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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.
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.
The next step will be to solder your credit card directly to the ApplePay reader.