of what Apple and other manufacturers charge for more storage, 10GB is still lots of storage space. It might be transferred in ~100 seconds with a gigabit connection, but considering I can store my whole paper archive in ~1GB of space, that's a lot.

I'd be removing that snapshot as soon as possible after a successful update.

I don't really see an explanation for the complexity though, this is usually itself very interesting.

After the live CD years it became much easier to abandon the headaches and work with large signed images, but most OS vendors have had at least one pressure to continue with the hellscape of patch permutations and one way configuration adaptions.

Apple could use differential snapshots though. They wouldn't have to store an entire copy of that 10GB.

They used to do something to this effect with older MacOS X updates by only transferring a bundle of the files, but at some point they just sliced the OS into giant partitions and started sending the full file system image over the wire regardless of the actual changes.

This wouldn't be such a wasteful idea had they used file system snapshot differential block transfer a la ZFS send. All I can guess is that they either think their customers are so rich they must all live in places with gigabit internet available, or they just don't care and everyone suffers. Either way it's a massive waste of time, resources and energy, just not theirs.

> This wouldn't be such a wasteful idea had they used file system snapshot differential block transfer a la ZFS send.

That would have been so epic. They should do that in FreeBSD. Take the macOS idea of having a separate protected partition for the base system, and combine that with the support for ZFS in FreeBSD to use ZFS snapshots to update the FreeBSD base OS, instead of having to run freebsd-update which applies a bunch of patches

I don't really like that, because it would make it impossible to modify stuff that I want to modify.

I moved to FreeBSD precisely because I wanted more control than Apple would give me (which is ever less of course).

And freebsd-update works well, it can even validate files so you can see which have been manually changed. This is perfect for me, it's not a hard lock to what the provider decides but more of a suggestion.

APFS can do snapshot transfers, that's how Time Machine works for APFS volumes. It may just not meet their goals for signed system volumes.

Better corrupted but safe, than compromized.

That's nice, but it's still no use for this purpose if it doesn't support differential block level transfer.

> All I can guess is that they either think their customers are so rich they must all live in places with gigabit internet available

They resisted any kind of low data mode for a long time because their “vision” was unlimited, unmetered everything.

Which is a nice vision. But not the reality for now.

or a hidden 20GB recovery partition. Even top of line SSD are dirt cheap.

Not so for Apple SSDs, upgrading from a 256GB to 2TB SSD is an extra $720 (US), when in reality top of the line 2TB nvme SSDs cost about $150. It's insane to me that people accept Apple's massive markup.

Are they the same ? (firmware)

You can remove a couple of gig of wallpapers and default apps to resolve it, and anyway, you dont need to waste space forever, just until it's clear the system is stable and the space need is critical, so that's not a good reason

Windows 10/11 keeps 20GB of rollback data on the drive for 30 or something days after an in place upgrade. This works fine on machines even with only 128GB disks

They only need to store the changed part, and the firmware thing was always a thing, also back when it was possible to roll back updates.

This reads like Microsoft’s ‘the old new thing’ where they make up excuses for choices made by Microsoft and here for Apple.

I presume the real reason is that Apple would say instead of preparing for the update to fail, it’s better to make sure it doesn’t fail in the first place.

You can always pull from the recovery/cloud of Apple. It's just an excuse to push you to newer hardware

"Wait, is that a lot?" - Windows

The storage isn't soldered to the motherboard on a PC typically so you pay commodity prices for storage instead of Apples markup, making this less of a problem.

> The storage isn't soldered to the motherboard on a PC

On a PC laptop it often is. Even on many all in ones now.

Compare like for like for goodness sake

Huh? Which PC laptops have soldered storage? Soldered RAM, yes, but soldered SSDs?

literally soldered cases, where you can't even get to the internals (eg. hp)

Many low end laptops, like some chromebook, feature soldered eMMC. For example, the first thing that I found on the google store, a samsung chromebook[0].

[0]: https://www.google.com/chromebook/discover/pdp-samsung-galax...

Those are quite literally not PCs, though. They are laptops, but they are much closer to a cellphone than to a PC. They're far more comparable to an iPad than to a Mac, if we're still in that comparison.

I had an HP laptop that shipped with Windows 10.

32GB eMMC, not enough to do a feature update. The Celeron and 4GB RAM were not ideal either.

I think it was a PC. The low end of PCs is amazingly awful.

That's still a PC, but the letters stand for Piece of Crap, not Personal Computer

I have a Lenovo laptop with eMMC. It isn't unusual. Fortunately they had an undocumented M.2 slot inside but that wasn't ever used in a stock configuration.

Most of them can boot Windows and are x86-64. How are they not laptops?

They said they are laptops, they’re not PCs. “PC” is a Windows term, traditionally. So a Chromebook is quite literally not a PC. You say they can boot Windows, so that makes the argument a bit less solid, but it wasn’t sold as a PC, then. In my opinion, continuing this line of argument is kind of silly, the point is that most decent consumer laptops that come provisioned with Windows still have replaceable storage. Or maybe I’m just very lucky and all the laptops I’ve purchased did. Even my mini-PCs like Intel NUCs have replaceable storage.

2 minutes of searching for various combinations of "windows laptop", "soldered SSD" and "upgradeable SSD" turned up e.g. Dell's XPS 13, which is not an obscure or low-end device by any metric.

You're correct, it seems like from 2022 the base version of the XPS 13 unfortunately can't have it's SSD upgraded. I searched too, but I looked at the XPS 13 for 2023, which only comes in the Plus model, and that one can be upgraded.

Most high end ones that have a slim form factor.

Don’t know if you’ve looked at that segment but, maybe it’s not what you loop for, but it started not long after Apple did (HP & Dell’s MacBook Pro design-ripoff series especially)

Also many lower end laptops have done it for a looooong time.

> On a PC laptop it often is. Even on many all in ones now.

s/even/especially/

This used to be unheard of on PC laptops. Soldered storage in PC laptops is a recent development (past 10 years or so)

I dunno if I’d call a decade “recent” when it’s like… 1/3 of the lifetime of the form factor!

But, yes. It’s a form factor thing really, as people want smaller, thinner, lighter, laptops. Memory (and battery) removability gets sacrificed as those aren’t a priority for most customers

> The storage isn't soldered to the motherboard

What difference does that make? The old version just needs to be kept on disk, not in RAM.

The "disk" is chips soldered to the motherboard.

One of the disks is. Not all of them are. There is this wonderful technology called "external storage".

But even if the backup has to be stored on the on-board SSD for some reason, so what? It's temporary. That storage can be reclaimed when it's needed. MacOS is already using on-board SSD behind the scenes for Time Machine backups when you don't have an external drive attached. I see absolutely no reason why it could not do the same for a rollback image.

The real reason you can't roll back is simply that Apple doesn't want to allow it, because that would make it easier for the market to reject one of their updates.

> The real reason you can't roll back is simply that Apple doesn't want to allow it, because that would make it easier for the market to reject one of their updates.

Bingo. OpenSUSE makes it easy using BTRFS snapshots, enabled by default. Apple and Microsoft could make it easy too but empowering users like this isn't in their interest.

> The real reason you can't roll back is simply that Apple doesn't want to allow it, because that would make it easier for the market to reject one of their updates.

Right. That's why your Time Machine backups stop worki--oh wait, their integrated backup software lets you restore your disk to the state before the update. So your narrative is FUD.

No, it isn't. What you say is true in theory but it doesn't actually work in practice because major upgrades come with non-backwards-compatible firmware changes. Try installing Mavericks on a machine that has been upgraded to Yosemite or later.

(It also puts the burden on the user to actually make a backup before upgrading.)

Wow. Imagine having to update your linux/bsd kernel after a bios update.

Apple puts like 2GB of animated wallpapers into the sealed system volume, for your protection.

And the bitcoin paper

https://coingeek.com/five-years-later-apple-removes-bitcoin-...

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