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Louis Rossman on soldered SSD
- Thread starter danbuter
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If someone were to rip the SSD module out of your Mac studio, it would be basically useless to them do to it needing to be linked to the secure enclave.
Without being linked to the secure enclave, those modules are basically dead.
Remember, the modules that Apple uses do not have SSD controllers in them, it’s all controlled by the processor and the secure enclave inside.
Compare this to a standard replaceable hard drive or SSD, where you can pretty much just swap them to any computer and access data on it.
Except Apple actually holds themselves to measurable metrics on sustainability. How do they market it when making the slot reduces reliability and recapture for recycling?
Nope. If they move on this, and I don't expect they will, it'll be a Tim Cook "we heard you" keynote comment, but it's not a green bullet unless there's data to support it.
Things serviced or replaced at Apple get recycled (possibly refurbished). Things serviced or replaced at home get thrown away.
Having a certain professional work attitude is critical for an academic degree, yes.
Knowing where your data is coming from, where you save it and how you ensure that you can still access it in case of a disaster is part of that. No matter if you’re studying computer science, biology or classical latin.
In what world would a thief open a Mac Studio, spend 30 minutes with their screwdrivers just to take the SSD?
They'd just snatch the whole thing
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I think the point being made was the stolen Mac Studio can't have its data exfiltrated even by removing the NAND chips.
Exactly this. If you’re working on a thesis, it’s not unreasonable to expect a certain level personal responsibility.
”I see here that you have a PhD, but never completed a thesis? Can you explain that?”
”Yeah, you see, Apple ate my SSD and my adviser agreed it wasn’t fair for me to be punished for that…”
“Ah no problem. We had that happen a few weeks ago where we couldn’t deliver on a major contract because we lost a decade of irreplaceable sensor data. The client understood the situation and paid the contract in full.”
How do you mean this, practically?
User replaces faulty SSD, and tosses the old one into electronics recycling bin. Where is the waste?
<looks under sink for ewaste recycling bin, is disappointed>
Is your electronics recycling bin emptied twice weekly by leprechauns? I’m not sure what country you’re from, but where I am half the population doesn’t recycle newspaper and aluminum cans because they consider it too much trouble.
I’d have to scroll back, but are you one of the people arguing it’s too much to expect people to have a Time Machine backup?
Not to mention that even if you do put it in the recycling bin ... https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131...y-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse only a small percentage of it actually gets recycled according to that URL.
Apple does a much better job recycling.
It’s not just about having your computer stolen.
It can also, for example, prevent a possibly malicious or dangerous third-party installing a hard drive in your computer before you ever receive it.
not very important for you or me, but for anyone in a possibly compromised situation it *could* help, in a similar way that lockdown mode in iOS could help.
The point was, there are security benefits to having everything so tightly tied together.
Just because we don’t need them or we don’t think they’re important doesn’t necessarily mean that they shouldn’t exist.
Yea, that's why I generally opt for just taking it to the Apple store myself. If you have the money, it's definitely the better call.
But I also remember back when I was in college, and I had my 2012 MacBook Pro (it's been put through a lot of abuse). I was a broke college student working full time and taking a full time load of classes at the same time, and at one point I had shattered the screen. I used it like that for months until a friend of mine (who was a graduate student in the computer science program) offered to replace it for $100. He had a little side business, no idea where he was able to source the parts for it that cheaply, but he got it done and it worked flawlessly. If it hadn't been for him, I would have had a shattered screen for a lot longer because there was no way I could have afforded to pay Apple to fix it.
There are a lot of folks who are in these kinds of situations. The better answer is always to just take it to Apple, but if you don't have the money, sometimes you just have to settle for the next best thing. A working computer is better than a broken one, and if it's already busted, there's nothing to lose by trying to get it fixed wherever you can afford to get it done.
I'm confused here. I wonder what the stats are on the usage of iCloud drives for primary data storage, and the usage of time machine are. I mean, I've always had an external handling backup, and that deltas every hour or so. I would have thought a lot of people do?
I wonder how this twenty-something year old's thesis is coming along if they're not even smart enough to back-up such important work
I doubt that every single person who has had a great thesis in college backed up their work at regular intervals. Most of the time people just use Google Docs these days, but stuff happens.
Data loss has happened to a lot of people who weren't dumb. Life happens, we live and learn.
That's certainly one way of saying, "members accepting a different set of tradeoffs than I would."
100%
For one, Rossman's framing—and even some posters in this very thread—would have you believe that Apple is the only one doing this! As if there aren't Surfaces, and Dell XPSes, and other models from other manufacturers going to soldered components as well.
So why the focus on Apple?!?
Rossman knows where his bread is buttered. There is a whole cottage industry of loving to hate Apple, and criticizing Apple brings in the clicks!
I don't gain anything from an unpaid position "defending" Apple, and that's not what I'm doing here. I'm simply acknowledging the reality (that even major publications engage in) that the mention of "Apple" is a headline-grabber, especially in a negative light. To ignore Rossman capitalizing on that as if he's doing this out of pure benevolence is disingenuous.
Also, a "moral" argument?!?! We're talking about products that anyone is free to buy or not buy based on their own desire (or lack thereof) for user-reparability. Let's have some perspective.
Which university is accepting an all night thesis submission? You work on thesis for months, if not years. Heck the amount of QC I had to go through for my thesis was ridiculous. I had like 20-25 versions of my thesis. I use iCloud to back up as I save my important documents. And I have a disk and NAS backing up.
Rossman doesn't zero in on Apple. He talks about many other companies in the industry in the exact same manner, including pure.ism, amazon, John Deer, and others. His stance has been pretty consistent on right-to-repair regardless of the company.
His commentaries tend to generate many more views, but he still posts repair videos regularly, some of them are quite in depth. The majority of his net worth comes from his business, not from his youtube channel.
To be fair, his YouTube channel almost certainly drives customers to his business. Alex Jones probably didn't make a lot of money on YouTube but I'm sure that exposure drove a lot of sales to his soy pill website.
Oh for sure, but is Louis Rossman selling soy pills and snake oil? Not sure what Alex Jones has to do with this.
I know he is a hack because his rant is perfect for Dell, not Apple. Apple soldering or not is moot on MBP post T2, with hardware encryption. Dell doesn’t have any hardware encryption and recommends software bit locker encryption after shipping. If he knows and puts this, it’s bad look. If he is ignorant, then it’s stupid.
I'm pretty sure he is well aware of this. His whole point is that there is no easy way for any third party to replace these chips if they fail (and SSDs do fail), and that Apple's charges are significantly higher than the average person could afford.
This whole problem could be resolved if Apple had lower prices for repairing these (or if the prices for authentic parts weren't so expensive for authorized repair shops). When the cost of replacing these chips is almost as much as a new Mac (and people have no other alternative because even third party shops with the right tools can't source the parts for less than $600), some amount of pushback is understandable.