Right, only a specific ... batch? manufacturing run? ... of Toshiba SSDs had to be replaced. Not all of them suffered from whatever problem was causing them to fail. These sorts of things happen.
Apple does have every incentive to provide a high quality, reliable product. Not because they're a "good" company that has the public interest at heart. If somebody has a problem with an Apple product, their first visit to have it serviced probably wipes out whatever profit Apple made on that product. Plus, they might become dissatisfied with the product, which hurts Apple's customer satisfaction scores, and they might tell their friends, which might hurt Apple's reputation. Since Apple sells expensive, premium products, they have to avoid anything that might devalue the brand like low customer satisfaction or a bad reputation.
Apple seeks to provide a good products due to one reason: Company's philosophy. See "Jobs" the movie. read his bio. Man was a blatant narcissist, but terrific at leading products that are amazing. Steve viewed machines as an extension of one's arms, and they cannot fail. He regarded tech failure as a personal failure (again, ego and narcissism)
The Nvidia issue: Apple was 'had' by Nvidia which, guess what? cut a corner to push its GU gipset, vs, say, AMD or Intel. The moment a cheapo factor was added, something was amiss, and the cost, to Nvidia, was $ 400 million. Since Apple integrate everything except battery and ram and fans, if a company designs an erroneous board, that was the volume replacement cost. I like the fact that a company like Apple seeks to create amazing products that are so good that even Apple
cannot afford to have key defective parts.
SSDs. I read a lot on technology, but am not an expert. When it comes to SSD's most failure reasons hover around write failures. Check the scary reality:
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...ing-drive-are-power-outages-killing-your-ssds
One year old article, all current SSDs are still the same. What is key, for top manufacturers, is controlling the sequential write and reduce errors. Sandisk, Crucial, Samsung, Toshiba. Hence, the memory controller is, arguably, the most important component on an SSD. Furthermore, top manufacturers build engineering teams around their SSD's and update firmware, etc, and improve controllers. Finally, they go further, adding writing loss prevention chips or controllers (usually built in the same controller). So, if your Macbook drops to 1% and cuts off power, (could be sleep) your SSD's write is preserved, provided it is a quality SSD. A controller that writes SLOWER, BUT BETTER squashes any fast writer that creates errors and eventually collapses the SSD (OWC).
Toshiba replacements: yes it goes by batch. Some 3 months into production, and a few million units shipped, a guru realizes their controller has several flaws, and they fix it on the production line. Unlike cars, this can happen in days or weeks. However, the first compromised batches are by now already installed. Why not mass firmware upgrades? They are done only if sure they will not fry the very SSD's being fixes. In labs, some 10% of firmware updates fail. Speaking about Apple, those numbers and risk are too high. In that case, safer to recall those batch numbers.
My belief is that OWC is nowhere near this tech reality, and are just basic. They are at batch zero of that first sub-million set they began selling in 2012. Maybe only a hundred thousand or so units or less than $ 30 million profit since 2012 (one could check OWC financial figures). High failure rate, most likely over 30% (back to the math of proving the likelihood of the esteemed board members having replacement failure), and, whatever happens, OWC makes an outrageous profit by selling junk at Ferrari price. Safe bet that OWC spends no more than 80-180$ per SSD, which is 30% of the cost of a similar Samsung, Crucial Toshiba SSD. Then they charge you $ 300-500 for those 240 to 480Gb. Outrageous and unnecessary waste of your time and ressources. Also, OWC does not have an engineering team collecting user data and designing improved controller. Nor does its SSD manufacturer. OWC CANNOT AFFORD to go buy Samsung or Toshiba, at low volume purchase, they would pay 10-30% more than Apple for the same thing, or minimum $ 300 for the 128, $400 for the 240 etc, and actual MSRP, it would have to ask 400-500/128, 600-700 for 240 and 800$ or so for the 520. Cheaper for the user to just buy a newer unit and OWC knows that. Solution? Sell cheap junk. All one needs is OWC IRS financial figures, extrapolate SSD profit from the rest of the company's sales, and divide the # of SSD sales by 1.4-1.8 and one gets the per unit cost of average SSD. Then, one goes shopping for matching SSD cost, and very few manufacturers will meet that specific price range. Everything else about 'Aura pro reliability' gimmick are just marketing labels prven false by reviewers and esteemed users as yourself.
Went yesterday at Apple to ask if or when will they offer SSD upgrades. I was told NO- just defective replacement. They will not pull out a 128 and sell a 512 if you wish. Why not? No idea, but likely has to do with reasons listed above, Apple does not want the liability of defective batches and 3d party, non-factory installations. They also do not want to buy and stock $300 million worth of SSDs (or just 600,000 units at $500 a piece). And, likely, newer modules may not be compatible with previous Motherboard firmware. Apple cannot just order 600,000 units of 2012 MBA SSDs- certainly not from Samsung any longer. Besides, tech has moved several generations of controllers since and no one goes to replicate the old ones. So Apple has its defective replacement stocks, likely 0.0001 or so % of all MacBooks sold since very few have SSD failure to begin with. And if they run out of SSDs for systems under warranty, they will replace the whole mac.
