Hacker News Reader

Comment by selfhoster1312 | Hacker News Reader

OS LTS support barely matters when planned obsolescence is baked in at the hardware level. Wearing parts (eg. SSD) are soldered on newer macs and there's intensive efforts to make sure even if you have the tools you can't repair it.

Parts aren't available but if you get your hands on there's cryptographic parts pairing so it more or less can't be replaced: https://rossmanngroup.com/services/ssd-data-recovery/macbook...

Overall, i wouldn't count on "many good years left".

View on HN

My MacBook Pro M1 is 5 years old now and the SSD wear level is at 4%. SSD wear is not a problem for normal users.

Meanwhile Apple's standard OS support period is 7 years, that's a much more imminent limit.

Not saying that I support non-user-replaceable SSDs, but if your goal is reducing e-waste, there are more impactful changes to make.

Thanks, that's a fair data point. Although i'm sure it depends on actual user workloads.

I'm not saying that I support closed-source firmware, locked bootloaders, or even that replacing SSDs is the one true path to sustainability.

I believe it's a whole field and we shouldn't tolerate compromises on any level. It should be 100% illegal in any civilized country to sell the kind of lame hardware we have today. It should be 100% repairable, 100% open bootloader & free firmware, 100% public tech docs/datasheets. Original manufacturer OS support is not insignificant, but i believe it's only significant because we have so little control/understanding of the hardware/software stack.

You have trade offs though. Both with added effort during the development but also just physical limits with the amount of additional losses you have over clicked vs soldered connections

That's true. I can't say i'm 100% against soldering parts, that would be silly. What concerns me is that undocumented parts that are unavailable to buy as spare parts are soldered and have firmware that enforces pairing with a specific other part.

It would be reasonable if all components on a motherboard had to be sold as spare parts by law (not just the entire board that costs the same as the entire device, that's malicious compliance) and all spec sheets were made available. That might just make the economy of a repair shop work again.

Sure, and in a zero marginal cost world that would be fine and dandy. In practice, it would mean significantly increased development and documentation costs for a low percentage increase in sold units.

Selling spare parts was worth when things broke often and labor was cheap. We don’t live in that world anymore. That means a broken device will no linger get fixed. But on the plus side there are far fewer broken devices. I’m pretty sure that has the same problem shape as “there is no glory in prevention”

Totally agree that lawmakers need to crack down on locked-down hardware.

The DMA crap that the EU passed even seems to go in the wrong direction, allowing Apple to audit the financials of anyone who makes an iOS app.

I was mostly just reacting to your "barely matters" wording :)

The thing about SSD failures is that in normal use, you can't wear one out. But in perfectly normal use, some of the units just die after N years (for very small number N in some cases). They don't warn. They don't show increased fault or wear counters. They just die and completely disappear from the bus and stop accepting any commands. There is no recovery and, I repeat, no warning.

That's why you have backups and drives are easy to replace, though reinstall/restore can be tedious.

Unless it's a soldered in one.

Every piece of Apple hardware I own has outlasted its software support by at least 2X. Or, as I'd rather put it: The software support has been prematurely cut off at best at 50% of devices' lifetimes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com