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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.
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.
How are you supposed to wipe the SSD before you sell it?
Clear the FileVault encryption key.
...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.
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.
Sell it?! I thought the Mac upgrade path was pick up old laptop, deposit in trash, open box, set new laptop on desk.
Buy your own mac building kit! Only $10K! Some assembly required.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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.
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
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.
This is 100% correct. Apple knows Moore's Law is ending and the upgrade train is over. There will be no reason in 5 years to update the laptop you are using today....because there won't be any appreciable differences in speed.
Or, you know, don't use FileVault on your home folder because that's the quickest way to nearly brick your MacBook Pro and have to reinstall everything from scratch. Been there, done that - decades of practice and they still get it wrong.
That's not green, you should send it to a recycling center in China where they specialize in extracting your personal credit information to maximize value from the waste stream.
No, you can't use File Vault safely - if your computer hangs during power down and doesn't power down "gracefully," File Vault can lock your home folder up tight and throw away the key. (Been there, talked with Carlos in advanced tech support, it's toast man, reinstall from original image.)
The soldering job these days is usually surface mount soldering, so how exactly did you manually pull it off? Especially given that the packages are probably BGAs, so you'd have to get solders underneath the package, not at the sides, where it is easier. Not to mention 0.5mm pitches or below.
As a former flash memory guy, I just wish they had come out w/ soldered storage last decade, when I still worked in the industry. But aside from that, if they solder PCIe storage modules to the board, why don't they go a step further, remove the PCIe slots plus modules, and just solder the flash devices and controller logic on the motherboard itself? Saves space not just in thickness, but also, on a laptop motherboard, why would they need any PCIx slots? Those slots are meant for add-on cards, which makes sense on a desktop, but never in a laptop. So just optimize everything like you did in the Mac Pro, and put everything - CPU, North Bridge, South Bridge, SSD storage, RAM, all on the motherboard.
And in keeping w/ the Apple tradition of add-on enhancements, maybe introduce USB3 dongles w/ the same SSD in similar levels of density, like 1TB or more.
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?
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.
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.
if they solder PCIe storage modules to the board, why don't they go a step further, remove the PCIe slots plus modules
Because fuck you, customer. The modules are there so that Apple can second source SSDs and keep costs down, the solder is there so that you can't get a cheap upgrade or repair.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
To be fair, I was last burned by it in 2006 - that was enough for me to stay away, branding hasn't changed - hard to trust the new versions.
That's a good thing, I suppose - the home folder only method was inherently dangerous the way they implemented it.
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.
How are you supposed to wipe the SSD before you sell it?
Clear the FileVault encryption key.
No, you do it the same way that you should wipe any other hard drive: Hit it with a hammer until it is in small pieces, then put those pieces in a fire.
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.
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