11 ms·

Two things I've been waiting on for years: • MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak lin

by ttfkam 3y ago

Two things I've been waiting on for years: • MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. It's the difference between spending $75-$300 for a dock in addition to the cables and just connecting the monitors together along with a single cable to the first monitor. • Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail. SSDs only have so many write cycles. • BIOS on a separate chip. To make matters worse, with the introduction of the T2 chip, the BIOS is stored on the SSD as well. This means if the SSD fails, you don't just lose your data; you have an expensive brick. You can't even boot to external drive anymore if one of the two SSD chips fails. • Safer SSD chips. If a cheap capacitor fails on newer Macs, 13V gets shorted straight to the SSD. The SSD commonly doesn't survive this. And since the BIOS is on the SSD now… Literal ten cent part blows up your multi-thousand dollar laptop with zero warning. https://youtu.be/RYG4VMqatEY https://youtu.be/RYG4VMqatEY

andromeduck 3y ago
Most people don't write terabytes per day and the ones who do can just double their storage.
- javchz 3y ago
  But they do, specially in low RAM systems, as the SSD becomes like a backup ram to juggle extra information.
  - andromeduck 3y ago
    If you're swapping a dwpd.
  - webmobdev 3y ago
    More so when the RAM remains limited on Macs as it too is integrated with the CPU and hence is non-upgradable. This is even worse than soldered SSD, as we can still make an attempt to replace the SSD chips with new ones with careful soldering, but nothing can be done about the RAM. These deliberately irreparable new Macs are just shitty products.
    - volemo 3y ago
      You know you can buy other products, right? There’re plenty of computer manufacturers that use discrete modules.
      - ffgjgf1 3y ago
        To be fair not that many if you want alternative to the Air and size/weight is a priority. Also.. I’m not sure what are you trying to say? That there is something wrong about criticizing Apple’s design choices?
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      All my old laptops since 2003 still have functional CPUs and RAM. I'm not overly concerned about the CPU/RAM situation, especially have seen the advantages to a shared CPU/GPU/RAM Arm architecture. Would I prefer upgradeable RAM, sure, but it's not the weak link. Know what's actually failed me over the years? Storage. Hard drives and SSDs.
  - graphe 3y ago
    I remember modding osx Yosemite to run the swap in the ram when I had an SSD since I was so worried about it, not sure if it still does this but with the infrequently of negative problems and the fact that one of my friends used a 2gb MacBook air 2009 until 2017 made me realize it probably doesn't matter.
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      A 2009 MBA can still be used if the SSD dies. You can get a replacement or you can plug in an external drive to install on and boot off of. You can upgrade the storage space on that model if you want to. Since 2018 and the T2 chip, the BIOS is stored on the soldered storage chip pair. Either one of those two chips or a capacitor adjacent to them dies, you've not only lost your files and OS. You can't replace them. You can't even plug in an external drive to boot off of since the BIOS is now stored on the SSD chips as well instead of a separate ROM as before. 2016-2017 soldered the storage, but you could at least work around it. 2018+, there are no more workarounds. If any part of your SSD fails now, you've got an expensive useless brick. Swapping wear your SSD out faster? SOL. Capacitor fails and shunts 13V through your SSD? SOL. Anything at all happens to either one of your SSD chips? SOL. Either pay for that AppleCare in perpetuity or buy a whole new laptop. There are no more workarounds.
  - pier25 3y ago
    That's user error
1letterunixname 3y ago
Apple devices aren't engineered to last; they're engineered to be manufactured, sell new, and sometimes sell expensive repairs by them. Also, NVIDIA cards in eGPUs and Thunderbolt (arm64) aren't supported. The best solution is either don't use Apple, or have a machine under warranty and very good backups. Complaints aside, the Anker 777 dock does 5K-8K DP over USB-C, 1 GbE, 100w charging, 4 USB-A and more and works with m1 and m2 MBPs. Add a quality magnetic USB-C connector, and it's "MagSafe" docking to a monitor, power, and accessories with one cable. I'm in the camp of 1 giant 49" monitor, with occasional AirPlay to a nearby Apple TV 4K on an 85" TV.
- stouset 3y ago
  Can you explain why Apple devices in general maintain a higher percentage of their resale value for longer than their competitors’ counterparts?
  - luckydata 3y ago
    only laptop I know carved from a single piece of aluminum. not the only reason but for sure that one is a good one. No other laptop feels as solid and I don't understand why nobody else does it.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      Milling a case from a block must be far more expensive that folding a few sheets, right?
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      I haven't had any of the recent MBPs, but my 2020 HP EliteBook's main body looks similar to my 2013 retina mbp, which already had the "unibody" construction. If also feels quite solid when I hold it by one corner while open. The lid does feel somewhat flimsier, though, especially the hinge.
      - kergonath 3y ago
graphe 3y ago
With a large 4K screen, I'm not seeing any benefit for MST, and studies have shown it decreases productivity after 2 screens. The other problems are simply fixed with using iCloud and treating your laptop as a disposable, which many laptops have been designed as. If you use the MacBook add intended and invest in apple care it's unbeatable.
- ed_mercer 3y ago
  Any source for said studies? As an engineer I often find my current 2 external monitors limiting and wish I had four.
  - zoky 3y ago
    It never ends. I have 4 monitors and sometimes wish I had 5 or 6. If I could physically fit more monitors on my desk, I would.
  - graphe 3y ago
    NYT in 2014, (personal experience too). https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/technology/personaltech/surviving-and-thriving-in-a-one-monitor-world.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/technology/personaltech/s... this advocates for one monitor https://hackernoon.com/why-i-stopped-using-multiple-monitors-bfd87efa2e5b https://hackernoon.com/why-i-stopped-using-multiple-monitors... the tl;dr is that mutiple screens mean more distractions, and some tasks are better with 2 monitors but the studies don't indicate it's universal.
    - nl 3y ago
      These aren't studies, just anecdotes, and the actual study quoted in the NYT shows the opposite: > One study commissioned by NEC and conducted by researchers at the University of Utah showed that people using a dual-display machine to do a text-editing task were 44 percent more productive than those who used a single monitor. I think it's fair to say that any research from 2014 isn't the most relevant now. Both screen size and (importantly) software has changed to better support both multiple screen usage as well as large screens. The argument for single screens in the NYT is mostly that it reduces distractions: > But for most people, the time spent juggling two windows or scrolling across large documents isn’t the biggest bottleneck in getting work done. Instead, there’s a more basic, pernicious reason you feel constantly behind — you’re getting distracted. This seems to indicate they were comparing a maximized window on a single screen vs non-maximized windows on multiple screens, and probably in the days before modern notifications on desktop OSs. Based on this it is fair to say more research is needed, but it is inaccurate to claim that studies support the idea that one monitor is better.
lxgr 3y ago
> Storage is the most likely component to fail. Got any sources for that? I find that hard to believe. > MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. This is indeed annoying, but with USB4/Thunderbolt support becoming more common in monitors, I believe this is going to be less of an issue going forward.
- vishnugupta 3y ago
  Data point of one. Last 20 years storage has not failed on me across close to a dozen laptops I’ve owned across various brands. So even I get puzzled whenever I see “storage is the most likely component to fail”. Maybe I just got lucky?
  - Moldoteck 3y ago
    I think it's more about ssd's with limited cycles+ the fact that with smaller RAM, swap can nuke those ssd's pretty fast if you go beyond ram capacity
  - smcl 3y ago
    If you're replacing your laptop every 1.5 years then you're probably not likely to encounter any part failing.
    - thombat 3y ago
      And if a man mates with nine women he'll be holding one baby this time next month? With both electronic devices and gestating females concurrency is common.
      - smcl 3y ago
        No, you don't understand. SSDs begin to encounter problems over time after some number of read/write cycles. This is entirely expected and when one sector has issues it gets remapped to one of some spares that are built into the drive. Once those are exhausted it's a matter of time before you have an unusable SSD and, if it's soldered to the motherboard, an unusable laptop. A sister comment to mine referred to this too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38066645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38066645
bilalq 3y ago
The lack of MST support caught me by surprise. Six years ago, I intentionally bought an expensive monitor with USB-C and daisy-chaining support as the second screen so that the monitor itself would be able to function as my dock. Lo and behold, it worked fine on Windows but not on MacOS. Had to buy a dock separately and now have one more thing cluttering my desk. I spent so long troubleshooting and trying to figure out why it didn't work before I stumbled on this article[1]. [1]: https://sebvance.medium.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-macbook-pros-and-their-lack-of-displayport-mst-multi-stream-98ce33d64af4 https://sebvance.medium.com/everything-you-need-to-know-abou...
- rekoil 3y ago
  It's such a frustrating missing feature.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  It’s so surprising that it doesn’t I too only found out when I bought the monitors plugged them in and it did nothing.
AdamN 3y ago
* Just use TB monitors and daisy chaining works fine * Nothing to add. * Hardware enclave is a requirement for most corporate/government computers so you're just comparing two different classes of computer. All the enterprise Windows machines also do this. * Same as above
- bogantech 3y ago
  > * Just use TB monitors and daisy chaining works fine Not everybody has a zillion dollars to spend on expensive thunderbolt displays and they shouldn't have to when the Displayport standard (and other operating systems) support daisy chaining.
  - Terretta 3y ago
    > when the Displayport standard (and other operating systems) support daisy chaining It doesn't support it, exactly, it supports a compressed image in each of the multiple streams transported, which can introduce quality problems when doing the production work people use higher end Macs for. "the combined data rate requirements of all the displays cannot exceed the limits of a single DP port" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Multi-Stream_Transport_(MST) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Multi-Stream_Trans... Arguably, compared to TB ports transmitting a full quality image to each screen, this could be "unexpected behavior".
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      I'm not a gamer. I'd be fine with a single cable that served two 4K monitors at 30Hz from the Mac if it meant I never needed another dock ever again. That said, TB3/TB4 should be able to handle dual 4K at 60Hz from a single DisplayPort connection to the laptop.
      - AdamN 3y ago
        I have dual 4k right now daisy chained from a Mac at 60Hz. Works totally fine and it was a 2019 MBP (and now a 2021 M1 Pro MBP). This is already a solved problem if you just stick with TB3+ gear.
Dig1t 3y ago
>Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail. SSDs only have so many write cycles. One thing to note is the quality of Apple’s storage is above and beyond anything else you can buy. They have teams at every level of the storage stack and have an amazing focus on quality. From individual chips all the way up to the filesystem, all of the software is customized to extend the lifespan of the device. They do wear-leveling so the larger the drive you buy with your device the longer the device will last, but honestly the drives they come with will last much longer than 99.9 of people will ever actually use a Mac.
- KETHERCORTEX 3y ago
  > One thing to note is the quality of Apple’s storage is above and beyond anything else you can buy. Average good experience of other users doesn't make a guy having a failing SSD feel any better. The absence of easy repair/replacement just adds an insult to injury. > They do wear-leveling so the larger the drive you buy with your device the longer the device will last Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like a description of an average modern SSD. Heck, I was reading similar things about wear leveling regarding USB drives, like, a decade and a half ago.
  - droopyEyelids 3y ago
    Where is the evidence of failing Mac SSDs? I think you're being overly creative in your interpretation of average, like you're imagining a bunch of people people that have it fail after a year of regular use and then others that have it fail after 30 to 'average it out' and mask a bad experience for many people.
- ksec 3y ago
  >all of the software is customized to extend the lifespan of the device It is widely known macOS paging out a lot more than Windows. On a multiTab Safari you could easily have 100GB write or higher per day. Kernel_Task lock up are extremely common on google search.
  - 3y ago
runjake 3y ago
I'm in an org with tens of thousands of Macs deployed. We've got through butterfly keyboard failures, screen ribbon issues, bloated batteries, and dead logic boards. We've had some SSDs fail, but it's virtually unheard of. It's so rare, I can't recall a specific instance. I submit that failure rates within a Mac's usable lifetime is so rare that it's a non-issue. That said, I'm always going to strongly want user-replaceable, modular components everywhere I possibly can. Barring that, I want cheap repair options (buying stuff like logic boards from Apple is obscenely priced.) I also factor AppleCare+ into device cost, because forget buying a $2,000-3,000 Apple device without it.

by ttfkam 3y ago

andromeduck 3y ago

Most people don't write terabytes per day and the ones who do can just double their storage.

javchz 3y ago
But they do, specially in low RAM systems, as the SSD becomes like a backup ram to juggle extra information.
- andromeduck 3y ago
  If you're swapping a dwpd.
- webmobdev 3y ago
  More so when the RAM remains limited on Macs as it too is integrated with the CPU and hence is non-upgradable. This is even worse than soldered SSD, as we can still make an attempt to replace the SSD chips with new ones with careful soldering, but nothing can be done about the RAM. These deliberately irreparable new Macs are just shitty products.
  - volemo 3y ago
    You know you can buy other products, right? There’re plenty of computer manufacturers that use discrete modules.
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      To be fair not that many if you want alternative to the Air and size/weight is a priority. Also.. I’m not sure what are you trying to say? That there is something wrong about criticizing Apple’s design choices?
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    All my old laptops since 2003 still have functional CPUs and RAM. I'm not overly concerned about the CPU/RAM situation, especially have seen the advantages to a shared CPU/GPU/RAM Arm architecture. Would I prefer upgradeable RAM, sure, but it's not the weak link. Know what's actually failed me over the years? Storage. Hard drives and SSDs.
- graphe 3y ago
  I remember modding osx Yosemite to run the swap in the ram when I had an SSD since I was so worried about it, not sure if it still does this but with the infrequently of negative problems and the fact that one of my friends used a 2gb MacBook air 2009 until 2017 made me realize it probably doesn't matter.
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    A 2009 MBA can still be used if the SSD dies. You can get a replacement or you can plug in an external drive to install on and boot off of. You can upgrade the storage space on that model if you want to. Since 2018 and the T2 chip, the BIOS is stored on the soldered storage chip pair. Either one of those two chips or a capacitor adjacent to them dies, you've not only lost your files and OS. You can't replace them. You can't even plug in an external drive to boot off of since the BIOS is now stored on the SSD chips as well instead of a separate ROM as before. 2016-2017 soldered the storage, but you could at least work around it. 2018+, there are no more workarounds. If any part of your SSD fails now, you've got an expensive useless brick. Swapping wear your SSD out faster? SOL. Capacitor fails and shunts 13V through your SSD? SOL. Anything at all happens to either one of your SSD chips? SOL. Either pay for that AppleCare in perpetuity or buy a whole new laptop. There are no more workarounds.
- pier25 3y ago
  That's user error

1letterunixname 3y ago

Apple devices aren't engineered to last; they're engineered to be manufactured, sell new, and sometimes sell expensive repairs by them. Also, NVIDIA cards in eGPUs and Thunderbolt (arm64) aren't supported. The best solution is either don't use Apple, or have a machine under warranty and very good backups. Complaints aside, the Anker 777 dock does 5K-8K DP over USB-C, 1 GbE, 100w charging, 4 USB-A and more and works with m1 and m2 MBPs. Add a quality magnetic USB-C connector, and it's "MagSafe" docking to a monitor, power, and accessories with one cable. I'm in the camp of 1 giant 49" monitor, with occasional AirPlay to a nearby Apple TV 4K on an 85" TV.

stouset 3y ago
Can you explain why Apple devices in general maintain a higher percentage of their resale value for longer than their competitors’ counterparts?
- luckydata 3y ago
  only laptop I know carved from a single piece of aluminum. not the only reason but for sure that one is a good one. No other laptop feels as solid and I don't understand why nobody else does it.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    Milling a case from a block must be far more expensive that folding a few sheets, right?
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    I haven't had any of the recent MBPs, but my 2020 HP EliteBook's main body looks similar to my 2013 retina mbp, which already had the "unibody" construction. If also feels quite solid when I hold it by one corner while open. The lid does feel somewhat flimsier, though, especially the hinge.
    - kergonath 3y ago

graphe 3y ago

With a large 4K screen, I'm not seeing any benefit for MST, and studies have shown it decreases productivity after 2 screens. The other problems are simply fixed with using iCloud and treating your laptop as a disposable, which many laptops have been designed as. If you use the MacBook add intended and invest in apple care it's unbeatable.

ed_mercer 3y ago
Any source for said studies? As an engineer I often find my current 2 external monitors limiting and wish I had four.
- zoky 3y ago
  It never ends. I have 4 monitors and sometimes wish I had 5 or 6. If I could physically fit more monitors on my desk, I would.
- graphe 3y ago
  NYT in 2014, (personal experience too). https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/technology/personaltech/surviving-and-thriving-in-a-one-monitor-world.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/technology/personaltech/s... this advocates for one monitor https://hackernoon.com/why-i-stopped-using-multiple-monitors-bfd87efa2e5b https://hackernoon.com/why-i-stopped-using-multiple-monitors... the tl;dr is that mutiple screens mean more distractions, and some tasks are better with 2 monitors but the studies don't indicate it's universal.
  - nl 3y ago
    These aren't studies, just anecdotes, and the actual study quoted in the NYT shows the opposite: > One study commissioned by NEC and conducted by researchers at the University of Utah showed that people using a dual-display machine to do a text-editing task were 44 percent more productive than those who used a single monitor. I think it's fair to say that any research from 2014 isn't the most relevant now. Both screen size and (importantly) software has changed to better support both multiple screen usage as well as large screens. The argument for single screens in the NYT is mostly that it reduces distractions: > But for most people, the time spent juggling two windows or scrolling across large documents isn’t the biggest bottleneck in getting work done. Instead, there’s a more basic, pernicious reason you feel constantly behind — you’re getting distracted. This seems to indicate they were comparing a maximized window on a single screen vs non-maximized windows on multiple screens, and probably in the days before modern notifications on desktop OSs. Based on this it is fair to say more research is needed, but it is inaccurate to claim that studies support the idea that one monitor is better.

lxgr 3y ago

> Storage is the most likely component to fail. Got any sources for that? I find that hard to believe. > MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. This is indeed annoying, but with USB4/Thunderbolt support becoming more common in monitors, I believe this is going to be less of an issue going forward.

vishnugupta 3y ago
Data point of one. Last 20 years storage has not failed on me across close to a dozen laptops I’ve owned across various brands. So even I get puzzled whenever I see “storage is the most likely component to fail”. Maybe I just got lucky?
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  I think it's more about ssd's with limited cycles+ the fact that with smaller RAM, swap can nuke those ssd's pretty fast if you go beyond ram capacity
- smcl 3y ago
  If you're replacing your laptop every 1.5 years then you're probably not likely to encounter any part failing.
  - thombat 3y ago
    And if a man mates with nine women he'll be holding one baby this time next month? With both electronic devices and gestating females concurrency is common.
    - smcl 3y ago
      No, you don't understand. SSDs begin to encounter problems over time after some number of read/write cycles. This is entirely expected and when one sector has issues it gets remapped to one of some spares that are built into the drive. Once those are exhausted it's a matter of time before you have an unusable SSD and, if it's soldered to the motherboard, an unusable laptop. A sister comment to mine referred to this too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38066645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38066645

bilalq 3y ago

The lack of MST support caught me by surprise. Six years ago, I intentionally bought an expensive monitor with USB-C and daisy-chaining support as the second screen so that the monitor itself would be able to function as my dock. Lo and behold, it worked fine on Windows but not on MacOS. Had to buy a dock separately and now have one more thing cluttering my desk. I spent so long troubleshooting and trying to figure out why it didn't work before I stumbled on this article[1]. [1]: https://sebvance.medium.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-macbook-pros-and-their-lack-of-displayport-mst-multi-stream-98ce33d64af4 https://sebvance.medium.com/everything-you-need-to-know-abou...

rekoil 3y ago
It's such a frustrating missing feature.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
It’s so surprising that it doesn’t I too only found out when I bought the monitors plugged them in and it did nothing.

AdamN 3y ago

* Just use TB monitors and daisy chaining works fine * Nothing to add. * Hardware enclave is a requirement for most corporate/government computers so you're just comparing two different classes of computer. All the enterprise Windows machines also do this. * Same as above

bogantech 3y ago
> * Just use TB monitors and daisy chaining works fine Not everybody has a zillion dollars to spend on expensive thunderbolt displays and they shouldn't have to when the Displayport standard (and other operating systems) support daisy chaining.
- Terretta 3y ago
  > when the Displayport standard (and other operating systems) support daisy chaining It doesn't support it, exactly, it supports a compressed image in each of the multiple streams transported, which can introduce quality problems when doing the production work people use higher end Macs for. "the combined data rate requirements of all the displays cannot exceed the limits of a single DP port" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Multi-Stream_Transport_(MST) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Multi-Stream_Trans... Arguably, compared to TB ports transmitting a full quality image to each screen, this could be "unexpected behavior".
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    I'm not a gamer. I'd be fine with a single cable that served two 4K monitors at 30Hz from the Mac if it meant I never needed another dock ever again. That said, TB3/TB4 should be able to handle dual 4K at 60Hz from a single DisplayPort connection to the laptop.
    - AdamN 3y ago
      I have dual 4k right now daisy chained from a Mac at 60Hz. Works totally fine and it was a 2019 MBP (and now a 2021 M1 Pro MBP). This is already a solved problem if you just stick with TB3+ gear.

Dig1t 3y ago

>Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail. SSDs only have so many write cycles. One thing to note is the quality of Apple’s storage is above and beyond anything else you can buy. They have teams at every level of the storage stack and have an amazing focus on quality. From individual chips all the way up to the filesystem, all of the software is customized to extend the lifespan of the device. They do wear-leveling so the larger the drive you buy with your device the longer the device will last, but honestly the drives they come with will last much longer than 99.9 of people will ever actually use a Mac.

KETHERCORTEX 3y ago
> One thing to note is the quality of Apple’s storage is above and beyond anything else you can buy. Average good experience of other users doesn't make a guy having a failing SSD feel any better. The absence of easy repair/replacement just adds an insult to injury. > They do wear-leveling so the larger the drive you buy with your device the longer the device will last Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like a description of an average modern SSD. Heck, I was reading similar things about wear leveling regarding USB drives, like, a decade and a half ago.
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  Where is the evidence of failing Mac SSDs? I think you're being overly creative in your interpretation of average, like you're imagining a bunch of people people that have it fail after a year of regular use and then others that have it fail after 30 to 'average it out' and mask a bad experience for many people.
ksec 3y ago
>all of the software is customized to extend the lifespan of the device It is widely known macOS paging out a lot more than Windows. On a multiTab Safari you could easily have 100GB write or higher per day. Kernel_Task lock up are extremely common on google search.
- 3y ago

runjake 3y ago

I'm in an org with tens of thousands of Macs deployed. We've got through butterfly keyboard failures, screen ribbon issues, bloated batteries, and dead logic boards. We've had some SSDs fail, but it's virtually unheard of. It's so rare, I can't recall a specific instance. I submit that failure rates within a Mac's usable lifetime is so rare that it's a non-issue. That said, I'm always going to strongly want user-replaceable, modular components everywhere I possibly can. Barring that, I want cheap repair options (buying stuff like logic boards from Apple is obscenely priced.) I also factor AppleCare+ into device cost, because forget buying a $2,000-3,000 Apple device without it.