Did the question about Apple’s new laptops and their apparently high writes in general usage get resolved? And was it incorrect/misleading reporting, or somehow not a problem (life of SSD still likely to be ‘long enough’) or is it still potentially the case that the machines will be ‘bricked’ due to the non-replaceable SSD dying early?
I don’t mind having to have the SSD replaced by Apple if the cost is reasonable, just as I do with batteries, but would be good to know what to expect.
While I don't like it being that way, I can definitely see the benefits of non-upgradeable RAM. The performance of the SOC on my "lowly", entry-level M1 Air is out of this world.
But an SSD that's glued on to the motherboard has 0 benefits that I can think of and basically only serves to give any computer a hard coded expiration date. And thinness is not an excuse. There are computers as thin as the Air that have removable storage drives.
> But an SSD that's glued on to the motherboard has 0 benefits
It's because, since the T2 chip and going on with Apple Silicon, they're not SSDs in the NVMe sense. They're an Apple-specific technology derived from their Anobit acquisition, that only look like an NVMe device to the upper layers.
And the only viable mitigation strategies involve giving Apple more money.
Spec'ing a larger onboard SSD to spread out the writes for hopefully longer endurance should be effective.
And, perhaps, opting for more RAM to reduce VM writes to disk? I'm not sure if that's effective. Perhaps the resulting sleep file will be larger as well, resulting on more writes overall. I'm sure somebody can chime in on that?
At least the newer models have SD card slots; can use SD cards for semidurable storage. They are obviously unsuitable for some things, but fine for others.
"Thin" is also no longer a word I'd use to describe the current M1 Macbook Pros; they're significantly thicker and heavier than their Intel counterparts of old (bigger battery required to achieve that legendary battery life?)
I have both a 2019 Intel and 2022 M1, and the M1 is more than 0.5KG heavier and more than 0.7mm thicker.
I was surprised to realize they'd made the newer machines significantly thicker and heavier.
Both machines have their pros and cons, neither is perfect or terrible.
All specs are available here [0]. Even if you compare different sizes the 14" M1 is still just ~230g heavier than the 13" Intel. At the same size (13") the differences are what I put above. "More than 0.5kg" means almost half the weight of the laptop. You need a 16" M1 Pro to get there.
At 16" it would still put them at a barely noticeable 100g (at 2kg) and 0.6mm difference. Even after Apple rid itself of Ive's obsession with thinness they would never go for "significantly thicker and heavier" than the previous model in a portable device.
Can't really think of many (any?) laptops that have this mix of thin, light, high performance, and long battery life.
I agree, I'd prefer longer battery life, and better performance in a slight weight and thickness tradeoff.
Sadly, I've tried PC laptops (Surface tablet, Surface laptops and Asus laptops) and the performance (speed, thermals and battery life) are still nowhere near the Apple M1 hardware. I wish there was better price/performance from apple, but until the PC world has a strong contender, I don't see that happening.
At least Intel has strong competition from AMD now :)
> While I don't like it being that way, I can definitely see the benefits of non-upgradeable RAM. The performance of the SOC on my "lowly", entry-level M1 Air is out of this world.
It's not even clear that this has a performance benefit on typical workloads. At release the M1 was non-trivially faster than contemporaneous PC mobiles, but its competition was also using TSMC 7nm and DDR4.
Now we've seen Zen3+ mobiles on 6nm with DDR5 and upgradeable memory and they're about the same speed for nearly everything despite the M1 being on 5nm, which basically proves they didn't need to solder the RAM.
Less Physical Distance should create less latency, plus an optimized profile for one list of model of banks vs the diversity in the modula industry with different clock speeds and latencies.
Is there any actual evidence that this marginally lower latency makes any real life difference?
And why would the laptops suddenly ship with a variety of modules if they're replaceable? You can still ship it with the same modules in every laptop and get those benefits. And if someone upgrades it, that's still an improvement over no upgrade path, so this makes no sense to me.
> Is there any actual evidence that this marginally lower latency makes any real life difference?
Yes, compare the specs of DDR4 and DDR5 to LPDDR4X and LPDDR5X. The latter are significantly higher performance.
This is also the reason that Dell recently introduced CAMM memory modules -- it is an attempt to address the packaging bottleneck that is limiting the speed of DIMMs currently.
The amount of time that it takes a signal to go down a wire has been relevant for DRAM for a while now. If you look at the traces on the board of any relatively modern computer, you'll see some that take circuitous routes, for the purpose of having the signals arrive at the CPU at the same time. You can see this even on relatively low performance devices like a Raspberry Pi. https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Rasp...
> If you look at the traces on the board of any relatively modern computer, you'll see some that take circuitous routes, for the purpose of having the signals arrive at the CPU at the same time.
Having all the signals arrive at the same time isn't the same thing as having the signals arrive soon.
High bandwidth, low latency unified memory is a central component of the M series architecture and a key reason those chips perform so well at their power profile.
I'm not sure what "evidence" I could provide that would convince you since we don't have high latency Apple chips to benchmark against. However, there's a reason VRAM is soldered onto GPUs.
Soldered RAM doesn't really help much with latency; most of the DRAM latency ocurrs within the chip itself. Where soldering RAM does help is with reaching higher clock speeds with lower power (in phones and laptops), or with reaching clock speeds that are impossible to shove through a DIMM connector (GPUs).
That higher frequency helps phones save on pin count by using a narrow memory bus, and allows laptops to have lots of memory bandwidth to feed the integrated graphics when using typical laptop/desktop bus widths.
The 'iPhone Slowdown Thing' seems to be the 'McDonalds Frivolous Lawsuit" of the computer world. As in, misunderstood mainly for ideological reasons. What Apple did in response to aging batteries was perfectly sensible technically, what they failed to do was communicate it properly to the user.
What Apple did in response to aging batteries was perfectly sensible technically
Yep, and what would be even more sensible is allowing users to 'cap' the charge level the way Samsung has started to with a "charge only to 85%" ability. Don't just respond to aging batteries, allow steps to reduce aging.
> But, that goes against the upgrade sales process.
Have you considered your own bias? Apple automatically caps battery charging at 80% but it is algorithmically controlled instead of a manual toggle. I would like the manual target, too, but if your narrative were accurate they would not have implemented the feature to begin with.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't cap anything. It just waits an arbitrary amount of time before charging from 80% to 100%. Simply charging it in that range causes long-term battery wear.
> Yep, and what would be even more sensible is allowing users to 'cap' the charge level the way Samsung has started to with a "charge only to 85%" ability.
You can kinda do this with AOSP, but it's obnoxiously convoluted. You enable the adaptive charging feature, then set a silent alarm for 9:59, then set an alarm on something other than your phone so you can unplug your phone at 7:00 or so. (edit: or I guess you could get a smart outlet to cut power to your phone at 7:00)
The obsession with thinner phones and undersized batteries to allow that was the real issue, in my opinion. Looking at a comparison list[1] the 6s has about half the battery capacity of the iPhone 13, and is the smallest battery of the entire iPhone lineup for its screen / face size.
I would say call that tangential. Properly functioning batteries that are undersized are a battery life problem. A malfunctioning battery that cannot deliver enough current for the CPU at full power is a different problem. It could be argued that the smaller battery would degrade faster due to more cycles, but I don't recall whether there was general dissatisfaction with battery life on the 6S or not. I expect the battery on the 13 to be bigger because I assume (with no research, admittedly) that the SOC and screen both take a good bit more power than the equivalents on a 6S.
> Properly functioning batteries that are undersized are a battery life problem. A malfunctioning battery that cannot deliver enough current for the CPU at full power is a different problem.
These are the same problem. Nominal voltage lowers as batteries age, as does the ability to maintain a voltage under load. The batteries were "fine" for the first year. A larger battery would have been able to keep voltage under load at an acceptable level even as it aged.
> I expect the battery on the 13 to be bigger because I assume (with no research, admittedly) that the SOC and screen both take a good bit more power than the equivalents on a 6S.
And yet the 6 had a larger battery (same screen size). Personally I find the 6S (and 6) to be very thin. They could have easily been a couple mm larger without the consumer noticing (Apple could have made the camera lens flush!).
This is kind of a weird diss against a phone manufacturer that regularly releases OS updates for devices that are over 5 years old. Are there others that even come close? Google abandoned their first-party Pixel 3 about 3-4 years in. I'm not sure Samsung has done any better.
The SSD is soldered onto the motherboard on all new apple laptops and has been for years, there is no replacing it without the whole board. Which can be 70% of the cost of a new laptop.
Whatever ram and SSD config you buy when new is how it will be forever.
This is the exact reason I am currently very uncomfortable with the idea of a new Macbook Pro for my own business use.
On the one had it absolutely makes life a lot easier and all the software I need runs great on it. On the other I would by buying into a device I simply cannot upgrade or maintain myself. This makes me extremely uncomfortable.
I dont want to run Windows as a daily driver since it is really jarring for my personal workflow etc. Yet Linux lacks quite a few of the essential pieces of software I need outside of development. E.g. (Krisp.AI, Reincubate Camo etc)
For as often as I've had to upgrade a machine, or had a hardware failure, I'd just choose whatever works best for my daily workflow. An inconvenient fix that takes my computer out of service for a day while I run over to the Apple Store that only happens every few years at most is just not comparable to something that puts a drag on my workflow every single day.
I was a windows user and thought the same thing for awhile about switching to Linux. I was heavily dependent on Adobe products to create PDF Forms. Then I realized I could use a CRM solution to handle the from creation for me. I wrote about my experience in switching to Linux and so far it is work well for me: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...
Have you replaced SSD's because of failure or to upgrade? I personally have never seen an internal SSD fail. My 2018 MacBook Pro has had zero issues, and I still use a Samsung Evo 840 SSD from 2013 in one of my PCs.
I'm not agreeing with Apple soldering the SSD to the logic board. But they do seem to be significantly more reliable than hard drives.
Anecdotally, I did have a Samsung T5 go tits up on me not long ago. But that's an external drive. Not from physical abuse, either, it spent its life sitting on my desk.
I've never had any kind of problem with internal SSDs.
Usually to upgrade capacity, but I have had one personal SSD fail (I've used... 30? 35? in the last decade). It was an internal drive, 60 GB OCZ bought in 2012, failed in 2015.
Similar here - 256GB 830 Pro, lasted damn close to a decade and was in my desktop, then my sons and finally my daughters before it died. Very high writes as well - it was a great SSD.
I don’t mind having to have the SSD replaced by Apple if the cost is reasonable, just as I do with batteries, but would be good to know what to expect.