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15-Inch MacBook Pro With Touch Bar Has Non-Removable SSD
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I don't know why this shocks anyone. When's the last time 99% of the Apple user base replaced their own RAM? I haven't done it to a laptop in over 10 years.
Where are you buying SSDs, because I can get the 256GB Samsung 950 Pro from Newegg for $165, and the 512GB version for 289. And I have no doubt if I put effort into it, I could beat those prices.
we were talking about future UPGRADES of capacity. Neither of those would be much of a capacity upgrade, would they?
Also, neither is compatible with the new MBP which uses a different form factor.
My 2011 MBP has had 2 RAM upgrades and 3 storage upgrades as my needs changed. So great if you've never needed to do this, but some of us have
Indeed it does- a soldered form factor. Which goes back to the claim of replacing it with a new SSD would still be as expensive...
The soldered vs. slotted isn't the only change to the form factor or electrical connection.
"This MacBook Pro with Retina Display is great, but it's just too thick, heavy, upgradeable, and repairable for me, and it has too many ports to choose from"....said no MacBook Pro 2012-2015 owner.
And yet Apple continues to operate as if we all think that.
Wow, there are some really vehement apologists here. I haven't finished scouring the whole thread yet, but I keep reading again and again how MOST users would never need to upgrade the SSD...or how backups and cloud/external storage should eliminate our concerns about the non-upgradeable, NON-REPAIRABLE drives. The arrogant dismissal of many users' concerns because they don't operate the same way or have the same expectations as these apologists is disturbing. Just as disturbing as Apple's arrogance toward its customers regarding choice.
And CHOICE is what the real loss is here along Apple's and Jony's ridiculous warpath toward paper-thin and helium-light. Choice to expand capacity. Choice to replace a faulty drive years from now to avoid just throwing the machine away because it's "old". Choice to repair ourselves or in a manner not solely reliant on Apple. It used to be that in both hardware and software, Apple offered more than one way to go about things. Now they seem quite content— eager even— to force everyone into the small box they've decided for us to operate in. Maddening and saddening.
Some apologists urge us to buy something else and go on our merry way. Again, arrogance and lack of respect for our choice. The reason we are "rife with bitterness" or whatever that BS line was, is that we chose the Mac (long ago or recently) for our needs and simply want its custodians to handle it well enough to continue meeting our needs. And we don't perceive that happening.
In any case, the soldered RAM already sucked, but what disturbs me the most about this soldered SSD is a logic board issue taking the data with it. I have plenty of clients who have applied their own unique coffee, beer, tea, hot chocolate, wine, or other liquid "treatments" to their machines. The logic board might have been zapped, but the HD/SSD usually was not, and so I could save their data for them to move to something else. And quickly. Now this requires a (probably expensive) special piece from Apple, and it shouldn't need to. At the very least, even with the latest removable SSDs with proprietary Apple connectors (also unnecessary with M.2 out there), I could temporarily pop them into another MacBook or Mac Pro tower with $10 PCIe adapter and access the data. Not now.
Yes, of course this means we should be more diligent than ever in backing up our data. But to those of you who like to point out how few of the MacBook Pro users ever upgrade their SSDs, you do realize that there's an alarming number of users out there that never set up any kind of backup either, right? That's certainly their fault for neglecting to back up their data, but now the penalty is that much higher. Unnecessarily so.
Let's consider just one possible scenario: what about a user that DOES do daily backups at home who hits the road to work for a few days, but has a spill or a drop on the trip that renders a 2016 MBP inoperable? Can I help this user recover his last few days' work by quickly extracting the SSD and mounting the drive elsewhere? Not without that proprietary contraption from Apple, and even then, who knows how well that will work.
I just wish that Ive & Co would stop assuming that we simply cannot get enough thinness and lightness at the expense of every other function or option we need...
And yet Apple continues to operate as if we all think that.
Wow, there are some really vehement apologists here. I haven't finished scouring the whole thread yet, but I keep reading again and again how MOST users would never need to upgrade the SSD...or how backups and cloud/external storage should eliminate our concerns about the non-upgradeable, NON-REPAIRABLE drives. The arrogant dismissal of many users' concerns because they don't operate the same way or have the same expectations as these apologists is disturbing. Just as disturbing as Apple's arrogance toward its customers regarding choice.
And CHOICE is what the real loss is here along Apple's and Jony's ridiculous warpath toward paper-thin and helium-light. Choice to expand capacity. Choice to replace a faulty drive years from now to avoid just throwing the machine away because it's "old". Choice to repair ourselves or in a manner not solely reliant on Apple. It used to be that in both hardware and software, Apple offered more than one way to go about things. Now they seem quite content— eager even— to force everyone into the small box they've decided for us to operate in. Maddening and saddening.
Some apologists urge us to buy something else and go on our merry way. Again, arrogance and lack of respect for our choice. The reason we are "rife with bitterness" or whatever that BS line was, is that we chose the Mac (long ago or recently) for our needs and simply want its custodians to handle it well enough to continue meeting our needs. And we don't perceive that happening.
In any case, the soldered RAM already sucked, but what disturbs me the most about this soldered SSD is a logic board issue taking the data with it. I have plenty of clients who have applied their own unique coffee, beer, tea, hot chocolate, wine, or other liquid "treatments" to their machines. The logic board might have been zapped, but the HD/SSD usually was not, and so I could save their data for them to move to something else. And quickly. Now this requires a (probably expensive) special piece from Apple, and it shouldn't need to. At the very least, even with the latest removable SSDs with proprietary Apple connectors (also unnecessary with M.2 out there), I could temporarily pop them into another MacBook or Mac Pro tower with $10 PCIe adapter and access the data. Not now.
Yes, of course this means we should be more diligent than ever in backing up our data. But to those of you who like to point out how few of the MacBook Pro users ever upgrade their SSDs, you do realize that there's an alarming number of users out there that never set up any kind of backup either, right? That's certainly their fault for neglecting to back up their data, but now the penalty is that much higher. Unnecessarily so.
Let's consider just one possible scenario: what about a user that DOES do daily backups at home who hits the road to work for a few days, but has a spill or a drop on the trip that renders a 2016 MBP inoperable? Can I help this user recover his last few days' work by quickly extracting the SSD and mounting the drive elsewhere? Not without that proprietary contraption from Apple, and even then, who knows how well that will work.
I just wish that Ive & Co would stop assuming that we simply cannot get enough thinness and lightness at the expense of every other function or option we need...
No. You get a new USB C cable for your existing USB 3.0 HDD or SSD drives.
Minimal cost and fully compatible for both new and old systems.
Putting on an Apologist hat just to make myself feel dirty:
It's the users own fault for not carrying around their Time Machine backup hard drives, dongles, and cables with them of course!
I've done it to every single laptop I've had in the past 10 years. So you assume every one is like you?
Brilliant. Yes, given what sales metrics? Based against what control case? Compared to what other Mac options? Exactly. Ive & Apple apparently think we're dismayed that the MacBook Pro continues to be so fat and heavy because we buy the only option they provide. Strong argument.
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Hahaha, yeah, wheels and tires are non-removable, so when your tread is gone, you buy another car!
If you disagree with my statement you implicitly assume that Apple keeps designing things like this for irrational reasons (or at least for some reason other than selling things). Apple exists to sell hardware. They have a strong incentive to design hardware that sells.
Of course they do, however:
1. They're not infallible or guaranteed to make the absolute best decision to sell the most units.
2. Have you not noticed the obsession with "thin and light" form with no regard to loss of function? So, yes, irrational design choices.
3. The Mac segment is not Apple's biggest moneymaker anymore, and they have subjected it to very obvious and well-documented neglect over the last several years.
I've consulted on hundreds of MacBook Pro sales to my clients over the years, and NOT ONCE have I ever had one of them lament to me that the 2012-2015 Retinas were not thin or light enough, never mind wanting to omit features or functionally to achieve more thinness or lightness. Nor the 2008-2012 Unibody MBPs, for that matter.
Don't get me wrong— Apple's thin and light designs are elegant and impressive, far more so than most every other PC maker out there. But there comes a point when sacrificing functionality to squeeze out a tiny bit more downsizing that nobody asked for is just not listening to your target ("Pro") users.
I sent an email to Tim Cook regarding this, and one of his staff members actually called me back on the phone. She didn't give me the details about repairs, but she did get me to the information I needed about this. There is a port on the logic board that can be used to recover data from the soldered-on logic board. Apple authorized service techs have access to a special kit that is used to migrate data from the soldered-on logic board to another machine. I don't know if you can also just copy data from the logic board to another computer or drive (without the migration) with this kit. So, the good news is that you can recover data... at least through migration. I am hoping that individual directories/files can also be simply copied over. What I am still disappointed about is the fact that you can't just swap out the SSD into another device or enclosure. Oh well.
Unfortunately, you are looking at this purely from only your perspective. I back up my data regularly, so I am probably not going to lose much data. It is almost impossible to always backup up data, though. I am often in the field working and can't easily back up my data at that time. If there is a problem, I will lose some data, but at least not very much.
Here's the problem from my perspective and a lot of others...
I support about 200 staff members all using MacBook Airs or Pros. I can't force them to make backups regularly. When their systems go down (cracked display, bad logic board, etc.), I am able to simply pop out their SSD into another Mac or enclosure and get them back up-and-running in minutes. This will not be the case with the new MacBook Pros and also the MacBook.
Apple took away the ability from system admins like me to quickly help users of the new MacBook Pro to get working again and also easily make their data available to them in the event of a logic board failure. We use Apple products because we have found that the total cost of ownership is on par with or even cheaper than deploying Windows systems (we have years of empirical evidence to back this up), and I don't want to see that change... we love our Apple products, and we hope to be using them for years to come. But if the total cost of ownership goes up and users lose data, we might have to consider other options.
The good news... I spoke with a person at Apple, and I was able to get information regarding how to recover data from an SSD that is soldered onto the logic board. There is a port that can be accessed on the new MacBook Pros that will allow data migration using a special kit used by Apple authorized technicians. It isn't the easy swap-out solution that I use now, but at least it is a way to get data off of the SSD. Of course if there is damage to the port (water damage or something else), you will lose data, but that would be the case anyway with an SSD that has water damage.
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Yes, this is what I was referring to here:
The logic board might have been zapped, but the HD/SSD usually was not, and so I could save their data for them to move to something else. And quickly. Now this requires a (probably expensive) special piece from Apple, and it shouldn't need to. At the very least, even with the latest removable SSDs with proprietary Apple connectors (also unnecessary with M.2 out there), I could temporarily pop them into another MacBook or Mac Pro tower with $10 PCIe adapter and access the data. Not now.
This just seems so incredibly stupid to me. They are SO hell-bent on making everything ludicrously thin that they have to actually design a port on the logic board AND a device to read it, merely to access data if the logic board fails. Just ridiculous. Nobody asked them to please solder the data to the logic board and cause data recovery to be unnecessarily difficult in order to make it 1mm thinner. Dumb dumb dumb. Ugh.
FT
I think the kit is around $100 to $200, and the cable that is used can only be used 30 times... at least that is what they are telling their authorized techs. I am guessing that OWC or another company might eventually have a cheaper kit/tool to access the data on the SSD through this port, but it is still very inconvenient.
As I ranted and whined many a time here, today's over-minimalist unintuitive flat-design-bullsh*t non-upgradable Apple absolutely sucks in so many ways that they have no idea how close they are to many of us jumping ship should windows come up with an interesting OS that abandons all this flat design crap and that operates with the slick, simple efficiency of Apple OSX's before Jony Ive ruined it with so much Fisher Price-look design injections. I wonder whether anyone at Apple realizes how many of us are sticking with them in spite of themselves and because they're still a slightly better option then what else is out there, versus how it was years ago when they were unquestionably the best and only option. A subtle but yet HUGE shift that SHOULD be recognized by and scaring at least someone at Apple. Unless they're all too busy smelling each other's flatulence in a blind happiness stupor while dreaming up random UI changes every 12 months.
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Definitely agree that I am only sticking with Apple because they are a somewhat better option than all the others, not because I like at all the direction of their ever more excessively thin but under-battery-powered laptops, their lack of standard internal connectors for storage, their lack of actual keys on the 15 inch models (am I alone in just wanting keys, not a glowing non-haptic bar?) etc.
More and more people I know feel this way, and it's such a radical shift that I am shocked, genuinely shocked, that nobody from Apple is recognizing this and reacting to it.
How long will it take for this to catch up with Apple? I wonder...
My MacBook Air is three years old, and I expect to only get another two out of it before Apple finds a way to reduce its functionality, such as no longer supporting updates, or it growing to be underpowered for what's needed in 2020 but with no way to improve its hardware inside. Guarantee that I'll shop around and see what's available in windows land when that time comes, first time since buying a Mac pro in 2005. Simply put, the magic that made Apple shock the world into mass popularity with a slow burn starting around 12 years ago that turned white hot by 2007 (and make it worth spending up for an Apple product) is gone for now or permanently. And just like how the ramp up took 5 to 10 years, so will the ramp down should Jony Ive's minimalist unintuitive boring ever-changing UI reign continue. And that's not even mentioning how buggy and crash prone my iPhone is now compared to iOS 6 and prior.
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For now....
I don't believe Apple are too worried about whether people buy their Macs or not. iOS devices are what is making them most of their money and Macs are now almost an after thought, albeit a necessary one since iOS development can only take place on a Mac. You only have to look at the lack of new Mac Pro and Mini models to see this.