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Just had a 2019 MacBook Pro 16" have its SSD die randomly. Took it to a repair shop and they said that since the internal SSD is soldered on to the logic board, there is no easy way to repair it without also getting a whole new board, so the machine is essentially completely bricked. I can't even boot it off of an external drive because Apple requires the boot volume to be the internal SSD!

I couldn't believe it was designed in such a fragile and user-hostile way. I took care of it, didn't drop it or spill anything on it, and it is bricked after just a couple of years due to a simple component failure beyond my control.

Yeah that is a unfortunate design choice, I consider drives to be wear items, that is, they will wear much faster than the rest of the machine, and as such should be field replaceable units.

But it’s not like this design was a secret that Apple kept from you, this is well known information.

Might not be a secret but it's not like Apple inform you on it. Looking at the product page you need to click on "How much is storage is right for you" to find a vague : "MacBook Air storage is not user accessible".

What does accessible even mean ? Far from clear that even Apple won't upgrade/change it.

And as for the boot issue it was not present on older modele and quite a lot of people only learned of it with the recent Rossman video.

I would expect any person buying a device that costs a couple of thousand bucks to do some research before buying.

casual classism on HN. You're suggesting not only that everyone do the research, but be capable of doing the research, understanding the research, understanding whether they're being lied to, all without potentially any knowledge of how things work.

remember how normal people operate ffs

Sorry but you don’t need a CS degree to do some basic research.

I’m not a “car guy” but I can still make an informed decision when buying a new car.

I honestly hope that EU regulatory pressure forces Apple to make their Macs more repairable. SSD failure = brick is just bad design.

Meanwhile in another HN thread - "muahaha, look at these Europoors, how your economy is stagnating, no successful startups, no innovation. That's all due to your overregulation!!!111" /s

true in the context of HN, but kind of a moot point from a more broad consumer perspective, I think.

But hey, they're super environmentally conscious at least by adding a few recycled cans to the new laptop you'll end up buying after the repair isn't worth it.

had the same thing happen to the ssd in my father's thinkpad ... replaced it with a new ssd.

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Now people may claim that Apple hardware is superior to other manufacturers and that it will last longer.

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On the average that's undeniably true.

But not for some Apple is perfect kind of reason but because apple is producing high quality laptops while others manufacturers are producing a lot of shit too besides that.

> The main problem with devices like Apple's Mx series laptops is that everything works fine...until it doesn't. This device is non-repairable and non-upgradeable as far as CPU, RAM and disk are concerned.

Given inflation, the Macbook Airs are pretty crazy cheap. If they break you can just replace them. The base base low end M1 Air is only $1000 last I looked (and another $100 off for those in education). They're some of the best price:perf in a laptop the world has ever seen. "inflated prices" is not an accurate description of an $899 retina M1.

Money is only part of the equation. It's pretty wasteful to have to toss a computer because one component failed, when that specific component would be replaceable in other brands.

This seems like a movement of the goalposts. I'm not that concerned about electronic waste, and I haven't seen any great arguments why anyone really should be.

It's not replaceable in other brands, because approximately no one is making a laptop remotely equivalent to the M1/M2. Perhaps the Surface Pro, but even that isn't a good comparison.

Remember when Apple made the first Air and it was so far ahead of every other laptop out there that Intel had to invent the term ultrabook to describe it so Asus and Dell could clone it? Yeah.

>I'm not concerned about electronic waste.

Why not?

If you’re concerned about electronic waste specifically you’d never buy a new computer, only repair computers destined for the trash.

Concerned about it in general is appropriate for governments and large companies, of course; they can make a dent.

That's an insane thing to say. I am concerned about electronic waste. I am not concerned about it to the extent that I would never buy or use a new computer. I am concerned enough about it that I don't want to waste a perfectly good computer because it has been designed to be thrown away.

Would you say that someone concerned about food/food-related) waste should not ever buy any food? Of course not. But don't buy food that you don't intend to eat, and don't buy food that causes unnecessary waste like food that is unnecessarily individually-wrapped.

I go out of my way to recycle things appropriately: dropping off old computers at the local e-waste depo, recycling old rechargeable batteries at retail, etc. It may very well be pointless, but at least I feel I tried.

That’s good, but reuse is best - maybe something like https://www.pcsforpeople.org/ is nearby. They’re great.

Apple has a tradein program where you can trade in your current Apple device for a discount on a new device.

Thats even worse! Tradeinn orogramm are insidious, their purpose is to drain the marlet of second-hand goods, so to increase sale of new ones.

Every time you sell a second. hand conouter you are cutting their sale of new ones.

But how much of what is traded in is actually repurposed?

And get paid peanuts in return?

The base model price is a little misleading.

256 and 8 gb are lowkey unusable for anything but a Facebook machine .

I always look at the price for the 16/500 or 16/1t machine as the reference point

I have the base model $1k M2 air and it functions excellently as a development machine. Both web dev for work (running multiple react clients, node servers, Pg instances, docker containers, etc all at the same time), and for basic game dev for recreation - though admittedly I’m using Godot for that which is among the lighter weight game engines available.

That to say, it’s far more than a glorified Facebook machine and is a truly excellent value. I much prefer it over my work issued intel MacBook Pro.

I used the M1 Air 8/256 as a dev machine for a whole year. It was faster than a 16/512 Intel 16" MBP from 2019.

Calling it a Facebook machine is silly.

That’s not true at all. Have you actually used one?

Edit: obviously if you need a windows vm you’re out of luck at 8gb ram

You’re out of luck if you need docker.

M1 Macs would make fantastic Linux laptops, because macOS is appallingly bad at backend development. It makes it up in sheer hardware power and efficiency, otherwise I’d be completely at loss why it’s so loved.

> macOS is appallingly bad at backend development

That's news to me. In what way are they bad compared to Linux? Both can run docker, Intellij, Insomnia and Dbeaver.

The main thing is Docker requires emulation

True although if you develop for arm then you can use virtualisation. Still, performance wise I've not noticed any impact.

Docker runs fine... Both x64 and arm64 containers run

It requires a full VM. macOS is the only OS with that requirement.

And? It still runs fine.

It works. It doesn’t work fine. It breaks, sometimes in a way you need to manually clean it up.

I had a laptop with a replaceable CPU. By the time it was worth upgrading it made more sense to buy a new laptop rather than upgrading the CPU. For repairability it's also not really that different unless you're running something like a framework laptop and, even then, replacement mainboards cost about as much as a whole new laptop anyways.

I do wish the M* laptops had something like a CFexpress slot or similar though. The built in storage is blazing fast and power efficient but soldered. Thunderbolt or USB drives are plenty fast enough these days but the external nature of the ports is a bit of a pain. Large amounts of storage are also where the price inflation really is (since you can't just add cheap storage it has to be the blazing high end storage + markup) so this would help the most.

RAM I'd rather have soldered in these days on a laptop. Performance is higher, power usage is lower, and you can order it with enough that you don't need to wait for new modules to be invented to upgrade and have enough RAM 5 years from now. It does mean you can't take any old M1 from ebay and upgrade it, which is definitely a downside, but for a laptop I think the benefits outweigh the cons. One thing I've noticed is there are always people that order them maxed out and move on when the next generation comes so high RAM options are still available used. One thing that is lost is, again, you can't choose to cheap out and get bottom bin speed memory. You have to pay for 8 channel 6400 MHz RAM in your laptop. Not necessarily a problem with the manufacturing method, it's possible to solder cheap RAM, rather just an Appleism. On the other hand... you do always know what you're getting if you buy one, which could be a plus.

Anyways, all of this is to say if you want a budget laptop which minmaxes it's price/performance ratio at a lower cost then the Apple laptops are definitely not the right pick. The reason for this is not as much how they are manufactured rather wher Apple targets the platform. The best price/performance optimization is probably a Chromebook with a monoboard and soldered RAM.

> The main problem with devices like Apple's Mx series laptops is that everything works fine...until it doesn't. This device is non-repairable and […]

The sad unspoken truth is that most apple users are just rich enough to replace the whole thing when it breaks, and don’t really care much of the environmental issues if apple hardware.

I doubt you can find any data to back that claim up. My first macbook was in daily use for about 8 years. My current macbook is only four years old so I'm not expecting to replace it any time soon. Colleagues seem to have the same usage pattern. Apple hardware lasts a long time.

edit: no hard data after a quick google but every article on the first two pages estimates 5-8 years.

Most of my Apple laptops I have given to other people who have used them for years. Of the three M laptops I have (including the first M1 Air), none has any issues so far. If one breaks, I would let it repair at Apple. My personal main Laptop has AppleCare to make that less costly, in case something breaks.

I often recommend Apple refurbished to friends who are strapped for cash, the argument being that it’ll last longer and be cheaper over the long run. So far haven’t really run into an issue with this. Call it the Sam Vimes theory of computer upgrades.