I'll add some references:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...
"You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am"
The Apple Mx CPUs had some secret test registers that allowed the bypassing of all hardware memory protections and which could be accessed by those who were aware of their existence, because they were not disabled after production, as they should have been. Combined with some software bugs in some Apple system libraries, this allowed an attacker to obtain privileged execution rights by sending an invisible message to the iPhone.
It is unknown whether the same secret test registers were also open in the laptop versions of the Apple Mx CPUs. There the invisible message attack route would have been unavailable, but malicious Web pages might have been able to use the same exploit.
This incredible security failure has been hot news for a couple of weeks, together with the long list of CVEs associated with it, and it has been also discussed on HN, but after that it has been quickly forgotten. Now most people still think that the Apple devices have good security, despite their history showing otherwise. I do not think that any other hardware vendor except Apple has been caught with a security bug so dumb as those unprotected hardware test registers.
This was not a theoretical security failure, but it was discovered because some unknown attackers had used it for a long time to spy on some iPhone owners. The attack had been discovered by studying the logs of WiFi access points, which had shown an unusually high outbound traffic coming from the iPhones, which were exfiltrating the acquired data.
You make it sound like this was a huge impact issue, it really wasn’t, theoretically everyone could be affected but in reality a negligible subset were.
The fact that Apple keeps secret many technical details of their CPUs, like the existence of those hardware test registers, does not improve the security of their devices, but it weakens the security considerably.
Because of the Apple secrecy policy, the existence of the backdoor has been known and exploited by very few, but the same secrecy has enabled those few to spy on any interesting target for several years, without being discovered.
Had the test registers been documented, someone would have noticed quickly that they are accessible when they should not be, and the vulnerabilities would have been patched by Apple a few years earlier.
As for the registers itself, I concede that information about those specifically could've been made available.
Two minutes or less, 4 DNS entries.
I'm a lot less convinced than you are of the hardiness of Apple's security.
1) "I'm not a security researcher" (ethos; repeal to authority)
2) "I get" (pathos; personal opinion)
3) "distinct impression" (pathos; emotional appeal)
4) "good enough" (logos; implies security is immeasurable/infeasible to prove)
Now, I wouldn't get caught dead endorsing a company that I have to write so many excuses for. But they did warn you!
With direct physical access, a lot of things can be done which cannot be done remotely, e.g. attempting to boot from an external device, possibly using hardware fault injections to bypass protections against that, attempting to read data that has not completely decayed from the DRAM modules, replacing some hardware component or inserting an extra component that would enable spying in the future, making copies of an encrypted SSD/HDD with the hope that after making other copies of it in the future that will enable breaking the encryption , if that is done using an encryption mode that does not protect against this kind of attack, and so on.
It's pure robbery on Apple's part. Completely beyond the pale now. Their ridiculous RAM and storage prices were never that big of a deal back in the PowerBook/early Macbook Pro days, because you could always opt out if you were a tiny bit handy with a small screwdriver (my 2008 unibody lets me swap storage with *1* screw, swap a battery with zero!). Now? It's unforgivable. I don't care about soldered RAM, I get it, but it is despicable charging as much as the entire computer to upgrade the RAM a paltry 16GB.
There's profit, and there's actively making your entire product experience worse in pursuit of profit. Having to constantly hem and haw over oh god oh geeze do I have enough local storage for this basic task, having to juggle external storage and copying files back and forth (since plenty of their own shit doesn't work if its installed on an external SSD), or constantly deleting and redownloading larger apps, makes the product experience worse. Full stop. At the very least every Mac they sell should have 512GB, if not a TB, stock. I'm tired of acting like SSDs are some insanely expensive luxury like it's 2008 again.
But I think it's point, the performance of Hackintosh is terrible for many reasons as its all a hackjob.
The people involved in making the Hackintosh possible should be immortalized in stone carvings to be remembered for all of time.
So maybe I'm calling it early, but it will at some point be pointless to continue running the old Intel systems.
Even still, I'm a huge fan of taking advantage of the cheaper options with an portable external chassis and a nice thunderbolt cable. While not quite as fast as the internal version, it's still 2+GB/s worth of speed that exceeds my needs/use.
So from my perspective, it's dirt cheap compared to your insanely expensive perspective
This has a number of downsides on macOS. I am well aware of the cheapness of this, but you also get a worse user-experience. I have a huge NAS that I could connect to over 10GbE too, save for no native iSCSI drivers. I have a handful of external SSDs in enclosures, but I can't easily boot off of it (and if I do, certain features of the OS get disabled). I can't easily or reliably move my home folder to it. I can't clean up my desk without buying expensive external "docks" or something that in addition to a standard M.2 SSD, come out to more expensive than the iBoff upgrade. I have to waste my time juggling files back and forth from the external to the internal in situations where I either want to (for faster speeds) or need to (in cases where Apple's software refuses to work if its not on the internal SSD).
Yeah, 20 years ago the thought of 5GB/s for less than a grand was fantasy. It's not fantasy anymore, and it's not 20 years ago. I'm tired of pretending it is to justify these outrageous prices Apple is extracting from their customers.
You're also acting like I'm suggesting running the OS from the external. That's just a weird way to think about it. The system drive is just that, for the system and apps and home folder. Media belongs on a different volume. Granted, I'm a media person with professional workflow mentality where the media is never small enough to fit on a system drive. Plus, "back in the day" the media drives were much faster than the system drive. So it's all turned up on its head in that regard
For what it's worth, I completely agree with you.
But.
I suspect that Apple isn't solely doing this for profit. Apple's pricing structure aggressively funnels people into the base config for each CPU.
Thinking about getting an M4 with upgraded ram? A base config M4 pro starts to look pretty good.
In practice, this means that Apple's logistics is dramatically simplified since 95% of people are ordering a small number of SKUs.
> There's profit, and there's actively making your entire product experience worse in pursuit of profit.
It was really egregious when the base config only came with 8 GB of ram. I'll admit that storage can be a bit tight depending on what you're trying to do, but at least external storage is an option, however ugly and/or inconvenient it may be for some.
This isn't a profitable move from Apple's perspective - they try to keep the base unit at about the same price across generations. That's what happened when they moved from 8 GB of ram to 16 GB.
Looks like you also have to do the upgrade yourself (so it’s not all just cash money being forked over).
Privately it is all about Linux/Windows/Android.
Very good insights,
The first enclosure I ever dealt with was a 7-bay RAID-0 that could just barely handle AVR75 encoding from Avid. Just barely to the point that only video was saved to the array. The audio throughput would put it over the top, so audio was saved to a separate external drive.
Using SSD feels like a well deserved power up from those days.
Woah, how long would that last before you'd start having to replace the drives?
More typically, you'd have a drive die much less frequently, but it was something you absolutely had to be prepared for. With RAID-6 and a hot spare, you could be okay with a single drive failure. Theoretically, you could lose two, but it would be a very nervy day getting the array to rebuild without issue.
The fun thing about storage pools is that they can lull you into thinking they are set it and forget it. You have to monitor SMART messages. Most drives will give you a heads up if you know where to look. Having the fortitude to have a hot spare instead of just adding it to the storage pool goes a long way from losing data.
---
1. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...
To be clear, I should have said replacing 2-3 disks per year.
I did have a period where I thought drives were failing but further investigation revealed that ZFS just didn't like the drives spinning down for power save and would mark them as failed. I don't remember the parameter but essentially just forced the drives to spin 24/7 instead of spinning down when idle and it's been fine ever since. My health monitoring script scrubs the array weekly.
I have (stupidly) used a too small Samsung EVO drive as a caching drive, and that is probably the first computer part that I've worn out (bar a mouse & keyboard).
For the ones new enough to get an SSD upgrade, it's night and day the difference (even a Power Mac G4 can feel fresh and fast just swapping out the drive). For older Macs like PowerBooks and classic Macs, there are so many SD/CF card to IDE/SCSI/etc. adapters now, they also get a significant boost.
But part of the nostalgia of sitting there listening to the rumble of the little hard drive is gone.
Would those be bandwidth limited by the adapter/card or CPU? Can you get throughput higher than say, a cheap 2.5" SSD over Sata 3/4?
Might still be worth doing for someone into older computers, I've considered putting a few of my old computers on the free pile at a VCF!
I remember this being a key troubleshooting step. Listen/feel for the hum of the hard drive OR the telltale click clack, grinding, etc that foretold doom.
Somehow the 750MB HDD from 1996 is still working, but I admit that the crunch and rumble of HDDs is a nostalgia I'm happy to leave in the past.
My 1.67 PowerBook G4 screams with a 256GB mSATA SSD-IDE adapter. Until you start compiling code or web surfing, it still feels like a pretty modern machine. I kind of wish I didn't try the same upgrade on a iBook G3, though...
Oh god. Those were the worst things ever to upgrade the hard drive. Just reading this gave me a nightmare flashback to having to keep track of all the different screws. This is why my vintage G3 machine is a Pismo instead of an iBook.
It doesn't help that I'm not a great laptop repair tech as is, but wow are those iBooks terrible. The AlBook was fine, and the Unibody MacBooks just a few years later had the HDD next to the battery under a tool-less latch.
Most (cheap) SSDs their performance goes off a cliff once you hit the boundary of these tricks.
Tell me more. When do I hit the boundary? What is perf before/after said boundary? What are the tricks?
Tell me something actionable. Educate me.
For the RAM cache, you hit the boundaries when you exhaust the RAM cache. It performs faster, but is smaller and once full, data has to be off/loaded at the rate of the slower backing NAND. It might not be RAM, either, sometimes faster SLC NAND is used for the cache.
It's not really possible to describe it much more concretely than that beyond what you've already been told, performance falls off a cliff when that happens. How long "it" takes, what the level of performance is before and after, it all depends on the device.
There are many more tricks that SSD manufacturers use, but caching is the only one I know of related to speed so I'll leave the rest in the capable hands of Google.
In context it's more likely a translation issue, perhaps from modern translation picking up a challenging tone and inadvertently turning it to 'challenged by a lawyer or cop' mode to maintain the tone.
For most (all?) SSD drives they need a good 20% of the drive free for garbage collection and wear levelling. Going over this means it can't do this "asynchronously" and instead has to do it as things are written, which really impacts speed.
Then on top of that on cheaper flash like TLC and QLC the drive can go much faster by having free space "pretend" to be SLC and write it in a very "inefficient" size wise but fast method (think a bit like striped RAID0, but instead of data reliability issues you get with that it only works when you have extra space available). Once it hits a certain threshold it can't pretend anymore as it uses too much space to write in an inefficient fast way and has to write it in the proper format.
These things are additive too so on cheaper flash things get very very slow. Learnt this the hard way some years ago when it would barely write out at 50% of HDD speeds.
I'm afraid I don't understand how exactly this makes it faster. In my head, storing fewer bits per write operation should decrease write bandwidth.
Of course we observe the opposite all the time, with SLC flash being the fastest of all.
Does it take significantly more time to store the electrical charge for any given 1-4 bits with the precision required when using M/T/QLC encoding?
RootsComment: SSD speed is miraculous! Jorvis: well ackshually is just RAM and tricks that run out Me: your comment provides zero value
I am annoyed by well ackshually comments. I’d love to learn more about SDD performance. How is the ram filled? How bad is perf when you cache miss? What’s worse case perf? What usage patterns are good or bad? So many interesting questions.
More recently we saw SSDs get added to video game consoles and load times are about 4x faster. And that’s with code/data optimized for a spinning plate not an SSD.
I know they aren’t actually magic. But they might as well be! I’d love to hear details on what weird conditions reduce their performance by 10x. That’d be cool and fun to know. Alas.
Its not really a well ackshually comment, there's real pitfalls. Especially when doing 4K. RAW 4K is 12Gb/s and would fill 450GB within 5 minutes. ProRes 4444XQ within 10 minutes. ProRes4444 in 40 minutes.
Martinald his comment is right too. By being very inefficient and treating TLC (or even QLC) as single level and only writing one bit to a cell, much higher performance can be extracted. But once you hit the 80% full threshold, the drive starts to repack the last/least used data into multiple bits per cell.
A RAM cache and SLC cache can both speed access times up, act as a write buffer and mask the shuffling of bits, but there is a limit.
Lastly, its kind of ironic to see me portrayed as jaded when someone else is the one pouring out vitriol all over the thread. Ah well.
[0]https://tweakers.net/reviews/12310/wd-sn5000-4tb-ssd-hoe-sne...
This is interesting. Thanks!
> Its not really a well ackshually comment, there's real pitfalls
I don’t doubt the existence of pitfalls. But the lack of specificity was quite irritating!
The test measures the write cache speed and the time to the fall to the native NAND write speed. There are usually irregularities in the sustained write speeds as well.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-black-sn850x-ssd-rev...
The other test I've seen is based on writing and using up free space, SSD performance can drop off as the free space fills up and garbage collection efficiency goes down. I think this impacts random writes particularly
In the enterprise space, drives tend to keep more over provisioned NAND free to maintain more consistent performance. Very early on the SSD timeline, it was advisable to only allocate 80% of consumer drives if you were using them outside of desktops and expected the workload to fill them.
This is why I always recommend developers try using SQLite on top of NVMe storage. The performance is incredible. I don't think you would see query times anywhere near 20uS with a hosted SQL solution, even if it's on the same machine using named pipes or other IPC mechanism.
The most recent desktop I built has it situated directly below the standard formfactor x16 PCI slot.
Virtual memory subsystems in operating systems of the last 40+ years pretty much do exactly that – they essentially emulate infinite RAM that spills over onto the external storage that backs it up.
Prosumer grade laptops are already easily available, and in 2-3 years there will be ones with 256-512 Gb as well, so… it is not entirely incoceivable that in 10-20 years (maybe more, maybe less) the Optane style memory is going to make a comeback and laptops/desktops will come with just memory, and the separation into RAM and external storage will finally cease to exist.
P.S. RAM has become so cheap and has reached such large capacity that the current generation of young engineers don't event know what a swap is, and why they might want to configure it.
It's not that much of a stretch to imagine ultra dense wafers that can have compute, storage, and memory all in one SoC.
First, unify compute and memory. Then, later, unify those two with persistent storage so that we have something like RAM = VRAM = Storage.
I don't think this is around the corner, but certainly possible in about 12 years.
Pretty much every modern CPU is a hybrid design (either modified Harvard or von Neumann), and then there is SoC, as you have rightfully pointed out, which is usually modified Harvard, with heterogenuous computing, integrated SIMT (GPU), DSP's and various accelerators (e.g. NPU) all connected via high-speed interconnects. Apple has added unified memory, and there have rumours that with the advent M5 they are going to change how the memory chips are packaged (added to the SoC), which might (or might not) lay a path for the unification of RAM and storage in the future. It is going to be an interesting time.
That would be possible even on spinning harddrives as long as they're already spinning.
The fastest memory can't prevent the real reason games take so long to the menu: company logos. The Xbox can already resume a closed game within a few seconds, loading a simple main menu is trivial in comparison.
Obviously not true that they’d overwhelm modern databases but feels like that place has had the same opinions since the 1960s.
This is the secret hack a lot of people don't know about!
I recently bought a $17 SSD for my son’s middle school project that was speced to deliver like 3x what I needed in those days. From a storage perspective, I was probably spending $50 GB/mo all-in to deploy a multi million dollar storage solution. TBH… you’d probably smoke that system with used laptops today.
I've been traveling for business with this as my sole machine for 3 months straight and it has proven to be an excellent system.
> If non-square screens on Macbook Pros make your blood boil with rage
> If you can't afford or don't want to pay for a Macbook Pro (smart choice)
> If you have ergonomics concerns with shrinking laptops and one size fits all keyboards
> If you like your systems to be repairable and modular rather than comprised of proprietary parts shoehorned in to a closed source design available only from a single vendor for a limited time
> If you are blind (and don't want to carry a screen around)
> If you want to use AR instead of a screen and therefore prefer to be untethered
> If you are on a sailing ship, submarine, mobile home, campervan, paraglider, recumbent touring bicycle, or otherwise off-grid
> If you want a capable unix system to power a mobile mechatronic system
I'd add in not having to deal with a Macbook in clamshell mode doing stupid crap like forcing you to double-tap the touchID button sometimes, refusing to connect to external keyboards and mice on wake, and some of the other annoyances I have dealt with.
Also, a Mac Mini is small, and a MacBook is not, at least as a function of "desk area" vs "area consumed".
MB Air ($1100+ / >1.8x) is only available 15" which is IMHO too small for long term comfortable use.
MB Pro ($2300+ / >3.8x) is 16" which is IMHO still a bad ergonomic experience. I'd sooner buy a mini, trash it, buy another one 4 times. Especially given they are improving annually.
> If you are blind (and don't want to carry a screen around)
> If you want to use AR instead of a screen and therefore prefer to be untethered
You can just remove the screen! My M1 Air works just fine at least. (I’ve broken the screen, but if you just don’t need screen at all, you can sell the top half assembly and save some money.)
Are the populated from the existing PSU input or just there in case anyone wanted to mod it?
If you do this mod, you should really use crimped ring connectors instead of just hooking the power cables around the screws. It greatly reduces the risk of pull-out since the screw retains the connector, which also means less chance of shorts and a much easier install. Also since the terminals are uniform and flat, you get much more even clamping. I would also add heat shrink over the crimp.
I don't have a Mini so can't comment on the right size to buy, but you can buy ring terminals in practically any diameter for next to nothing:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/terminals/ring-co...
About a decade and a half ago, Apple paid half a billion dollars to acquire the patents of a company making enterprise SSD controllers.
> Anobit appears to be applying a lot of signal processing techniques in addition to ECC to address the issue of NAND reliability and data retention. In its patents there are mentions of periodically refreshing cells whose voltages may have drifted, exploiting some of the behaviors of adjacent cells and generally trying to deal with the things that happen to NAND once it's been worn considerably.
Through all of these efforts, Anobit is promising significant improvements in NAND longevity and reliability.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5258/apple-acquires-anobit-br...
Every flash controller does this. Modern NAND is just math on a stick. Lots and lots of math.
Still sucks that you can’t use standard parts.
Same thing with DDR5: the electrical layer is a beast, it's a reason enough to require its own controller.
On the CPU's PCIe bus. NVMe drives are PCIe devices, designed specifically to facilitate such interfacing.
Edit: Pardon, misread the actual statement you responded to. Of course one shouldn't hook NAND directly to the CPU. I'll leave my response for whatever value the info has.
We already see the demand for this in the latest NVMe protocol spec that allows the host to give placement hints. But this is a half-measure that suggests what systems really want, which is not to vaguely influence the device but instead to tell it exactly what to do.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/upgrading-2013-2015-mac...
> Apple File System uses checksums to ensure data integrity for metadata but not for the actual user data, relying instead on error-correcting code (ECC) mechanisms in the storage hardware.[18]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System#Data_integri...
There is no reason to speculate as the reason is know (as stated by Jeff Bonwick, one of the co-inventors of ZFS):
>> Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a "private license" from Sun (with appropriate technical support and indemnification), and the two entities couldn't come to mutually agreeable terms.
> I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.
* https://archive.is/http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs...
* https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mail.opensolaris.org/pi...
Fixed links for the message and reply:
https://web.archive.org/web/20091028/http://mail.opensolaris...
https://web.archive.org/web/20091028/http://mail.opensolaris...
If they're really interested with data integrity they should add checksums to APFS.
If you don't have RAID you can't rebuild corrupted data, but at least you know there's a problem and perhaps restore from Time Machine.
For metadata, you may have multiple copies, so can use a known-good one (this is how ZFS works: some things have multiple copies 'inherently' because they're so important).
Edit:
> Apple File System uses checksums to ensure data integrity for metadata but not for the actual user data, relying instead on error-correcting code (ECC) mechanisms in the storage hardware.[18]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System#Data_integri...
Or you can spend half a billion dollars to solve the issue in hardware.
As one of the creators of ZFS wrote when APFS was announced:
> Explicitly not checksumming user data is a little more interesting. The APFS engineers I talked to cited strong ECC protection within Apple storage devices. Both NAND flash SSDs and magnetic media HDDs use redundant data to detect and correct errors. The Apple engineers contend that Apple devices basically don't return bogus data.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/a-zfs-developers-ana...
APFS keeps redundant copies and checksums for metadata, but doesn't constantly checksum files looking for changes any more than NTFS does.
Handling file integrity at the hardware level is a big step up.
Why not come up with a solution that covers external storage too, instead of spending all that money and relying on external solutions? I just don't understand why they couldn't have optional checksums in APFS.
ReFS exists, so Microsoft knew they needed to do something, but they have utterly failed to protect the vast majority of users.
Don't get me wrong, there's no reason Microsoft can't transition to another filesystem (like offering ReFS outside of Server or whatever Windows variants support it currently), but I don't understand why a company would transition to a new filesystem in 2016 and not include a data checksums option. Hell, ReFS predates APFS, and I think it even has optional data checksums.
Handling file integrity in hardware is a big step up.
Is there any evidence that Apple actually has better hardware data integrity than anyone else, though? They make claims in the article linked a few posts back, but AFAIK SSDs in general make use of error correcting codes, not just Apple's SSDs.
That article also points out how even multi-million dollar arrays are known to return bad data, and previous Apple SSD devices have been known to do the same.
I agree that the state of default filesystems is bad, but I'm not convinced that Apple's hardware solution is anything more than them saying, "Trust me, bro."
https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/testing-instaling-windows-...
We’re talking “watch the mouse crawl across the machine” crushed. Completely useless. Life returned to normal when I uninstalled it.
Also, I’ve heard anecdotes that ZFS and USB do not get along.
I’ve also heard contrary experiences. Some folks, somewhere, may be having success with ZFS on external drives on an iMac.
I’m just not one of them.
By using external storage, instead of paying $10k more for more storage, you are directly harming Apple’s margins and the CEO’s bonus which is not ok /s
And hope that your hardware/firmware doesn't ever get bugs.
Or you can do checksumming at the hardware layer and checksumming at the software/FS layer. Protection in depth.
ZFS has caught issues from hardware, like when LBA 123 is requested but LBA 456 is delivered: the hardware-level checksum for LBA 456 was fine, and so it was passed up the stack, but it wasn't actually the data that was asked for. See Bryan Cantrill's talk "Zebras All the way Down":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE
And if checksums are not needed for a particular use-case, make them toggleable: even ZFS has a set checksums=off option. My problem is not having the option at all.
For instance, try to find a processor aimed at mobile devices that doesn't handle video decoding in dedicated hardware instead of running it on a CPU core.
1. There is hardware support for (e.g.) SHA in ARM:
* https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0514/g/introducti...
But given Apple designs their own CPUs they could add extensions for anything they need. Or use a simpler algorithm, like Fletcher (which ZFS uses):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher%27s_checksum
2. It does not have to be enabled by default for every device. The main problem is the lack of it even as an option.
I wouldn't necessarily use ZFS checksums on a laptop, but ZFS has them for when I use it on a not-laptop.
Indeed. They added an entire enterprise grade SSD controller.
> In its patents there are mentions of periodically refreshing cells whose voltages may have drifted, exploiting some of the behaviors of adjacent cells and generally trying to deal with the things that happen to NAND once it's been worn considerably.
Odds are very good that totally different people work on the architecture of AFS and SoC design.
https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/attrsum
I use zfs where I can (it has content checksums) but it sucks bad on macOS, so I wrote attrsum. It keeps the file content checksum in an xattr (which APFS (and ext3/4) supports).
I use it to protect my photo library on a huge external SSD formatted with APFS (encrypted, natch) because I need to mount it on a mac laptop for Lightroom.
I know if my previous job at a large hard drive manufacturer we had special Apple drives that ran different parts and firmware than the regular PC drives. Their specs and tolerances where much different than the PC market at a whole.
Citation needed. This modification doesn't look to me at all like it'd void the warranty unless you damage the machine while you do the installation.
If you need to make a warranty claim, you should of course reinstall the factory one before you do so, since the vendor doesn't expect users to replace that and won't have any practices of looking/removing so they can return it to you if you take your machine in for service with a non-Apple card there.
But voiding your warranty for this has been roundly rejected, in the US at least, as long as you don't damage your equipment by doing it.
He recently posted an upgrade of this same process as a short - https://m.youtube.com/shorts/b-Z5GhYhbjM
It’s wild to see how much Apple invests in making these as hostile to the user to upgrade. But also cool to see people out there with the skills to desolder the chips, memory, and storage and replace with a much faster alternative.
If Apple truly cared about their carbon footprint, devices would be easily serviceable and upgradeable by user
New in box after having been stored in a warehouse for twenty years maybe. Apple isn't any greener than any of their competitors.
and even if what you say had a shred of truth, the carbon footprint would still further reduce if they were not user hostile to upgrades.
For Apple… they had A for for their cellphone chips, which vaguely made sense because they were the only chips Apple made at the time. But then, M for their laptop chips? M as in… mobile, or mini? But they use it in their Macs Pro, including their workstation-y ones…
I'm sure there are cases where you really do care about speeds >3GB/s (and USB-4, the port on the mac, should max out at ~5 which is still marginally lower than the internal one). But I doubt they are common. It's hard to process most data in a meaningful way that fast.
More than once I’ve had, say, Photos complain that it couldn’t find its library because I have apps relaunch on startup, my library has been moved to external storage, and the drive was not ready yet.
Also there’s no guarantee, at least naively, that what was /dev/disk4 on the last boot will be /dev/disk4 on this boot. Normally not necessarily an issue, but if you care about actual drive devices vs volume names, it can be an issue. (And there well be some low level config file wizardry to fix that issue, I just haven’t bothered to research it.)
I've considered getting a mac mini with decently specced CPU/GPU and plenty of RAM and then just attaching a big SSD via thunderbolt. Probably a lot cheaper than maxing out the internal SSD and I don't think it will be that horrible. My main use case would be dealing with photos, maybe X-plane, and some videos. I might buy some games as well but it's not my core use case. It seems the Apple store is slowly filling up with a decent selection of ported games. I gladly pay the Apple tax to never deal with Windows again. I actually have a linux laptop running Steam. The hardware is just really crap and I keep longing for my macbook whenever I have to use it. Actually typing on this thing right now as I'm traveling and I left my work M4 Max mac book at home (it's a bit of a beast to lug around on vacation). The mini would probably be hooked up to a TV so I can watch stuff via Firefox and use a sane ad blocker and UI rather than dealing with whatever crap tastic shit comes with modern smart TVs.
So a reasonably beefy mac mini would basically be my entertainment center and double as a home PC with a ginormous 4K screen. I have considered getting some AMD equivalent with Arch Linux. Still on the fence about that. But either way, external USB-C for storage seems fine.
Frankly, this is exactly the sort of head-up-ass attitude that will end with Apple being smacked around by investigatory commissions like what happened to John Deere and Microsoft.
My suspicion for their shitty process is that it was set up purely so Apple can tell regulators "see, consumers can't be trusted to replace their own batteries, look what it takes", but they do offer a programme for it.
The stupidest part about the whole thing is that the official URL looks like a total scam: https://selfservicerepair.com/en-US/home
Not only that, they won't repair devices with third-party hardware. If my Mini has an issue, I'll have to remove the new SSD and reinstall the OEM one before I drop it off. I experienced this when tried to get my 2012 MacBook Pro fixed (wet keyboard).
They did the replacement, but I learned how to do it myself, including replacing the keyboard again, another SSD upgrade, and eventually a battery upgrade.
To be fair, I did this upgrade and actually ended up wasting several hours because the first SSD failed after a few weeks.
Obviously, the tradeoffs are different for everyone.
Damn I wis--
> And if it’s not then you have bigger fish to fry.
You make it sound like anyone in tech that isn't making giant piles of money screwed up their career.
And if I take that literally, wouldn't I have to be making at least a thousand dollars an hour?
Not blaming anyone for wanting a machine like this. Trying to point out that tech has become so accessible that we all aspire to have a supercomputer as our daily driver.
When I was young a PC (xt and on) would set my dad back about a monthly wage. What I see is a huge compression of the price range. But the upper part of the range still exists (training LLM is not much different from the central computer at universities in the 70s/80s).
But that wasn't the argument. In "your time is more valuable", the time is what it takes to remove a dozen screws, replace a card, and format it. Plus any increased risk of data loss, but that should also be quite small if it exists. So for saving hundreds of dollars or more, your expected time is like an hour if you have backups (you'd better have backups!), hard to say for sure if you don't.
Although yes I didn't buy a Mac because of this.
My time is more valuable. That's why I don't waste it researching Apple's arbitrary price-optimal solution so I can write and debug Linux software in a VM.
Not as fast as a single nVME in external Acadis enclosure... but it is fast.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/TERRAMASTER-D4-320-External-Drive-Enc... [sold out]
This is kind of why people start cloning macs in the 90s. They were too expensive straight from the factory.
All current models ship with 16GB so this isn't really true anymore.. 16GB will be good for most folks for years and years (most folks aren't doing heavy virtualization or other highly ram-intensive use cases).
>and the specs are so low they will underperform, or be obsolete in a few years.
...what?? People are still using OG M1 macs because they're still very capable machines. These things - especially the M4s - have crazy amounts of performance headroom.
Yes, I'm glad they finally went to 16/18GB for the new processors.
M3 non-pro processors were shipping with 8GB. That was less than a year ago.
>People are still using OG M1 macs because they're still very capable machines.
If precedent holds up, they won't be for long. The 8GB M1s are already dead in enterprise. There's m1 8GB airs out there that are next on the obsolete block. Soon, some basic web browsing + the OS updates will throttle it to barely usable. (Still better life than a Chromebook, but low bar).
On an enterprise level, the 8GB M1s are no longer deployable for us. Add antivirus, a zoom call, slack, mail, calendar, and a few SaaS app tabs, and it's not usable.
Every yearly OS update there's closed-source overhead that's introduced to the users silently. After dealing with macs for 10+ years, it's the one of only things I can rely on.
Old macs work great until you give them updates, or run modern software on them. Or until a few years after they change chip designs.
As for trusting them to maintain the headroom a few years from now, I really doubt it. They will find a way to fill that headroom, they always do. My 16GB M1 pro practically dies trying to run Logic Pro now. All my shiny expensive intel macs of the 2019 series are now basically paperweights. They don't get extra years of good use like the M1 does. They're no longer deployed because they all started having performance issues right-on-schedule. i9, 32GB RAM goes for $400 on Ebay right now. Lower specced models going for ~$200. A huge loss in value and performance.
It's double the price, double is too much.
The upgrade prices - 13" MacBook Air: 256GB to 512GB -> 256GB for 250 EUR
- 14" MacBook Pro: 512GB to 1TB -> 512GB for 250 EUR
So the Air upgrade is twice the price for what is - as far as I was able to figure out - the same hardware?
For a while, some MacBooks also had slower disks because some capacities used one NAND chip while others used two. I believe they stopped doing that for their latest models, though. That kind of fuckery means you need to look up benchmarks for each individual model, because the performance differences aren't clear from the product description.
Interestingly, when M4 mac mini went on sale, version with 32GB RAM/1TB drive was priced exactly 2x as 16GB RAM / 512GB drive version. This kinda implies that Apple sells only RAM and storage, and gives away the rest for free.
Even with upgradable memory:
When I bought my "cheesegrater" Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of SSD.
Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the sticker price came with a baseline of 1TB).
I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, which cost me $1,300. However, I kept the 1TB "system" SSD, which was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive's 5.5 GBps.
Similar to memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications). Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.
DirectorFeng: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbzzMQ1mNKjAaDwbELsVYcQ
For RAM, it's an entirely different ball game. The closer you can have it to the processor die, the higher the bandwidth, the lower the latency, and the lower the power consumption.
My daily driver is a base config 16” M1 MacBook Pro from 2021 and I have no inclinations to upgrade at all. Even the battery is still good.
I run CAD, compile and run large C++ projects. Do tons of heavy stuff in matlab. Various visualizations of simulations. My laptop just isn’t the slow thing anymore. I’m sure workloads exists that would push this machine but how many people are actually doing that. (Ok fine, chrome exists)
Even the smaller SSD isn’t an issue for me in practice because iCloud Drive and Box automatically move things I don’t often access off disk freeing local space.
Frankly if smaller memory footprints and smaller SSDs translates to lower base config prices and longer battery life it was the right choice, for me anyway.
Important note: the seller provides no warranty for the SSDs. I was fortunate that they offered a 1-year warranty when I bought mine, but that is no longer the case now. $700 is a pretty big risk when there's no warranty.
FWIW, the non-Pro-compatible SSDs were overpriced initially as well, but they came down in price as they became more prevalent. Wait a few months, and we'll probably see the same with Pro-compatible SSDs.
Depends what type of flash that's comparing. QLC is cheap, TLC a bit more expensive, MLC nearly unobtainable, and SLC insanely expensive unless you SLC-mod a QLC drive.
For the desktops you can always just plug in an external drive.
That said, SSDs eventually have to go bad.
This is probably more important as a RTR( right to repair ) issue.
Saving $500 for 30 min of actual work that’s also easily reversible if needed for a support case is too good to ignore.
jeffbee•7mo ago
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daneel_w•7mo ago