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It appears Apple may be unable to recover data from failed 2018 MacBook Pros
- cbluth 8y agoI'll say that these are no longer "Pro" devices.
- hrktb 8y agoArguably losing data from the laptop is more of a consumer issue. “Pro” users will be more inclined to have a workflow to mitigate hardware failure.
- nbdev 8y agoYeah, "it's crappier because pros use it" is arguable.
- IntelMiner 8y agoIt should not be up to the user to mitigate flawed hardware design
- jacobush 8y agoIt looks like excellent design, encryption is working even against Apple as an "attacker". Right?
- WalterSear 8y agoIt's a specious reason, and disengenous dissembly. There's nothing about encryption that precludes low-level duplication. This just something "you don't need" because they would rather shave another millimeter of the width, for the larger and more lucrative fashion-focused part of their customerbase.
- adt2bt 8y agoWhat? This isn’t about the size of the laptop. The 2018 model is the same size. The T2 chip on the logic board contains the decryption key for the SSD. Therefore, if the logic board breaks (and thus the T2), the data are irrecoverable. The design choice was either software encryption and data exfiltration port or hardware encryption and no port. They chose to add hardware encryption, so no port.
- simonh 8y agoWhat has this got to do with low level duplication? How would that mitigate encryption hardware failure?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jonknee 8y agoEncryption is not flawed hardware design. You also can't recover data from your iPhone and most people on HN consider that a feature, not a bug.
- hrktb 8y agoTo clarify my comment, the trigger of the issue here is a motherboard failure, and data loss is cascading from there. Sure Apple makes decision that can affect the outcome in this specific case, but other things happen to laptops (physical damage, loss, direct disk failure etc.). I would blame a pro user with valuable info for not backing/replicating it in case the laptop dies. Actually I am not even sure the laptop could go to repair with the data still salvageable in companies with strict security protocols.
- simonh 8y agoHardware fails, that's just a fact of life and an inevitable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. All the comment you are replying to is saying is that pros should know this and back up their data - preferably using multiple methods. I'd argue everyone should do this. Personally I use Time Machine and Backblaze, plus all my most important stuff is in Dropbox.
- alerighi 8y agoIf you have a normal laptop when it fails you can take a screw driver and put the SSD of the broken machine into another functioning computer, and in 10 minutes you are continuing you work where you left it. That is more convenient than having to move to another PC, install the OS, all the software that you need, copy the data from somewhere, a procedure that takes a couple of hours. And of course with a normal computer when you send your PC to service you can take out the SSD so the service personal cannot see your private data and so you can continue to work with another computer while you wait for the other to be repaired.
- ahje 8y agoMany modern drives will encrypt the data if you enable a HDD password. HDD passwords can't always be unlocked using another make/model so if you enable a HDD password on your you actually do risk ending up in the same situation.
- chrisper 8y agoTPM, which does the same thing, has been around for a while too. Mostly in business laptops. So it's very much Pro.
- eridius 8y agoThe summary here is the T2 chip provides custom hardware encryption for the SSD, which makes recovery impossible (and so they removed the data recovery port because what's the point in having it?). So remember, backups are important!
- mattnewton 8y agoAlso a reminder that apple really does seem to care about privacy, in ways the average user isn’t likely to understand / appreciate.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoCaring about privacy or not giving the customer a choice - these are two very different things.
- danShumway 8y agoHardware encryption isn't really something you can turn on or off though, right? You can look at something like the headphone jack and say, "adding a jack doesn't prevent anyone from using wireless headphones." But if they get rid of the chip, then it does prevent people from using it. Short of selling two separate models with different configs, is there any way they could allow the customer to choose?
- willtim 8y agoWhy not provide the customer with a recovery key? Microsoft Bitlocker is able to do this and uses hardware-based encryption.
- pvg 8y agoFilevault generates recovery keys.
- dogma1138 8y agoTPM isn’t adversary resistant, these modules are easily accessible over the IC2 bus and can be compromised there is plenty of research to support that. With Bitlocker unless you backup the recovery key in the cloud or manually there is no way to recover it unless you are going to attempt to compromise the TPM this is no different than FileVault/TimeMachine backups which do exactly that however with the added assurance that at least at the writing of this comment the T2 chip cannot be easily compromised or accesses outside of normal operating parameters.
- pmlnr 8y agoThat's the cost of hw encryption and the reason why I'm using LUKS.
- jacobush 8y agoHow about LUKS on top of hardware encryption?
- BuildTheRobots 8y ago> How about LUKS on top of hardware encryption? I don't understand what you're trying to achieve or what you think the parent was trying to achieve either. Parent is saying they don't use hardware encryption because it makes recovery impossible. With LUKS I can throw the disk into any PC that has a port for it, boot from a linux USB and get my data. If I'm using both, then I get the worst of both worlds! It's slower and I'm using more CPU, yet if the worst happens I still can't get my data back as the hardware encryption still scuppers me.
- nbdev 8y agoFascinating how things get much worse eventually. Is greed or incompetence the cause? I guess both. Seeing all of the bungles Apple seems to make, I wonder what Jobs would say.
- linker3000 8y agoI always consider any lap/desk top device as 'disposable'; when I am 'connected', my auto-saves and final saves are synced to online storage, and if I am out-and-about, I can double-save to an encrypted usb memory stick or a locker on my phone.
- lisper 8y ago> I always consider any lap/desk top device as 'disposable An MBP is a mighty expensive disposable.
- jonknee 8y agoWell if you were needing the recovery feature of older models you were already in an expensive situation...
- westpfelia 8y agoOne mans Mcdonalds is another mans Mortons Steakhouse.
- bni 8y agoA laptop can be stolen at any time. No data recovery possible from that either.
- leonroy 8y ago> An MBP is a mighty expensive disposable. True - to a person paying for one themselves. For a company though a MBP is a negligible cost compared to the employee using it - or the data on it.
- manmal 8y agoExactly. I use Arq with Amazon Drive for daily incremental backups at noon, which is at times bothersome, because it needs a lot of CPU for encryption and verification. But in case my MBPro is stolen, I will be up and running again ~24h later (depending on network bandwidth) with max a few hours of work lost. Time machine over network is not a great option for me because of my workplace situations, but I could carry a small disk or even a thumbdrive for extra backups - those have gotten so cheap recently.
- HNLogInShit 8y agoAnd what happens when the asinine soldered-in SSD fails? I guess you just throw the computer away. Another degraded POS from Apple, at astronomical prices.
- Krowbart 8y agoAnother HN thread where valid complaints get downvoted. That’s why this is a toxic board; we can’t have adult conversations here. Most people want their data protected or recoverable. Most want a computer with a variety of ports, specifically for our existing peripherals. Most don’t care about a MILLIMETER of thickness, it’s not worth it. Online syncing is not a solution to everything. Shame we can’t discuss the issues here.
- Lio 8y agoOf course we can discuss it but if you passionately throw around opinions like "most people want" as if they were facts without reference to supporting evidence then people will probably vote you down. You're also making the strawman argument that removing the recovery port was done to save millimetres of thickness and that's clearly false because the 2018 laptop is the same size as the 2016-2017 MacBook Pro which includes the port. For the record I'm not convinced by the current Apple lineup so I haven't upgraded but that is a different discussion.
- sjayasinghe 8y agoApple doesn't care about what most people want. They have a specific vision about the future of computing that they want to bring into existence, and this is simply one step in that direction. You may not agree with the changes taking place at the moment, but of course you and I don't exactly know where they're planning on taking this, and where things will be in another decade or two.
- ubernostrum 8y agoMost people want their data protected or recoverable. Apple makes it almost unbelievably easy to do regular encrypted backups and restore from them. I've used Time Machine backups to restore lost/accidentally deleted data many times, and to "restore" to multiple new Macs over the years, for example. Backups are and always have been the correct answer to "what if this specific disk/machine goes irrecoverably bad". Meanwhile, the reason they can't recover the data for you here is because they implement the one correct answer to "what happens if I lose all my decryption keys". Which is "you're out of luck, we don't have a backdoor to recover the data in that case".
- RantyDave 8y agoSo, hang on, did they used to be able to bypass the disk encryption? Surely they just moved it block for block?
- INTPenis 8y agoAccessing the data does not mean decrypting it. I'm just guessing here but they probably had to rely on the client's password after they had access to the data.
- jakobegger 8y agoAnd presumably that no longer works, because only the T2 chip on the logic board can decrypt the data. Dumping the raw contents of the SSD is now pointless.
- mschuster91 8y agoWell, yet another reason to stick with the older macbooks: you can always put your SSD in another Macbook and unlock the FileVault encryption. Timemachine is nice, unless you're dealing with gigabyte-sized files... be it Photoshop, AfterEffects or whatever.
- tzahola 8y agoWhile I welcome the privacy implications of this, I don’t see why recovery wouldn’t be possible if the T2 chip and the SSD is intact?
- jakobegger 8y agoIn that case, target disk mode presumably works and you don't need a special recovery port?
- dingo_bat 8y agoT2 and SSD can be intact and other stuff in the motherboard may be fried. Would target mode work in that case?
- jakobegger 8y agoI guess it depends on what exactly is "fried"? I assume that the CPU is needed for target disk mode, but maybe a faulty GPU wouldn't matter? But to be honest I have no idea -- I'm a software developer and I know very little about hardware.
- Mindwipe 8y ago> In that case, target disk mode presumably works and you don't need a special recovery port? No good to you if the power connector on the logic board is screwed but the chips are fine.
- Dunedan 8y agoWhat people critizing this seem to miss is that it's exactly the same situation as for SSDs which include hardware full disk encryption (FDE): If the processor inside the SSD responsible for encryption/decryption breaks, you can't recover the data as well anymore. What would be the processor inside the SSD is the T2 chip in the current MBP's. It even exposes the same interface (NVMe) to the rest of the system as the processor of an SSD does. The only differences are that the T2 chip has some additional responsibilities in addition to handle the storage and its encryption and that the die with the T2 chip and the flash chips is larger (as it's the motherboard) and might not be as sealed against environmental impacts as the one of an SSD (which could be a higher risk of failure).
- makomk 8y agoIf I'm understanding the article correctly, they can't recover users' data even if both the T2 chip and the NVMe storage are working - the entire laptop needs to be functional in order for them to get data off. Any failure of any important mainboard component leads to complete data loss.
- jezfromfuture 8y agoThey can't on the 2015 , 2016 , 2107 macbook's either. Tbh Apple have gone down the shitter in the last few years.
- vertwo128 8y agoIronically (is that the correct usage?) this actually makes it appealing to me. Whenever I take a laptop in to be serviced, I always remove the hard drive and replace it with an old one that has a new Linux or Windows install on it. This is mainly for privacy reasons. When I got my MBP, I knew you couldn't do that, so I basically used it as a thin client, storing all my data elsewhere. However, I was still uncomfortable when I did need to turn it in for servicing, that I spent extra time and formatted it beforehand. And yes, I encrypt all the drives, but I've heard of instances where the tech will ask for passwords.
- SyneRyder 8y ago> I've heard of instances where the tech will ask for passwords. I've experienced this at the Apple Store when taking a Mac in for repairs. They refused to fix it if I didn't give them the password, even though it was under warranty. There's even a dedicated field for typing in your login password on the iPads the Apple Genius gives to you when submitting your Mac for a repair.
- ukblewis 8y agoWhen I took my MacBook Air in for repair with a UEFI password, they carried out the whole repair and just asked me to type my password when I arrived to collect it and ran a diagnostic on the machine to verify the computer was working. You shouldn’t need to tell/give an Apple Genius your password.
- makecheck 8y agoThe really huge problem with that is that Keychain uses your login password to unlock your world of passwords. Even if you change your login before servicing, are you going to delete your whole keychain?
- mamon 8y agoYes, this case kind of proves that they implemented disk encryption correctly :) If MBP weren't such overpriced garbage recently (fckuing Touchbar, fcuking AMD GPUs, fcuking overheating, throttling CPUs) this could convince me to buy one.