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> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited life
by Tuna-Fish 8mo ago
> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years
I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.
The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
- netule 8mo agoExactly, the entire appeal of Thinkpads is their ability to be repaired and upgraded by the end user. MacBooks are designed to be disposable.
- jonhohle 8mo agoIt’s really a shame. May last “favorite” MacBook was from 2013 where everything was upgradable. I bought the fastest Core processor with the lowest everything else and upgraded to 16GB of RAM, SSD (granted at SATA speeds) and a second data drive in the optical drive bay. What luxury!
- cromka 8mo agoAbsolutely not. SSD can be resoldered and that service is actually becoming popular and inexpensive. It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered. This will become a totally normal thing in a few years from now.
- nanliu 8mo agoIt's on chip for the m series and not soldered to the motherboard.
- testing22321 8mo agoThe ram is on chip, the ssd is soldered to the motherboard. There are tons of YT vids showing people upgrading them.
- Tuna-Fish 8mo agoNeither the ram nor the ssd is on chip. The ram is on package, the ssd is on board. On chip means literally on top of the silicon, like how AMD X3D cpus mount the SRAM chip. On modern Apple devices the ram is mounted on the organic package substrate. The difference is significant, and it's shitty that Apple outright lied about it.
- wtallis 8mo agoI think that particular definition of "on chip" is entirely your invention. I've usually seen it broadly used for anything on-package, whether it's on-die or on a separate die within the same package. "On chip" definitely does not have much if any history of referring specifically to stacked dies with TSVs, because that has been a very niche packaging technique until recently, and "on chip" is a much more broadly used term.
- zuhsetaqi 8mo agoThe RAM yes but not the SSD modules
- wtallis 8mo agoSoldered storage is extremely uncommon for laptops not from Apple. You pretty much only find it in very low-end Chromebook type hardware that's using eMMC for cost reasons, and a small fraction of more expensive Qualcomm-based laptops that use UFS for no good reason. All mainstream PC laptops use M.2 NVMe storage.
- EatFlamingDeath 8mo agoSSDs can be resoldered, but it's a PITA and I haven't seen it becoming popular or inexpensive.
- tredre3 8mo ago> It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered That's simply a lie. No other laptop have soldered SSD. An increasing number do have soldered RAM.
- 747fulloftapes 8mo ago> > It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered > That's simply a lie. No other laptop have soldered SSD. An increasing number do have soldered RAM. That's simply a lie. Pretty much all laptops using eMMC or eUFS for storage are soldered directly to the mainboard. These are often budget devices and many are things like x86-based tablets or chromebooks but there are models that are very much laptops. I do concede I am unaware of any non-apple laptops with directly soldered NVMe storage, but your claim that no other laptop have soldered SSD is patently false.
- FireBeyond 8mo agoI think it's a little disingenuous to try to compare high/er end Apple laptops with soldered storage to $2-300 Chromebooks and budget devices with soldered eMMC (which is much more like a CF/SD card than anything else) in your argument in the first place. As you acknowledge. When you look at actual competitors to Apple, you're forced to acknowledge that yup, no other manufacturer solders storage. But yes, with due pedantry, the statement that "no other laptop has a soldered SSD" is technically wrong. You could get into additional debates on whether eMMC and eUFS would map to most people's understanding of "SSD", but...
- gr4vityWall 8mo agoI have a 120GB SSD from 2013 that saw typical gaming/workstation usage since it was bought, and it still works fine. I think repairability is important, but I don't think it will stop those laptops from being popular.
- kalleboo 8mo agoI've yet to see a desktop SSD wear out from writes. The only dead desktop SSDs I've seen have been due to buggy firmware (early drives or that recent batch of Samsungs) or well before their wear level is down (cheap noname drives off amazon).
- thenthenthen 8mo agoMy macbook air 2013 ssd died after 10 years, it is not soldered luckily
- adrian_b 8mo agoThat is because you do not write much. My first SSDs were from Intel and I have completely worn them out by writing their specified maximum writable amount of data, in a couple of years or so. After that, I have been careful to always buy only SSDs with the maximum amount of writable data that exist on the market. I have not worn out others yet, but those that have been used for many years show in their SMART counters that a large fraction of the permissible amount of written data has been reached and not much has remained until their end of life. I typically write many tens of GB per day.
- kalleboo 8mo agoMy point is the vast majority of desktop users do not write much. My experience is not just my own computers but the network of extended family and friends' small businesses I'm the informal tech support for. This includes video editors who edit large video files. I do wear out SSDs but they're on servers I run with different use patterns.
- mikae1 8mo agoAnd how easy is it to replace an aging battery?
- agildehaus 8mo agoThe keyboard has a much shorter lifespan than the SSD, and it's incredibly difficult/expensive to replace. A single bad key or trace and any Apple laptop is basically toast. $800+ to have Apple replace the top cover. Maybe an independent shop can do it cheaper, I don't know.
- FireBeyond 8mo agoHah. Yes. Couple of drops of water on an an MBA... laptop worked fine. Battery, fine. Healthy. Charging circuit would not work. Perfectly functioning laptop on AC, but unable to be on battery because 0% charge. Me, at Genius Bar, expecting you know, maybe $300 with parts and labor? "Here's a quote, sir, we're looking at $850+tax, perhaps we should talk about getting you into a new Mac today?" No. The laptop was primarily connected to AC anyway and only 18 months old, if that. Sorry, Apple.
- thisislife2 8mo agoSame here. Bought an Apple Keyboard a long time ago. Spilled some juice on it. Some keys stopped working. That's when I learnt that a $200+ Apple Keyboard isn't even water resistant unlike the previous $25-50+ keyboard I had. That was the first major red-flag about Apple I had. The soldered RAM and SSDs, and locked bootloaders on the Mac were the last straw. Will never purchase an Apple device again.