5 ms·

> What happens here is that the secure enclave, cryptographic accelerator and flash controllers are all packaged together. This gives you sick speeds and perfor

> What happens here is that the secure enclave, cryptographic accelerator and flash controllers are all packaged together. This gives you sick speeds and performance while also making it more secure than your average OPAL TCG trash that often isn't even implemented at all. Apples SSD performance is nothing special, and if they wisely don't want to trust OPAL TCG they can encrypt the data in their own trusted silicon before handing it over to the untrusted SSD controller. That's pretty much what the Playstation 5 does, it supports standard NVMe drives but the disk encryption is done in custom Sony silicon so the third party SSD controller never sees the plaintext. I'm not convinced there's any purpose for the way Apple does their storage aside from vendor lock-in.

oneplane 2y ago
I don't think you can get a mass market SSD that does what this thing does. Not unless you change some parameters. The speeds and bandwidth you get is always with full encryption for all blocks. That might not be special to you, but doing this mass market in a way that doesn't make exploits and bypasses appear faster than the manufacturers can patch it (looking at TCG, BitLocker etc) is definitely special to me. As for that other methods may work (making the chain longer by introducing a separate bus, two transceivers, an additional controller from another vendor, extra firmware, extra power buses), they have done that in the past. In practically every shape: - SCSI - ATA/IDE - SATA - NVMe over custom physical port before M.2 was broadly available with the same specs, but probably also cheaper for them They also have had drives in all sizes as well, both internal and external. That includes most forms of modularity (external: entire drive + enclosure, just the drive or just the enclosure, internal: 5.25, 3.5, 2.5, CF-sized) and controller wise they also have done all variants: add-in card, on-board, on-chip, third party controller, first party controller, combinations where they did only the firmware or only the hardware, ones where the fabric and the controller were combined etc. So technology wise, it's not like they haven't gone back and forth with many, many combinations. Business-wise: > I'm not convinced there's any purpose for the way Apple does their storage aside from vendor lock-in. First of all, I highly doubt Apple gives a shit. Their model of lock-in is making a better combined experience than the competition. If they could do that with some random western digital black SSD while making the same amount of money, they would do it. But more importantly: if Apple would do that, they would still charge you $1000 for that SSD, even if it's only 1TB. The concept of lock-in is making it so that people don't want to pay the cost of leaving. You can't lock people in with just the stick (an SSD-shaped stick with a $1000 price tag) if you don't have a carrot. Secondly: I don't want or need to convince you, but trying to shoehorn a business in such a one-dimensional take is not exactly a good way to spend your energy.
- alwayslikethis 2y ago
  It is vendor lock-in. The cost of leaving is not in the SSD but the software ecosystem you'd be giving up if you want the same performance with other hardware. The $1000 SSD is the rent or surplus they are charging by the virtue of their lock-in, minus the prevailing price of the a comparable NVMe SSD.
- seec 2y ago
  > I don't think you can get a mass market SSD that does what this thing does. Of course, if you started with the requirements that is has to be the exact same thing you cannot meet it, precisely because what Apple does is highly proprietary and dependent on their implementation of the controller and the encryption that is handled by their own silicon. However, the fact is that there are SSDs that are faster than what Apple provides and there are also CPUs that are better at encryption or just competitive enough with what Apple does. You can't get a 1-to-1 solution because that a not something anyone actually desires but you can get a solution that is just as good if not better. It is always weird to me that when it comes to Apple people want to go with the arbitrary requirements they dictated while dismissing any requirement of another competing solution, like modularity. > First of all, I highly doubt Apple gives a shit. Their model of lock-in is making a better combined experience than the competition What you say makes no sense and is highly contradictory in its nature. They charge the price they do for upgrades because there is literally no other way to do so. The reason they don't use some random WD SSD is precisely because if they would it would be trivial for anyone to bypass their predatory pricing and very few would actually use their upgrade options and they definitely could not realistically extract so much money from their power users. It's completely crazy that you believe otherwise even though they started soldering SSD/RAM on the Intel MacBooks, way before there was any technical rationalization about it (in marketing and by their fans). The reason they do it is because of money; any other benefits are just a side effect. They get to save money from the vertical integration: suddenly they don't have to pay for a 3rd party integration of controller and software development (with the associated markup) and they go down the value chain, just buying NAND chips which are a lower value commodity with less supplier power. Since they already pay for their own silicon, the added cost of the controller on the silicon is minimal. And they get to dictate the price of storage/RAM upgrades since they become by definition their own supplier with no competition. If they really wanted, they could have a solution that would allow their own custom NAND board and also support 3rd party SSDs for anyone who wanted (even if it would have some downsides). The added development cost would be minimal but of course they would never do that because realistically almost nobody would spend 3-4 times as much on storage no matter how much better their solution would be in theory. When it comes to the lock-in, it is completely built into the software. They get to win because once people get used to and dependent on a particular software stack it is pretty costly to switch to another solution. And the cost is one of the things people hate the most: it is time and struggle to learn/adapt to new way of doing things. If you have been working a certain way for a very long time you also need to unlearn a good amount of it, which is a struggle (think about changing keyboard layout for example). Most people are not ready to pay this cost so they end up preferring to pay with cash because in the end they got the cash by selling their time and they find it is more efficient for them to go this route. And this is a fact Apple knows very well, in fact most of the Apple customers (at least when it comes to the Mac) are people who were wealthy enough to afford their hardware in the first place, those are people who generally have a large leverage on their time, meaning they have a great multiplier which is precisely why Apple feel that they can get away with this anticompetitive behavior and they are completely right. That doesn't make any of it better, it is still highly abusive and extortionate behavior which is funny because it is a company that markets itself as highly virtuous. All the while they extract more money out of economies all other the place, in a way that is highly inefficient for society because they don't give back anything and the value they provide is highly out of whack with what they extract. As for the carrot, there is some of it left but it has become very rotten. They make really nice hardware that's for sure, and the recent development of Apple Silicon has brough much needed value (if you don't care about compatibility outside of Apple focused software that is). But the reality is that outside of their base model that offer decent value, because of the cost of upgrades they wouldn't sell that much hardware if macOS could run on other hardware legally and without too much effort. Hackintosh would never have been a thing otherwise and we know that for a fact because historically when they licensed Mac OS to clone, their hardware sales tanked and then they later came with various technical mitigation to make it too costly to legally make a clone. So, in a way I agree that there is good part of a carrot left but that's mostly if you can be happy with their base default configuration, if you have a requirement outside of that their pricing make it so that the carrot leaves a very bad taste in your mouth and you wish you could go another route even if it meant having to compromise on some other stuff.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
You don't become a $3tn company by respecting and liberating users.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  You do it by providing the best choice for users over decades. Or if you're an actual lock-in firm like MS, you do it by embedding yourself in every government department and company and school, so people go from cradle to grave using your products.
  - zdw 2y ago
    MS's main lock in is the MS Office file formats (the entire "open" standards process around this was co-opted and destroyed), and then the predatory bundling/extension (browsers, email, Teams) to knock out competitors. Windows isn't the crown jewel - the real value is doc/xls/ppt that wrap people's data and bundling of everything into a MS license that marginalizes 3rd party entrants like Slack.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      I agree.
    - seec 2y ago
      Microsoft has always been about selling software, nothing else. Windows exists because they need to control a platform that is competitive enough to run their software and that cannot dictate their trajectory too much. They are very happy to sell their software and most platforms and since they don't make much money selling hardware, they will even sell you ways to run Windows anywhere for software that requires it. Microsoft has won because they were more competitive in bringing a desirable solution at a particular price, in other words they bring good value and even though some seem too ideologically tainted to understand it the whole world recognized it as such. The open standard Office formats work fine and Microsoft supports them just fine. The real reason they still win is because their software is generally just better to use. Many have used the competing open-source solution and end up paying for the Microsoft stuff because it is just a much worse experience that is not worth wasting your time for the very competitive pricing Microsoft offer. They win because they provide more value than free stuff at the price they offer, it is just as simple as that. You can see the bundling as predatory or you can see it as a competitive answer. Microsoft has seen that there was a market for some types of software, duplicated a competitive enough solution and sell it cheaper in order to bring more value, that's pretty much it. Even if they are legally prevented from bundling, I very much doubt it would change anything because they would just price the standalone solution in a competitive enough manner and would still win. They largely do that by the way, you can get plenty of their stuff in a standalone way. Even in the age of cloud/SASS subscription, Microsoft still sells standalone Office suite that you can very well use for years on end with zero need to upgrade (exactly what I do for my grandma, because she likes Publisher). And if the bundling legal precedent is set, their competitors like Apple and Google are in way more trouble because they abuse the bundling way more. It's hilarious the irrational hate Microsoft gets when they are objectively not that bad. Sure, they have some terrible behavior like any big corp, but by those standards, Apple is so much worse it is really stunning to see the difference in treatment.
matthewfcarlson 2y ago
There's a lot of reasons but IMHO the engineering answer is that the firmware is stored on the SSD, not on a random SPI NOR sitting on the PCB. So rather than having to support a wide variety of SATA controllers or do PCIe training (because few vendors implement the spec well so you gotta do a bunch of hacks to get it to work), they have a single storage controller that the SecureROM talks to. Then LLB and iBoot bring up more and more of the storage stack. Apple documents some of it here: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac71d5623/web https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac7...

oneplane 2y ago

I don't think you can get a mass market SSD that does what this thing does. Not unless you change some parameters. The speeds and bandwidth you get is always with full encryption for all blocks. That might not be special to you, but doing this mass market in a way that doesn't make exploits and bypasses appear faster than the manufacturers can patch it (looking at TCG, BitLocker etc) is definitely special to me. As for that other methods may work (making the chain longer by introducing a separate bus, two transceivers, an additional controller from another vendor, extra firmware, extra power buses), they have done that in the past. In practically every shape: - SCSI - ATA/IDE - SATA - NVMe over custom physical port before M.2 was broadly available with the same specs, but probably also cheaper for them They also have had drives in all sizes as well, both internal and external. That includes most forms of modularity (external: entire drive + enclosure, just the drive or just the enclosure, internal: 5.25, 3.5, 2.5, CF-sized) and controller wise they also have done all variants: add-in card, on-board, on-chip, third party controller, first party controller, combinations where they did only the firmware or only the hardware, ones where the fabric and the controller were combined etc. So technology wise, it's not like they haven't gone back and forth with many, many combinations. Business-wise: > I'm not convinced there's any purpose for the way Apple does their storage aside from vendor lock-in. First of all, I highly doubt Apple gives a shit. Their model of lock-in is making a better combined experience than the competition. If they could do that with some random western digital black SSD while making the same amount of money, they would do it. But more importantly: if Apple would do that, they would still charge you $1000 for that SSD, even if it's only 1TB. The concept of lock-in is making it so that people don't want to pay the cost of leaving. You can't lock people in with just the stick (an SSD-shaped stick with a $1000 price tag) if you don't have a carrot. Secondly: I don't want or need to convince you, but trying to shoehorn a business in such a one-dimensional take is not exactly a good way to spend your energy.

alwayslikethis 2y ago
It is vendor lock-in. The cost of leaving is not in the SSD but the software ecosystem you'd be giving up if you want the same performance with other hardware. The $1000 SSD is the rent or surplus they are charging by the virtue of their lock-in, minus the prevailing price of the a comparable NVMe SSD.
seec 2y ago
> I don't think you can get a mass market SSD that does what this thing does. Of course, if you started with the requirements that is has to be the exact same thing you cannot meet it, precisely because what Apple does is highly proprietary and dependent on their implementation of the controller and the encryption that is handled by their own silicon. However, the fact is that there are SSDs that are faster than what Apple provides and there are also CPUs that are better at encryption or just competitive enough with what Apple does. You can't get a 1-to-1 solution because that a not something anyone actually desires but you can get a solution that is just as good if not better. It is always weird to me that when it comes to Apple people want to go with the arbitrary requirements they dictated while dismissing any requirement of another competing solution, like modularity. > First of all, I highly doubt Apple gives a shit. Their model of lock-in is making a better combined experience than the competition What you say makes no sense and is highly contradictory in its nature. They charge the price they do for upgrades because there is literally no other way to do so. The reason they don't use some random WD SSD is precisely because if they would it would be trivial for anyone to bypass their predatory pricing and very few would actually use their upgrade options and they definitely could not realistically extract so much money from their power users. It's completely crazy that you believe otherwise even though they started soldering SSD/RAM on the Intel MacBooks, way before there was any technical rationalization about it (in marketing and by their fans). The reason they do it is because of money; any other benefits are just a side effect. They get to save money from the vertical integration: suddenly they don't have to pay for a 3rd party integration of controller and software development (with the associated markup) and they go down the value chain, just buying NAND chips which are a lower value commodity with less supplier power. Since they already pay for their own silicon, the added cost of the controller on the silicon is minimal. And they get to dictate the price of storage/RAM upgrades since they become by definition their own supplier with no competition. If they really wanted, they could have a solution that would allow their own custom NAND board and also support 3rd party SSDs for anyone who wanted (even if it would have some downsides). The added development cost would be minimal but of course they would never do that because realistically almost nobody would spend 3-4 times as much on storage no matter how much better their solution would be in theory. When it comes to the lock-in, it is completely built into the software. They get to win because once people get used to and dependent on a particular software stack it is pretty costly to switch to another solution. And the cost is one of the things people hate the most: it is time and struggle to learn/adapt to new way of doing things. If you have been working a certain way for a very long time you also need to unlearn a good amount of it, which is a struggle (think about changing keyboard layout for example). Most people are not ready to pay this cost so they end up preferring to pay with cash because in the end they got the cash by selling their time and they find it is more efficient for them to go this route. And this is a fact Apple knows very well, in fact most of the Apple customers (at least when it comes to the Mac) are people who were wealthy enough to afford their hardware in the first place, those are people who generally have a large leverage on their time, meaning they have a great multiplier which is precisely why Apple feel that they can get away with this anticompetitive behavior and they are completely right. That doesn't make any of it better, it is still highly abusive and extortionate behavior which is funny because it is a company that markets itself as highly virtuous. All the while they extract more money out of economies all other the place, in a way that is highly inefficient for society because they don't give back anything and the value they provide is highly out of whack with what they extract. As for the carrot, there is some of it left but it has become very rotten. They make really nice hardware that's for sure, and the recent development of Apple Silicon has brough much needed value (if you don't care about compatibility outside of Apple focused software that is). But the reality is that outside of their base model that offer decent value, because of the cost of upgrades they wouldn't sell that much hardware if macOS could run on other hardware legally and without too much effort. Hackintosh would never have been a thing otherwise and we know that for a fact because historically when they licensed Mac OS to clone, their hardware sales tanked and then they later came with various technical mitigation to make it too costly to legally make a clone. So, in a way I agree that there is good part of a carrot left but that's mostly if you can be happy with their base default configuration, if you have a requirement outside of that their pricing make it so that the carrot leaves a very bad taste in your mouth and you wish you could go another route even if it meant having to compromise on some other stuff.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

You don't become a $3tn company by respecting and liberating users.

robertlagrant 2y ago
You do it by providing the best choice for users over decades. Or if you're an actual lock-in firm like MS, you do it by embedding yourself in every government department and company and school, so people go from cradle to grave using your products.
- zdw 2y ago
  MS's main lock in is the MS Office file formats (the entire "open" standards process around this was co-opted and destroyed), and then the predatory bundling/extension (browsers, email, Teams) to knock out competitors. Windows isn't the crown jewel - the real value is doc/xls/ppt that wrap people's data and bundling of everything into a MS license that marginalizes 3rd party entrants like Slack.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    I agree.
  - seec 2y ago
    Microsoft has always been about selling software, nothing else. Windows exists because they need to control a platform that is competitive enough to run their software and that cannot dictate their trajectory too much. They are very happy to sell their software and most platforms and since they don't make much money selling hardware, they will even sell you ways to run Windows anywhere for software that requires it. Microsoft has won because they were more competitive in bringing a desirable solution at a particular price, in other words they bring good value and even though some seem too ideologically tainted to understand it the whole world recognized it as such. The open standard Office formats work fine and Microsoft supports them just fine. The real reason they still win is because their software is generally just better to use. Many have used the competing open-source solution and end up paying for the Microsoft stuff because it is just a much worse experience that is not worth wasting your time for the very competitive pricing Microsoft offer. They win because they provide more value than free stuff at the price they offer, it is just as simple as that. You can see the bundling as predatory or you can see it as a competitive answer. Microsoft has seen that there was a market for some types of software, duplicated a competitive enough solution and sell it cheaper in order to bring more value, that's pretty much it. Even if they are legally prevented from bundling, I very much doubt it would change anything because they would just price the standalone solution in a competitive enough manner and would still win. They largely do that by the way, you can get plenty of their stuff in a standalone way. Even in the age of cloud/SASS subscription, Microsoft still sells standalone Office suite that you can very well use for years on end with zero need to upgrade (exactly what I do for my grandma, because she likes Publisher). And if the bundling legal precedent is set, their competitors like Apple and Google are in way more trouble because they abuse the bundling way more. It's hilarious the irrational hate Microsoft gets when they are objectively not that bad. Sure, they have some terrible behavior like any big corp, but by those standards, Apple is so much worse it is really stunning to see the difference in treatment.

matthewfcarlson 2y ago

There's a lot of reasons but IMHO the engineering answer is that the firmware is stored on the SSD, not on a random SPI NOR sitting on the PCB. So rather than having to support a wide variety of SATA controllers or do PCIe training (because few vendors implement the spec well so you gotta do a bunch of hacks to get it to work), they have a single storage controller that the SecureROM talks to. Then LLB and iBoot bring up more and more of the storage stack. Apple documents some of it here: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac71d5623/web https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac7...