4 ms·

Same with the M1 Air. First time I've ever considered an air. I really like the idea of not having a fan: - No dust can get in because it's sealed. - Mechanic

by klabb3 5y ago

Same with the M1 Air. First time I've ever considered an air. I really like the idea of not having a fan: - No dust can get in because it's sealed. - Mechanical parts break more often. - I often block the vents anyway because I'm sitting in bed or something. However, it's not all green grass. Non-replacable SSD and RAM is horrible, horrible practice. I root for the competition / right-to-repair advocates to force apple into fixing this. I usually perform a major upgrade on desktops & laptops after ~4 years.

opan 5y ago
This is ARM now. Look at any SBC out there and you'll see soldered RAM.
bitwize 5y ago
No! Apple's integrated design has huge advantages. Then performance ceiling of RAM built on-chip, for instance, is much higher (because light can only go so fast) than even soldered-on discrete RAM chips, which in turn are potentially higher performance than DIMMs. One of the reasons why the M1 is so blistering fast is this integrated RAM design; it's like having 8-64 GiB of L3 cache. The same goes for SSDs; by building the SSD controller into the CPU, you can get I/O performance that vastly outperforms even PCI NVMe drives. Over the next few years, it will be the case that the most powerful computer you can buy will be a Mac. The M1 series Macs signal a return to the Amiga days, when thoughtful engineers designed the whole system with integrated hardware and software for speed and responsiveness that cannot be matched or surpassed by the cobbled together PC ecosystem that has dominated for so long.
- klabb3 5y ago
  Is it possible that the entire integrated chip can be replaced? Even if at a higher cost, it's better than throwing the whole computer away.
- tzs 5y ago
  The SSD controller is on chip in the M1 family, but the actual SSD controlled by that controller can still be removable. The Mac Studio proves that. The actual storage is on a removable card in a socket. I don’t think Apple has said why they did it this way in the Studio. I’ve heard three theories. 1. They plan to at some point support upgrading storage. 2. It is so failing SSDs can be replaced instead of having to do a whole logic board swap. 3. It is for easier and cheaper inventory management. It is easier for them to build most of them with the most popular storage configuration or two and then when someone orders a less popular configuration change the SSDs than to build ahead of time and stock the less popular configurations.

by klabb3 5y ago

opan 5y ago

This is ARM now. Look at any SBC out there and you'll see soldered RAM.

bitwize 5y ago

No! Apple's integrated design has huge advantages. Then performance ceiling of RAM built on-chip, for instance, is much higher (because light can only go so fast) than even soldered-on discrete RAM chips, which in turn are potentially higher performance than DIMMs. One of the reasons why the M1 is so blistering fast is this integrated RAM design; it's like having 8-64 GiB of L3 cache. The same goes for SSDs; by building the SSD controller into the CPU, you can get I/O performance that vastly outperforms even PCI NVMe drives. Over the next few years, it will be the case that the most powerful computer you can buy will be a Mac. The M1 series Macs signal a return to the Amiga days, when thoughtful engineers designed the whole system with integrated hardware and software for speed and responsiveness that cannot be matched or surpassed by the cobbled together PC ecosystem that has dominated for so long.

klabb3 5y ago
Is it possible that the entire integrated chip can be replaced? Even if at a higher cost, it's better than throwing the whole computer away.
tzs 5y ago
The SSD controller is on chip in the M1 family, but the actual SSD controlled by that controller can still be removable. The Mac Studio proves that. The actual storage is on a removable card in a socket. I don’t think Apple has said why they did it this way in the Studio. I’ve heard three theories. 1. They plan to at some point support upgrading storage. 2. It is so failing SSDs can be replaced instead of having to do a whole logic board swap. 3. It is for easier and cheaper inventory management. It is easier for them to build most of them with the most popular storage configuration or two and then when someone orders a less popular configuration change the SSDs than to build ahead of time and stock the less popular configurations.