Perhaps, but They're the ones that fight tooth and nail against the right to repair, they're the ones that purposely disabled faceid/touchid if someone other then Apple opened up their phones. True they begrudgenly opened up a self repair process for their phones, but as others on YT shown, its done in such a way that its generally more expensive.
So yes, my interpretation may very well be one sided but its backup by years of anti-consumer behavior by Apple.
Apple's opposition to right to repair is a well known fact. Whether it constitutes anti-consumer behavior is a matter of interpretation and personal stance. This is a very interesting discussion on its own, but is probably not appropriate in the context of this thread.
What I am trying to say is that Linus's interpretation assume that there is specific malicious intent behind these design decisions. But this is an additional assumption which is not necessary to explain or understand these decisions. If I am giving you a sandwich with butter it's not because I go out of my way to prevent you from putting cottage cheese on it instead. It's just that I want to make a sandwich with butter and speading the butter directly onto the bread is the simplest option for me. It didn't even cross my mind that you might want it with cottage cheese instead and if you tell me about your right of having your bread with whatever you want I will probably just shrug. Can you accuse me of malicious intent in this scenario?
Not being able to upgrade has other implications. If your M1 internal SSD dies the machine is a brick even if you have a bucket of external SSDs because of how Apple designed the boot process. You might not care but from an e-waste perspective it's pretty bad. Five to ten years from now there will be a stack of useless Macs that otherwise would have been good with a $30 SSD replacement.
I think you might be overdramatising this a bit. First, how can you know that there will indeed be a stack of useless Macs? Apple has been shipping on-replaceable SSDs since 2012, and it doesn't seem like it has exasperated the e-waste issue. But what's most relevant, do you think that there is indeed a substantial enough amount of users who would continue to use the computer with an external SSD or even replace the failed drive? My experience is very different. The majority would just get a new computer once their SSD goes. Hell, people don't even replace the battery on their iPhones, but get a new one instead!
What you say makes a lot of sense in the context of
options. The way how Apple designs these things certainly removes the option of prolonging the lifespan of the machine. And I fully acknowledge that there are users who would prefer to have these options and I respect their opinion. Frankly, I too would prefer if the SSD were replaceable and SSD upgrades were a reality (if not by user than at least by Apple). But I don't think it is correct or appropriate to frame these kinds of wishes in the context of environment or e-waste.
There's very little reason they couldn't have included industry standard M.2 slots and in some machines like the M1 Mac Mini that's half empty with oodles of room it's pretty inexcusable. They KNOW that soldered storage and memory will make them more money at time of purchase and that underequipping base models will hasten upgrades.
This is certainly part of their business model, yes. But there are also some valid technical reasons not to use M.2 SSDs. Power consumption, protocol optimisation, reliability (no third-party firmware with unclear behavior)... For example, Apple SSDs correctly implement data flush operations, while many consumer SSDs lose data even after confirming that the data has been written. M.2 SSDs have their own RAM for caching, while Apple can use the system RAM, improving power consumption and performance in certain situations. And so on.
Do these advantages outweigh the loss of upgradeability and repairability? That's a different question which probably cannot be answered generally. As I said, I'd prefer if all NAND on Apple Silicon was replaceable and if Apple offered a NAND upgrade/replacement service (either in shop or via their self-repair program).
www.macrumors.com
