Hacker News Reader

> What happens here is that the secure enclave, cryptographic accelerator and flash controllers are all packaged together. This gives you sick speeds and performance while also making it more secure than your average OPAL TCG trash that often isn't even implemented at all.

Apples SSD performance is nothing special, and if they wisely don't want to trust OPAL TCG they can encrypt the data in their own trusted silicon before handing it over to the untrusted SSD controller. That's pretty much what the Playstation 5 does, it supports standard NVMe drives but the disk encryption is done in custom Sony silicon so the third party SSD controller never sees the plaintext.

I'm not convinced there's any purpose for the way Apple does their storage aside from vendor lock-in.

There's a lot of reasons but IMHO the engineering answer is that the firmware is stored on the SSD, not on a random SPI NOR sitting on the PCB. So rather than having to support a wide variety of SATA controllers or do PCIe training (because few vendors implement the spec well so you gotta do a bunch of hacks to get it to work), they have a single storage controller that the SecureROM talks to. Then LLB and iBoot bring up more and more of the storage stack. Apple documents some of it here:

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac7...

You don't become a $3tn company by respecting and liberating users.

You do it by providing the best choice for users over decades. Or if you're an actual lock-in firm like MS, you do it by embedding yourself in every government department and company and school, so people go from cradle to grave using your products.

MS's main lock in is the MS Office file formats (the entire "open" standards process around this was co-opted and destroyed), and then the predatory bundling/extension (browsers, email, Teams) to knock out competitors.

Windows isn't the crown jewel - the real value is doc/xls/ppt that wrap people's data and bundling of everything into a MS license that marginalizes 3rd party entrants like Slack.

Microsoft has always been about selling software, nothing else. Windows exists because they need to control a platform that is competitive enough to run their software and that cannot dictate their trajectory too much. They are very happy to sell their software and most platforms and since they don't make much money selling hardware, they will even sell you ways to run Windows anywhere for software that requires it.

Microsoft has won because they were more competitive in bringing a desirable solution at a particular price, in other words they bring good value and even though some seem too ideologically tainted to understand it the whole world recognized it as such.

The open standard Office formats work fine and Microsoft supports them just fine. The real reason they still win is because their software is generally just better to use. Many have used the competing open-source solution and end up paying for the Microsoft stuff because it is just a much worse experience that is not worth wasting your time for the very competitive pricing Microsoft offer. They win because they provide more value than free stuff at the price they offer, it is just as simple as that.

You can see the bundling as predatory or you can see it as a competitive answer. Microsoft has seen that there was a market for some types of software, duplicated a competitive enough solution and sell it cheaper in order to bring more value, that's pretty much it. Even if they are legally prevented from bundling, I very much doubt it would change anything because they would just price the standalone solution in a competitive enough manner and would still win. They largely do that by the way, you can get plenty of their stuff in a standalone way. Even in the age of cloud/SASS subscription, Microsoft still sells standalone Office suite that you can very well use for years on end with zero need to upgrade (exactly what I do for my grandma, because she likes Publisher).

And if the bundling legal precedent is set, their competitors like Apple and Google are in way more trouble because they abuse the bundling way more.

It's hilarious the irrational hate Microsoft gets when they are objectively not that bad. Sure, they have some terrible behavior like any big corp, but by those standards, Apple is so much worse it is really stunning to see the difference in treatment.

> It's hilarious the irrational hate Microsoft gets when they are objectively not that bad.

There's no hate going on, irrational or otherwise. They have been really bad, and Teams vs Slack is a good example of how they are still bad in some instances. Not illegal bad, although maybe that, but just bad for competition, kept in place not by evergreen product quality (unlike Apple) but by 100 million IT departments all with mouse-only skills who couldn't choose anything but Microsoft without putting themselves out of a job.

I agree.

Fun fact: TCG OPTAL isn't a $3tn company and they also don't respect or liberate users. So while both things can be true, both things are also irrelevant to the discussion.

I don't think you can get a mass market SSD that does what this thing does. Not unless you change some parameters. The speeds and bandwidth you get is always with full encryption for all blocks. That might not be special to you, but doing this mass market in a way that doesn't make exploits and bypasses appear faster than the manufacturers can patch it (looking at TCG, BitLocker etc) is definitely special to me.

As for that other methods may work (making the chain longer by introducing a separate bus, two transceivers, an additional controller from another vendor, extra firmware, extra power buses), they have done that in the past. In practically every shape:

  - SCSI
  - ATA/IDE
  - SATA
  - NVMe over custom physical port before M.2 was broadly available with the same specs, but probably also cheaper for them

They also have had drives in all sizes as well, both internal and external. That includes most forms of modularity (external: entire drive + enclosure, just the drive or just the enclosure, internal: 5.25, 3.5, 2.5, CF-sized) and controller wise they also have done all variants: add-in card, on-board, on-chip, third party controller, first party controller, combinations where they did only the firmware or only the hardware, ones where the fabric and the controller were combined etc.

So technology wise, it's not like they haven't gone back and forth with many, many combinations.

Business-wise:

> I'm not convinced there's any purpose for the way Apple does their storage aside from vendor lock-in.

First of all, I highly doubt Apple gives a shit. Their model of lock-in is making a better combined experience than the competition. If they could do that with some random western digital black SSD while making the same amount of money, they would do it. But more importantly: if Apple would do that, they would still charge you $1000 for that SSD, even if it's only 1TB. The concept of lock-in is making it so that people don't want to pay the cost of leaving. You can't lock people in with just the stick (an SSD-shaped stick with a $1000 price tag) if you don't have a carrot.

Secondly: I don't want or need to convince you, but trying to shoehorn a business in such a one-dimensional take is not exactly a good way to spend your energy.

It is vendor lock-in. The cost of leaving is not in the SSD but the software ecosystem you'd be giving up if you want the same performance with other hardware. The $1000 SSD is the rent or surplus they are charging by the virtue of their lock-in, minus the prevailing price of the a comparable NVMe SSD.

> I don't think you can get a mass market SSD that does what this thing does.

Of course, if you started with the requirements that is has to be the exact same thing you cannot meet it, precisely because what Apple does is highly proprietary and dependent on their implementation of the controller and the encryption that is handled by their own silicon.

However, the fact is that there are SSDs that are faster than what Apple provides and there are also CPUs that are better at encryption or just competitive enough with what Apple does. You can't get a 1-to-1 solution because that a not something anyone actually desires but you can get a solution that is just as good if not better.

It is always weird to me that when it comes to Apple people want to go with the arbitrary requirements they dictated while dismissing any requirement of another competing solution, like modularity.

> First of all, I highly doubt Apple gives a shit. Their model of lock-in is making a better combined experience than the competition

What you say makes no sense and is highly contradictory in its nature. They charge the price they do for upgrades because there is literally no other way to do so. The reason they don't use some random WD SSD is precisely because if they would it would be trivial for anyone to bypass their predatory pricing and very few would actually use their upgrade options and they definitely could not realistically extract so much money from their power users. It's completely crazy that you believe otherwise even though they started soldering SSD/RAM on the Intel MacBooks, way before there was any technical rationalization about it (in marketing and by their fans).

The reason they do it is because of money; any other benefits are just a side effect. They get to save money from the vertical integration: suddenly they don't have to pay for a 3rd party integration of controller and software development (with the associated markup) and they go down the value chain, just buying NAND chips which are a lower value commodity with less supplier power. Since they already pay for their own silicon, the added cost of the controller on the silicon is minimal. And they get to dictate the price of storage/RAM upgrades since they become by definition their own supplier with no competition.

If they really wanted, they could have a solution that would allow their own custom NAND board and also support 3rd party SSDs for anyone who wanted (even if it would have some downsides). The added development cost would be minimal but of course they would never do that because realistically almost nobody would spend 3-4 times as much on storage no matter how much better their solution would be in theory.

When it comes to the lock-in, it is completely built into the software. They get to win because once people get used to and dependent on a particular software stack it is pretty costly to switch to another solution. And the cost is one of the things people hate the most: it is time and struggle to learn/adapt to new way of doing things. If you have been working a certain way for a very long time you also need to unlearn a good amount of it, which is a struggle (think about changing keyboard layout for example). Most people are not ready to pay this cost so they end up preferring to pay with cash because in the end they got the cash by selling their time and they find it is more efficient for them to go this route. And this is a fact Apple knows very well, in fact most of the Apple customers (at least when it comes to the Mac) are people who were wealthy enough to afford their hardware in the first place, those are people who generally have a large leverage on their time, meaning they have a great multiplier which is precisely why Apple feel that they can get away with this anticompetitive behavior and they are completely right.

That doesn't make any of it better, it is still highly abusive and extortionate behavior which is funny because it is a company that markets itself as highly virtuous. All the while they extract more money out of economies all other the place, in a way that is highly inefficient for society because they don't give back anything and the value they provide is highly out of whack with what they extract.

As for the carrot, there is some of it left but it has become very rotten. They make really nice hardware that's for sure, and the recent development of Apple Silicon has brough much needed value (if you don't care about compatibility outside of Apple focused software that is). But the reality is that outside of their base model that offer decent value, because of the cost of upgrades they wouldn't sell that much hardware if macOS could run on other hardware legally and without too much effort. Hackintosh would never have been a thing otherwise and we know that for a fact because historically when they licensed Mac OS to clone, their hardware sales tanked and then they later came with various technical mitigation to make it too costly to legally make a clone.

So, in a way I agree that there is good part of a carrot left but that's mostly if you can be happy with their base default configuration, if you have a requirement outside of that their pricing make it so that the carrot leaves a very bad taste in your mouth and you wish you could go another route even if it meant having to compromise on some other stuff.

This is the kind of content I keep coming to HN to find. I wish I could upvote it 100x. Thanks for the education.

> The reason Apple does this is the same reason as ever: it they feel like this is the best way to make some sort of experience work, they will do it. And if they make fat stacks of cash in the process, they aren't going to be sad about it.

This argument holds water only if the price were appropriate, not extortionate. Apple has shown the world for years they prioritize profit through control and not using industry standards.

The PCI/e, NVMe (+more) standards give you the best experience: a modularized peripheral connection system.

Appealing the capitalism, standards allow markets to exist and to compete in each component category. By not using the standard, Apple is saying "I don't want to compete on storage, I'd rather do it my own way and charge as much $$$ as possible."

Appealing to best practices programming, these standards are like interfaces. If you were to make a really useful *nix command line tool, but decided to not allow the output to be easily used by downstream programs through `|` pipelines by reason of "good experience" ("Why would you want to leave my good program? The flowers are so nice!", people would rightfully see you as stuck up and having the gall to think you know what's best for end users.

Appealing to psychology, Apple is not your friend. They are a powerful profit-driven company that dodges taxes and that fosters a cult-like belief system. I say this as an iPhone user and as a latest generation white-plastic macbook user. They make good devices. How much better could their devices be if they didn't spend so much effort in anti right to repair and anti compatibility?

The price is what the market is willing to pay. Not the actual cost of the physical components. Pricing has always been like that. The market just isn't always willing to pay huge margins. With Apple they do.

> give you the best experience

Hardly. For practically every normal user, the best experience is when they don't have to think about hardware or specs at all, forever. Doesn't just apply to computers either. If anything, people doing the things they want with the hardware not existing at all, that would be even better since they didn't want to deal with it in the first place. Reality is of course that the things they want to do are implemented in software, and software runs on hardware. And they still would rather have it not exist, and not think about it. And anything you do that forces them to think about it is a detractor, even if it was "The Right Thing".

It's why Android beats Windows, and mobile devices like phones and tablets beat PCs; there is a whole lot less dealing with the details of the hardware and the software, and more "doing what you intended to do", whatever that might be. Even if the hardware and software is almost universally worse (at the very least somewhere until desktop-class ARM came around).

As far as all your other concepts, reality says the thing Apple does in the Apple way makes them more money than everyone else. So either they are already doing the things you want them to do and they work, or they are not doing the things you want them to do because they don't work to generate the same concentration of money (which is what they exist for, as I already wrote).

I am an old school Apple user (first personal machine a second-hand Pismo PowerBook) and I find it dumbfounding how most of their customers justify any of their predatory behavior in ways that boggles the mind.

It really is cult-like behavior, there is no other way to put it. There is the famous piece of writing by Umberto Eco about Macs being catholic (https://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html) and it really feels like that, their users tend to be highly religious, just not to a traditional religion.

You can use the stuff and like it, find it better in many ways but it is hard to actually accept the commercial practice with a straight face.

You make it sound like people cannot make a distinction between "I like it and I can afford it, even if the prices are high" and "commercial value extraction in a post-capitalistic hellscape is bad".

Apple isn't some magic company where if they have extreme margins the people that buy the stuff do mental gymnastics where the margins are not extreme. Of course they are. But people buying it have accepted that they can vote with their wallet, and they still vote to pay and get the product, rather than not pay and hope the signal is strong enough to lower the margins and maybe buy a product later if it is cheaper.

Most products you buy are not priced just a sliver higher than the cost of production, or even the cost of production plus R&D. They are priced at the maximum revenue possible. As long as Apple can sell NAND chips at 1000% markup, they will do it. And as long as it doesn't hurt people enough, they will keep buying it. Look at the clothing nonsense, bags, shoes etc. You can get a plastic bag made out of 10 cents of material and 2 cents of manufacturing line time but you'll have to pay $500 because it's special to some people. Or most of the plastic shoes that Nike makes, they aren't really made with $200 of plastic, that's going to be maybe $10 of material in total. There might be a much higher manufacturing cost, so maybe that's another $10. That means there's $180 going straight to Nike. But you don't see people coming to HN to complain about that, because somehow that's okay.

Where you assign some loud Apple users (let's call that the vocal minority) some cult or religious status for their behaviour, you're doing a disservice to yourself and the rest of the people that just want to stuff and will pay the price even if they don't really like it. Presumably because saving $2k in cost on a computer costs them more in UX, productivity or forced change, which they don't want, and the company extracts as much money as they can for it ($1k wheels anyone?).

Maybe the vocal minority thinks a computer can be a status symbol. But that's mostly just in their mind. The same high school mentality (and group behaviour) applies to the shoes or bags mentioned above.

Trying to make this seem like a special Apple case is pretty useless. It's capitalism at work, and you're part of it. Whether you can live with that is mostly just up to you and not much of a technology or startup discussion. We might even end up more in the area of philosophy than anything else.

> it they feel like this is the best way to make some sort of experience work, they will do it

Yeah dude. They only do this for greed. That said, a Micron 7450 Max is $270 for 800GB.

I can't tell from your reply if you are getting the point or not so here is an expanded version for you:

If they could save themselves the huge mountains of money to takes to create their own flash controllers, firmware, fabric and hardware design, and just buy a Micron 7450 Max and put that inside the computer, and still charge you $1000, they would do it. Because it means more profit for them, which is what they exist for.

But they didn't.

The same concept applies to say, the Red Mags, which are essentially mSATA SSDs in a metal box. Red takes on all the responsibility, claims, (reputational) damage for their product, but if they feel like they can make it happen with an mSATA SSD and still make lots of money, they will do it. They could use an SLC enterprise SSD, make a little less money and take a little less risk.

But they didn't.