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Apple's New 15-Inch MacBook Pros Have Storage Soldered To the Logic Board (macrumors.com)
yoink! writes: The integration loop is complete. Apple's, admittedly very fast, PCIe storage modules are now built right into the main boards of their 15-inch, Touch Bar-equipped, Retina-screened, Thunderbolt 3-ported, MacBook Pros. A few forum posts over at MacRumors reveal the skinny on the quiet removal of the last user-upgradable component of their professional-series laptops. From the report: "MacRumors reader Jesse D. unscrewed the bottom lid on his new 15-inch MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar and discovered, unlike the 13-inch model sans Touch Bar, there is no cutout in the logic board for removable flash storage. Another reader said the 13-inch model with a Touch Bar also has a non-removable SSD. Given the SSD appears to be permanently soldered to the logic board, users will be unable to upgrade the Touch Bar MacBook Pro's flash storage beyond Apple's 512GB to 2TB built-to-order options on its website at the time of purchase. In other words, the amount of flash storage you choose will be permanent for the life of the notebook."
How are you supposed to wipe the SSD before you sell it?
Clear the FileVault encryption key.
So the MTBF of both components is the same now, whichever is lower.
Motherboard fails? Which apparently in your experience happens more often... you can't pull the SSD, stick it in another machine and get the data out.
Yes, you should backup. Yes, you should probably use some kind of cloud sync. It's no substitute for being able to yank the drive, shove it in another box, and keep on truckin'. I can do this on my Linux boxes with no problems. (Windows, of course, will throw a blue fit if you try this).
Live USB distro + 'dd' as always
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Don't buy. "Pro", my ass.
To audio pros, the single most important feature in a pro laptop is knowing that when the logic board s**ts itself, you can take the thing in for repair, and you'll get back a machine that still has all your software on it. Without that, you get to experience the joy of spending several weeks on the phone with a hundred different software vendors trying to convince them to give you another device activation because your old machine no longer exists and you can't deactivate the existing installation.
The other design screw-ups in the new "Pro" were obnoxious, but survivable. This one, however, represents a level of epic fail that is simply beyond acceptable. When you've had a long string of GPU-related logic board failures like Apple has experienced lately, soldering the non-volatile storage to the main logic board is just too incompetent for words.
This is a show-stopper. This is not a pro machine. It is a disposable toy.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
So when your SSD (or any other soldered parts) broke off, you have to throw the laptop in the garbage?? (e-waste recycling is just an illusion... everything is sent to Hong-Kong and sent to the trash). And what about extending the life of your laptop by upgrading some parts of it? Apple is the biggest e-waste producer on the planet. It's a shame! And all those Hipster defending the planet with their iPhone in their pockets!
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
The next step will be to solder your credit card directly to the ApplePay reader.
What makes you say that, exactly? I just used gparted Live last week to migrate my Windows 10 installation from an old Intel 180GB SSD to a new Kingston 480G SSD and had no problems whatsoever. I wouldn't expect moving drives between identical hardware to be any different, but systems with different motherboards, NICs, GPUs, can all be booted in Safe Mode to install the required drivers.
I imagine they aren't disassembling their old MacBooks; at least not on a nightly basis.
When it comes time to donate the hardware is where this is going to hit home. Often there are controlled rooms of hard drives awaiting professional destruction. The rest of the hardware is often donated to a charity. A move like this means that charities will no longer get nearly functional computers minus a hard drive, and the closets might need to be bigger.
False. I moved my boot disks (raid 0, intel rst) from an i7 2600k to a dual xeon build without issues.
Dude, when I can fly from GERMANY to any destination in the USA back and forth for $350, then it is hard to believe that you pay $1000 from US to Paris.
Actually, we in the USA are getting violated in pretty much every way it is possible to be violated when we fly. We go to the airport and get reamed on parking (if I'm not going to be gone long I'll just go ahead and use it) and then we get reamed for (and by) a cinnabon and then we get groped by the TSA and then we get bent over with our heads between our knees and get our asses pounded by some awful seats, and then if we're "lucky" we get our digestive tract boned by some lukewarm scientifically inoffensive and uninteresting airplane food and then we get fucked by their booze prices (since we can't carry booze onto the plane conveniently any more) and all the while we're getting fucked over ticket prices. And then I've heard but have not yet experienced because I have not been to Europe and doubly not been there recently that we then get our ears raped about what scum we are for even having Trump in the race, let alone electing him, even if we'd rather have cut off our testicles and mailed them in to the RNC than have had that come to pass.
The only way we don't get absolutely pinned down and taken when traveling is when we do it by automobile, and that only if we're clever and/or lucky enough to avoid intense traffic times and areas. Fuel is usually very cheap here (it's reasonably inexpensive right now) and if you drive a very boring but respectable looking car then odds are sharply against you having any problems... hmm, unless you are brown. Forgot about that part.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have the same issue. Even though I have been very happy with the Apple enviroment of OS X and their hardware. They are moving further and further away from something I want to spend my money on. Their recent MacBook Pro "upgrade" have made them useless for me and all too expensive.
My late 2013 iMac still packs a punch with the Intel I7. I can have FCPX pro rendering in the background while websurfing and other stuff still runs smooth. It feels like a workstation, it has a cmd line I can use. it used to have a proper disk utility program etc etc.
Of course that is because I am running external RAIDs on the USB3 ports for the rendering, etc.
I need to accessorize a MacBook Pro with numerous dongles, and after a while, external storage because I cannot upgrade it. So it is becoming useless too fast and too expensive for my wallet.
Like I switched from Windows in 2007 to OS X, I might need to do the reverse when the next upgrade comes around and see if I work with Windows again.
It is really sad how they have dumbed every thing down.
I just had a motherboard replaced in year four (2012 retina 15"), free, outside of AppleCare extended warranty period.
But, don't worry, we've gotta let the haters claim that Apple products suck, and Apple's treatment of customers suck, even though they don't own or use Apple products.
Once upon a time, like ten years ago, File Vault encrypted home folders as a dmg file on a partition. That is no longer the case and has not been the case for years. File Vault doesn't work like that anymore, and it hasn't worked like that for years. Now it's whole disk encryption like Microsoft's Bitlocker, and utterly bulletproof. The only way to lose your disk is to overwrite the key blocks at the start of the disk.
Technology moves on, man.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.