Still doesn’t excuse them making it proprietary. You can do all this and still make it non proprietary if you wanted
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The Mac mini 2024 actually has socketed SSD
- Thread starter Gnattu
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No you cannot. As I said the best thing they can do is to offer a secondary drive slot which is not proprietary and does not have all the self-made storage system benefits. Developing a technology with your own R&D money and allows others to use is not an obligation and should not be an obligation. People have to eat and cannot do all work volunteering. The problem is always where to draw the line and I'm really not a big fan of making totally reasonable business practices illegal where there are tens of thousands of alternatives in the market.
"Enacted in 1975, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act prohibits product manufacturers from conditioning consumer warranties on the use of any original equipment part or service. Furthermore, a manufacturer can only deny warranty coverage if it can demonstrate that a non-original equipment part or related service caused a defect to occur in the original product."
Just because you don’t understand it or believe it does not mean the act does not exist nor does it mean that it does not have legal standing.
It seems you like to live in theory and not in the real world. You can feel free to try bring that document to the Apple Store, but in the real world an Apple Service Centre will often refuse warranty work if they've seen you've messed with non-serviceable parts. The drive in those old Intel iMacs is one of those non-user serviceable parts. (eg. People would not be able to get AppleCare extended warranty service in an HD-only Intel iMac in which they've replaced the hard drive with a third party SSD.) We've seen this reported already. And plus, that law only applies in the US anyway. I don't even live in the US.
In contrast, if it's a user serviceable part, it's never an issue getting warranty work done.
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How? Again, their SSD controller is integrated within the processor. How do you make something like that non-proprietary? And how do you ensure that third-party hardware implements correct flush semantics?
I wonder how often Apple designs a machine only to find out that parts from other companies don't fit within Apple's design/methods or needs. So Apple can either drastically change their design/methods, and end up being like everyone else' products, or make their own proprietary parts to fit within their design/methods - I'd bet this is why Apple gear is so expensive. I have a feeling that, if Apple had to accept what other companies provided and not make their own parts, that new Mac mini would look very different. Apple likes to do their own thing, it's part of what sets them apart.
Just another reminder that third party NVMe SSDs kinda suck in Macs in some ways. Mac OEM NAND cards run cool with no heatsinks, and the SSD controllers are built right into the SoC, with high end features, and with the latest low power chip-making process node (currently TSMC N3E). Fast third party NVMe SSDs run scorchingly hot, with chipsets built on processes several generations behind, requiring heatsinks to prevent significant throttling.
Also macOS does not natively properly support the ASPM modes of the various NVMe drives out there, so those hot drives run even hotter on macOS than on Windows. The companies who make those drives don't write appropriate drivers for macOS to fix this, but I don't think Apple would want those hacks to macOS anyway.
Also macOS does not natively properly support the ASPM modes of the various NVMe drives out there, so those hot drives run even hotter on macOS than on Windows. The companies who make those drives don't write appropriate drivers for macOS to fix this, but I don't think Apple would want those hacks to macOS anyway.
Great point!
Research, development, engineering, prototyping would add costs of course, and it does add some quirks which might be annoying at times. But M-series is probably the best proof ever that being all too dependent upon someone elses parts/tech have bad implications too.
Doing their apple thing regardless of whatever anybody else did, killed the Sony Walkman, then it killed Nokia and Blackberry, and together with Google it killed Microsoft`s go at phones (the latter isn`t entirely true, Microsoft made a great phone, but wholehartedly put an end to it by using the same UX where it didn`t belong. UX needs to relate to it`s formfactor). And now Intel is in serious trouble.
Not only because of what Apple did, but because they relied upon their Wintel coziness and was more keen on defending their own than facing the music - efficiency and watt. M-series must have been a shock to Intel, and they are still trembliing whereas other competitors are in a way better position to compete with Apple. Eventually. Years with lies (ongoing) simply makes even their own fans loose faith.
There is this rather Microsoft centric site I read from time to time, where every release by Apple gets mocked one way or another in the articles, and the commentaries are having a field day at Apple`s expence. Meanwhile Apple is carrying on minding their own business, and for M4, the commentaries are clean. Hardly anyone got something to say about M4. Everyone undestood that the M-series was work in progress, and now they are in a quite decent position. One thing is certain: It doesn`t stop here, neither for CPU, GPU or bandwidths.
On the other hand, Apple is determined to run their own show no matter what, and there are a few obsoleted products due to not listening to users. The Apple way or the highway. Minimalism is fine, but users wants ports.
Pricing is always for business reasons. It would be horrible if pricing depended on technology.
Apple wants a certain profit margin for their line of Macs. They don't really care how they achieve it. If you have a proposal in which Apple can keep their profit margin (or even increase it) and still charge less for upgrades, it would be amazing to hear it.
How is ordering a drive afterwards and have it shipped separately more carbon neutral than ordering the Mac with everything included?
Of course it is, and of course I haven`t. It`s their business model, and they probably have the greatest profit margin of anyone but Nvidia....
...my point was that I seriously doubt they sell the entry iteration at loss, and they make the ladder the way they do to squeeze more profit from their customers.
They could offer storage upgrades for the Mini, but I'm not sure if they will. For instance, both the Studio and MP have had slotted NAND since they were first introduced, yet Apple has chosen to offer storage upgrades for the MP only:
Apple 4TB SSD Upgrade Kit for Mac Pro
The SSD kit for Mac Pro enables you to upgrade the internal SSD storage capacity of yourMac Pro. Installation required. Buy now at apple.com.
www.apple.com
I've wondered about that myself. Since the controller is on the processor, is there any reason Apple couldn't have configured these NAND chips to be the same as high-end non-proprietary SSD's, except without the controller?
These storage upgrade prices help Apple to maintain high profit margins in its Mac division, and I'd find it hard to believe that Apple executives didn't want these to be difficult to replicate. I thus suspect that their proprietary nature was motivated by business rather than technological considerations.
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Nah. There are huge technical advantages. I think that’s the primary reason to go this direction.
OK, in that case, what are they?
I.e., once you have the controller on the processor, what are the technical advantages of Apple's proprietary NAND over a controllerless version of a standard high-end SSD?
That was what my post was about—I was questioning why putting the controller on the processor required a proprietary solution.
? A controller-less NAND cannot be a standard SSD. They are fundamentally different. So in that context, why waste space and effort with a pin compatible 2280 card? If you’re already going for a non-standard implementation, don’t limit yourself by going with someone else’s less ideal design.
Apple already offers alternatives for storage, in the form of Thunderbolt 4/5 and USB 4.
Isn't that what they do? Still, there is no industry standard for this and nobody else except Apple uses NAND in this exact way. I think the notion of proprietary vs. non-proprietary loses its meaning if we talk about a hardware component and protocol used by a single company for a single type of product.
Maybe they could publish the spec and offer certification to third-party SSD manufacturers to make Mac-compliant SSD modules. Sounds like a huge hassle for very little gain given how tiny that market is. Also, that would preclude them from changing the interface in the future products.
That sounds like a reasonable assumption. As to the nature of these considerations, we can only guess.
I've already said that they are not standard SSD's, since they have no controller. Whether we call them "controllerless SSDs", or something that doesn't have "SSD" in the term (like "unmanaged flash"; see my next post), is just semantics.
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Actually, this may not be unique to Apple, since it appears there is a term of art for flash where the controller is not in the flash device itself: Unmanaged flash.
"Using unmanaged devices, copy-on-write (COW), bit error correction, bad block tracking, read disturbance handling and other flash management tasks must be taken care of on the host side."
Managed vs Unmanaged Flash Memory in Embedded Systems - JBLopen
Overview of unmanaged NOR and NAND Flash versus managed SD Card and eMMC storage devices from a system and software design perspective.
Actually, this may not be unique to Apple, since it appears there is a term of art for flash where the controller is not in the flash device itself: Unmanaged flash.
"Using unmanaged devices, copy-on-write (COW), bit error correction, bad block tracking, read disturbance handling and other flash management tasks must be taken care of on the host side."
Managed vs Unmanaged Flash Memory in Embedded Systems - JBLopen
Overview of unmanaged NOR and NAND Flash versus managed SD Card and eMMC storage devices from a system and software design perspective.www.jblopen.com
Absolutely, it is a common application in embedded hardware. I’m curious for whether there is an industry standard for modular unmanaged high-performance flash. The link you provided seems to focus on affordable low-performance embedded solutions.
Even the nomenclature of the term "solid state drive" (SSD), itself is a borrowed concept from when a drive system was literally a mechanical component that moves, predominately in a hard disk drive. There was a time when this distinction of whether or not the actual "drive" is present on the removable media was important, for example you wouldn't call a floppy disk a drive, since the literal drive was on the computer side. This naming convention got carried over to SSD, to me it is as a matter of metaphor since it immediately replaces HDDs. Therefore I find it a needless debate in asking whether or not Apple's implementation of the NAND in the Apple Silicon era should qualify as an "SSD". The fact that a stick of NAND with a controller on the media side became a standard is a happy coincidence that had nothing to do with what the term SSD meant.
And back to the current topic; the last time anything that resembles a "controller-less NAND" is an SD card. With NAND there has been no need to do so, perhaps a lot to do with the rise of embedded systems and cloud storage, than any technical reason.
And back to the current topic; the last time anything that resembles a "controller-less NAND" is an SD card. With NAND there has been no need to do so, perhaps a lot to do with the rise of embedded systems and cloud storage, than any technical reason.
A very big advantage for Apple is that they can save significant amount of pins vs the "standard " NANDs while providing the same bandwidth. I forget the numbers but Apple's NAND uses significantly less pins than the "standard" ones used on nvme ssds. This also enables them to also use the same NAND on iPhone where the PCB space is extremely constrained with the same nvme design, while its competitors have to use alternate technologies like the UFS.