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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."
The next step is soldering the human brain to the board.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
"This is bullshit!", said an enthusiastic Larry Gilbert!!
How are you supposed to wipe the SSD before you sell it?
blacklisted from secure environments now
Steve Jobs always wanted Macs to be appliances that the user could not tinker with or modify. Now they have made it for him.
Unfortunately, systems designed that way don't reflect my needs at all.
is to introduce an "enthusiast" version that lets you update and swap out parts.
At a premium, of course. An even higher premium than is already being charged.
In short, you are nothing but a walking wallet to Apple.
...the storage is set for the lifetime of the notebook... and the lifetime of the notebook is set by the longevity of the storage.
Way to go, Apple.
Buy now, while still DRUNK!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Lol! Linus, I thought we told you not to play on the Slashdots today!
Personally I'd recommend having one PCB for everything instead of dividing the PCBs into separate logic (FPGA) and CPU circuit boards.
But Apple can do what they want.
What about when the SSD craps out? Then it's back to Apple, (or at least to a third-party shop), for an undoubtedly expensive repair job. Great! More stuff that the user has no hope of repairing on his or her own, and more non-renewable materials prematurely tossed into landfill. Tell me again - why in hell would I want a new Apple laptop?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I desoldered mine and replaced it with a larger SSD. So far so goo
Just another reason to stick to commodity hardware and run Linux on it. Once upon a time, it took a lot of work to get it to cover all the bases, but, its all working now. Main obstacles to broader Linux adoption are unfamilarity, and many that have vested interest in keeping it that way. The reality is that the good stuff is not in your laptop, but everywhere else, so local hardware/software doesn't really matter - it should be transparent. Its no real differentiator. Some companies want to decommoditize standard devices and then make you pay more for it. Pfft. (See also MP3) I will take connectors, and flexibility, over spiffy clean and neutered. Yeah. I like bluetooth, but also like tethered things (USB headset, 1/8 pin jack earphones, USB, MMC, Firewire is ok too!). Had enough of DB9/Serial and RJ11/Phone, but RJ45 can be handy, and display port and HDMI are nifty. Not sure about fingerprint scanners, but the seem like a great idea.
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
This is a clip of an Apple representative explaining the changes to the MacBook Pro value proposition.
https://youtu.be/jsW9MlYu31g
Hmm... persuasive, but I'm still not planning to buy the new MacBook Pro.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Is this all Slashdork is anymore? Bitch about Apple, bitch about Trump, bitch about climate change. Booooring. No wonder this turd is dying.
No, not all. There is also a good number of people who come here to bitch about /.
SSD wear may be a problem. Once it dies, you now change the laptop.
This is to kill the secondary market now that a 5 year old laptop has a cpu that is just fine. If it wasn't to kill the secondary market and the flash was really amazing and isn't going to fail ever they'd show a 5 year warranty.
We all know they won't do that, they'll actually charge you extra to get any useful warranty. But yeah, I dislike apple and won't buy their crap after paying thousands for a macbook pro that they shipped with faulty nvidia hardware and didn't recall. Apple are just a horrible company, the existence of other horrible companies does not excuse them for being awful. They're worse than microsoft, their reputation was only ever better than microsofts due to their failure to get market power. As soon as they got any they went nuts with it. Think different to apple.
Asus zenbook with any linux distro on it is just a plain better laptop.
Please add your successful linux laptops to this thread.
This change is more inexcusable than other modifications / removals of user-serviceability that they did in the name of thinness or performance. This mod signals to me their trying to fully capture / enforce price segmentation and making sure that products will expire and be retired more predictably.
(and even if maybe not their outright explicit thinking, surely a benefit that they welcomed tacitly. And trading off user-friendliness and serviceability for profit. )
I was already unhappy with the newer Macbooks having non-swappable RAM. I stuck with the old 2010-style Macbook Pros that you could remove everything pretty much and keep it up to date with larger, faster SSDs, etc.
This on top of USB-C and the all-at-once crappifying of this model means I'm out.
Much like a toaster. It's a pity, I used to really admire Apple hardware, even if the UI experience wasn't my preference.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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?
Because fuck you, that's why.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We've just had the motherboard in a Mac at work die - it went back to the shop with a different disk in it so that the data could be preserved.
Now if the board dies, your data goes with it.
These days I always check the repairability score on iFixIt before I buy any gadget costing over $300. Extended warranties are nice but no substitute for being able to crack the case and get after it when something goes wrong.
I wasn't aware they released InDesign, Logic Pro, ProTools or MS Office for Linux. With a Mac, I can run these.... and most of my favorite X11 based FOSS software natively.
USB-C is perfectly usable for all those tethered things you described. You just need an adapter. Soon there will be USB-C versions of all those devices as well. People bitched about USB for years too. Now everyone uses FTDI USB->RS232 adapters.... I have an industrialized 4-port FTDI USB->serial box on my desk right now.... plugged into my Hackintosh. USB-C is certainly fast enough to handle gigabit ethernet adapters, etc.
Just like USB, thanks to Apple, USB-C will be standard on your cheap Wintel hardware in a couple years too.
That's incorrect. With the X series (and I believe the surface) the RAM is soldered down but the SSD isn't. This is another step worse.
Also this thread seems obsessed with the fact that the storage dying is the end of the machine - I'd be as worried if not more that something else (RAM, GPU etc.) dying means my storage is inaccessible. We've had machines die that have been recoverable because the disk can be pulled out while the mainboard is replaced etc.
If you go to Paris and don't spend quite a lot on food, aren't you rather a moron? After all that is a huge reason to go to Paris to begin with.
I've been and while many aspects are nice I didn't think they were much better than other major European cities, but the food was amazing and if you aren't spending a lot on that do not even bother going.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who has any computer of with anything of value that has no backup?
I have Time Machine on all the time, but in addition to that I use a backup program to fully backup my system to an external drive every month or so...
So I have two ways I can fully restore my system in well under a day, even if the whole machine is replaced.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ALL 15" MBPs come with 16 GB of RAM. The device can only take LPDDR3, and Skylake only allows a max of 16 GB for LPDDR3, so you couldn't upgrade it even if Apple gave you a fucking button you could push to eject/insert the RAM out of the side of the machine.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
This is behavior I expect of rock-bottom-price Chromebook vendors, not a MacBook Pro. This is also why never Chromebooks are unappealing to me -- soldered RAM is one thing (SODIMMs are big), but they can't even make room for a NGFF 2242 SSD? Not interested. I'd rather Hackintosh an i3 Acer C720, at least I can put any drive I want in there.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Something that snaps to the bottom of the laptops and adds extra battery, storage and a boatload of ports. Then when you need ultimate portability take the laptop out and live without movies or whatever you were storing on the extra hard drive for a little while. People are overthinking such things, solutions have been there forever for smartphones.
what do you mean with why don't they just solder them on the motherboard when they are in fact just soldering them on the motherboard? the said components need to stay somewhere and this is cheapest at the moment and doing it otherwise would be both a) more expensive to source components b) not provide any cost benefits.
and as for pcix.. well, uh. you mean they should invent their own pcix and have intel make them chipsets compatible with said new bus? it's a standard and it's there on the chipset anyways and other components use it to talk with the cpu/chipset anyways.
and.. but laptops did come with soldered memory last decade too.
just that nobody was buying them because they were limited in space(or expensive and still limited in space). they even came with arm cpu's. 13 years ago. nobody bought them except wince developers.
and well.. doing resolders like that is in the realm of possibility but very tricky. I think he was joking. it's not cost beneficial in the west to perform any kind of repairs like that due to high cost of labor involved.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
without touch screen but a keyboard and touchpad....
Motherboard fails -> buy new laptop or repair on warranty.
You want upgrade disk to bigger one -> buy new laptop.
You don't use encryption and something (ssd, motherboard) fails -> you cannot unplug ssd drive, you cannot delete data, you will share all your private data with apple repair centre. Ups!
Your laptop gets into apple repair centre -> say "bye bye" to all your data because apple doesn't do any data recovery or data copying when replacing hardware.
So:
- buy biggest storage variant you will need in next 5 years
- always use encryption
- always do regular backup (hey backblaze.com, your new advertising opportunity is there)
- pray
You're less likely to need to replace solid state storage than the battery, and people have tolerated non-serviceable battery packs in these devices for many years.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Why wouldn't someone use Windows if they hate Apple so much? Switching from Mac to Linux seems like a stretch to me.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
USB was available on wintel machines, but hardly anyone used it...
I had a pentium pro and a socket 7 motherboard both with onboard USB, where the ports were exposed as a header on the motherboard and the manufacturers of the machines never even bothered connecting them to actual sockets on the outside of the case. Serial, Parallel, PS/2 and AT keyboards were still common and thats what people used.
Linux support for USB was poor, Windows support for USB was poor, very few peripherals used it and those that did were generally niche as most people bought non-usb versions instead.
It's not until Apple came out with machines that *only* had usb, that people started using it and third parties really started producing USB peripherals. If you leave the legacy ports in place, people will continue to use them because its easier and cheaper to do so. Only by removing the legacy ports do you force people to use their modern replacements.
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It make complete sense now.
You must really like to be butt-fucked if you get an Apple .. any hardware really but lets say Macbook Pro ... and still they buy one.
SSDs are now cheap and easy to install....means Apple would be losing money because customers buy the already ridiculously overpriced model with the smallest SSD and then spend a few bucks extra to upgrade with a 3rd party module. That's a no go for Apple. They rather charge 200-400 Dollars more for an upgrade that cost 100 Dollars or less. The only option here is to stop buying the excessively overpriced Apple stuff. Almost 3k$ for a 15" and you do not even get a lousy USB port. The real kicker is 4-5 weeks shipping time. You'd think with the piles of cash that Apple has they could finally fix their massive production bottleneck. A Windows laptop for 1000 bucks is surely a nice device with all the bells and whistles....and you get three of them for the price of a 15" MacBook.
It's a late 2013 model, Retina display, upgraded SSD.
As has been discussed to death already, Apples refresh gave me zero reason to want to upgrade. No performance benefits anywhere to be found.
And now, with this revelation, should my computer shit the bed, I'd probably go looking for a similar model on the used market than go with a new one.
Hopefully Apples next update in 2018 (given its current product life cycle) remedies that - give us a upgrade path to greater performance, the ability to upgrade and service some of the components ourselves. Oh, and bring back the Magsafe power adapter. I know my computer survived two near death incidents at coffee shops thanks to Magsafe, I can't image why in the world they'ed take that away. Oh, so we can have 4 matching ports, rather the 3 USB-C's and one power connector.
I'm getting to the point where I think 80% of what I do could be done with Linux with the same exact programs, 90-95% if i wanted to learn new things like GIMP, but I just prefer Mac OS X's look and feel. But the trajectory at Apple since Steve's death has me starting to think that I'm not a wanted customer anymore. I'd say that maybe mac's are just becoming expensive accessories to iPhones and iPods, but that can't be - you can't even plug the latest iPhone into the latest MacBook, after all!.
Laptops were never really terribly upgradable but you could also add some RAM and storage. Sometimes this was worth while but unless you cheaped out on those things at the start to get a more powerful chassis/cpu/motherboard to defer some initial cost it was often not worth while to do so. CPU's were doubling in performance, things like PCMCIA were being phased out for cardbus/minpci/usb1/firewire/usb2/thunderbolt/etc. The basic platform technology was evolving so rapidly it made more sense to forklift the system.
Now we have really hit the wall on CPU and for some users GPU. You can have a perfectly comfortable computing experience with a 4 years CPU and motherboard (provided things were the top shelf variety that go into MacBooks anyway) if you have enough RAM and fast storage attached to it. With the exception of USB3C business the expansion interfaces have stabilized quite a bit. Most of us don't really need a whole lot more single core performance. It probably makes more sense than ever to be looking at laptops as things you might add memory or storage to in the future, yet manufacturers seem to be in a rush to make this impossible.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So when your mobo goes out, you have essentially zero chance of recovering your data without risking de-soldering your shit from the board and damaging it in the process.
This is why removable storage is important.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Do you remember the time when we had these machines ? ZX-81, Alice32, Commodore 64, Schneider CPC 464 (as well as 664 and 6128), ...
For the less young among us, they were monolithic, kind of cheap computer toys. I say toy as it was the general view around here since kids were better at them than adults. (The image of programming = playing remained strong in my family from my 6th birthday until my first paycheck).
I can't help but feel that Apple went back to that time, when you could get these imitations of the real deal. They just innovated by replacing "cheaper" by "more expensive".
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
Do you carry your external backup drive with you when you travel with your MacBook?
Absolutely I carry my backup drive when traveling, you can use any external laptop drive... I have been doing this as long as I've had laptops.
I can see where you might not if you never did any work or carry anything important, but if you have anything of value you have a backup drive with you, period.
If I'm speaking I ALSO copy speaking materials onto a USB drive before traveling...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I gotta be honest here. I defended Apple when they soldered RAM onto the logic boards of the laptops. I mean, they retained the ability to upgrade it in any of the higher-spec iMac configurations (the systems with a 27" screen), as well as in the Mac Pro workstations. So it appeared it was a decision where Apple drew a line in the sand and said, "For a portable machine, you should really just buy it with a suitable amount of RAM for your projected needs through its usable lifetime. RAM has gotten reliable enough so you don't have memory modules failing that often and needing a swap-out. And by soldering it on, we get rid of the need of the DIMM sockets and issues it can cause when RAM isn't seated in one properly."
I could live with that.... Biggest problem it caused us was in my workplace, where they bought quite a few Macbook Air 13" notebooks back in the 2011-2012 time-frame with the standard 4GB RAM configuration, only to find they were good enough computers to keep on using in the last quarter of 2016 *except* for the limited RAM becoming a performance barrier. After 4-5 years of regular use, it's really NOT a big deal to argue it's time to get those users new computers anyway. But just saying -- we could squeeze another 1-2 years of life out of these if they were possible to upgrade to 8GB RAM.
But soldered in SSD? That's a whole different ballgame. As someone else pointed out, it now eliminates your ability to just pull a drive out of a failing machine and install it in another one to immediately get a user back up and running. Big downside for us in the office setting. Additionally though? It means Apple is trying to lock people in to paying their hugely inflated prices for larger capacity storage. I really liked the alternatives provided by companies like Transcend for older Retina 15" Macbook Pros. You could buy a much cheaper machine with a 256GB SSD and double the storage down the road, cost-effectively (leaving the original drive you took out to install in an external USB 3 enclosure, making a slick little external drive out of it).
I know if I was going to buy a new Macbook Pro myself, I'd want one with between 1TB and 2TB of storage capacity in it. I just think anything less feels like buying "last year's" specs or standard-issue consumer grade vs. anything worthy of the "Pro" label on it. Apple wants to push this as a good video editing system for Final Cut Pro X too ... another situation where you can't really have too much drive space. But that price for one with that SSD capacity? It's just unacceptable.
Doing this saves them a pretty large sum of cash. Now all repairs are full mainboard or nothing. Diagnostics is a simple pass/fail. So the question is why isnt all this integration saving the consumer any money? I could understand these moves if it made their computers much cheaper due to the much lower repair and warranty tail this brings.
Good-bye
Apple makes inferior hardware and software. You'd be better off buying a Dell and installing Linux. There's no need to ever run any OS except Linux. The only reason Linux doesn't rule the desktop is because people aren't smart enough to be able to use it.
I assume you forgot the [/sarcasm] tag.
Oh please. USB was available on Wintel machines before Apple put it on their computers. All Apple did was replace its proprietary ADB with it. USB-C has been on non-Apple machines since early 2015, several months before the MacMook was released.
The CONNECTOR was there on Wintel mobos, thanks to Intel's Salesforce; but, until the iMac came along, there was virtually NOTHING to connect to it, nor was there decent OS Support outside of MacOS (Classic) (The original iMac released with MacOS 8.1, and it had support for USB, FFS!).
;-) )
Heck, Linux didn't even support USB in a non-experimental fashion until something like the 2.4.0 Kernel, in 2001 !!!
And Apple did more than replace ADB with it. They also replaced their RS-422/232 and SCSI ports with it as well. IOW, they went "USB or Bust!", and the rest is history...
And I know you don't like Apple; but there's no call for the racial slur! (