October 18th Apple Event - Unleashed - Apple Silicon, MacBook Pro upgrades, HomePod mini, AirPods 3rd Generation

[Paul Thexton]

Ahem.

 

What notch?  

 

 

Spoiler

 

[Lightwreather]

8 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

Ahem.

 

What notch?  

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Also, this is a thing now: https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/apple-macbook-pro-virtual-bezels

[Paul Thexton]

7 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Also, this is a thing now: https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/apple-macbook-pro-virtual-bezels

Yeah I saw that. I don't think I'll bother with that approach apart from individual apps that actually do need the setting turning on, off the top of my head I can't think of any of my regular usage apps that might need it.

 

My pic is literally just darkmode + non fullscreen wallpaper, with the background colour set to black and wallpaper mode set to fit to screen .

 

[Blademaster91]

17 hours ago, hishnash said:

Given that the last think you want to do is put a single point of pressure on a swelling battery (or even when the device is dropped) the challenge with screws is how you use them to retain the battery without creating a non-uniform point of pressure and thus risking a battery fire.  

You can put the entire battery in a rigid case, this reduces the volume by quite a bit.

You could try to retain it using a brace bar across the battery but this does result in a localised pressure long the edge of that brace as the battery expands. (remember most many will not bother replacing it haver ears it is to replace).  
 

If these strips are like the phones then if they break you can still remove them with height + cleaning alcohol.  

 

 

 

That isn't an issue with HP,Dell, or Lenovo laptops i've seen that use a plastic tab to hold down the battery, or the battery has a plastic frame with screw holes.

Also I'd much prefer screws over having to pry the battery out if the pull strips fail.

1 hour ago, hishnash said:

Would massively reduce battery size, your talking less than 50% the capacity.  
 

You can be agree but iOS users tend to keep their phones and use them for much longer than android phones. Turns out it is cheap and easy to get a older phones battery replaced almost anywhere in the world. Unless you make the capacity extremely small there would be no good reason for this to be easily user-replaceable the tradeoffs for day to day use are just way to high. And it would also be a nightmare to keep water tight leading to many many more failing phones (water damage is what kills most electronics). 

A removable battery doesn't reduce the battery size enough to be noticeable, for example see the Fairphone 4 , it has a battery capacity very similar to a Pixel 5.

Also not everyone has access to a first party store, and those stores charge at least $60 to replace a $20-30 battery. Most people know the battery is glued in so they just replace their phone more often, if the battery was more accessible a phone would last a lot longer. I don't see water resistance being an issue, the Samsung galaxy S5 was IP67 and the back cover was removable.

[Paul Thexton]

On 10/28/2021 at 3:35 PM, Paul Thexton said:

 

And another 

 

 

[saltycaramel]

If someone is not sure whether he/she needs the Max or the Pro, I suggest watching today’s reviews by The Verge and WSJ.

 

The 16” M1 Pro is the real all-day battery life dream come true.

The 16” M1 Max (while still excellent for its segment) pays a sizeable battery life price for that ginormous 57B transistors chip even when the GPU is idle. 

 

Don’t make the mistake of going for the Max if you’re not sure you need it. Go for the Pro and configure the RAM to 32GB if needed. (no 64GB tho) 

[saltycaramel]

 

6:10 - isn’t the display cable something Louis Rossman would complain about? looks like they fixed it

[BondiBlue]

11 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

6:10 - isn’t the display cable someone Louis Rossman would complain about? looks like they fixed it

The display cable issue is one that MANY people have complained about. It was a real issue, especially on earlier butterfly MacBooks, such as the 2016 and 2017 models. Aside from keyboard failure the one worry I have about my 2017 13" MBP is the display cable, especially since my model isn't covered by any extended service programs. 

[saltycaramel]

I like that for the future the guys at iFixit say they are open-minded to the idea of not penalizing high performance fully soldered unified memory computers for soldered RAM and soldered flash modules. That’s definitely different from r2r “purists” who refuse to see the advantages of some integrated solutions and fail to explain why some things are acceptable on smartphone/tablets but not laptops. 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, saltycaramel said:

I like that for the future the guys at iFixit say they are open-minded to the idea of not penalizing high performance fully soldered unified memory computers for soldered RAM and soldered flash modules. That’s definitely different from r2r “purists” who refuse to see the advantages of some integrated solutions and fail to explain why some things are acceptable on smartphone/tablets but not laptops. 

 

To a certain extent, you need to have a very high value-added reason to accept a soldered-in or integrated SoC logic block over an expansion-card.

 

For example:

8088, 8086, 80286 and 80386 motherboards did not integrate the Super I/O , Hard drive, or Floppy Drive controllers, because at the time, all of these things were in flux. As of the 486, PCI motherboards integrated the Super-I/O into the motherboard, and VL-Bus still had the Super-I/O on a VL-bus expansion card.  L1 cache got integrated into the CPU.

With the Pentium, Pentium II, and Pentium III, the Super-I/O completely disappeared, and now Ethernet, USB and Sound cards were being integrated on the ATX platform. Likewise L2 cache got integrated into the chip package between the Pentium and Pentium II

 

With the Pentium 4, Ethernet, Firewire, USB, Sound, Super-I/O, Hard drive, Floppy Drive, IrDA had all been integrated, and now iGPU's started being integrated into the south bridge. However unlike previous expansion card integrations, the GPU's were always outpacing the capability of functionality to be integrated into the south bridge (which was still the memory controller until the Core-series) 

 

All that's changed since the Pentium 4 is advances in USB, Firewire being swapped with Thunderbolt, and the older AC97 (which was a PCI device) replaced with "HD Audio" (which is PCIe), very little has changed with onboard audio or onboard ethernet since 1999. In fact we've actually lost features with audio, as MIDI functionality has been lost.

 

Video cards and Sound cards at one time had expandable memory, GPU's stopped having expandable memory once GDDR became a thing. Sound cards got integrated into chipsets and thus the RAM expansion for the MIDI wavetable was thrown away.

 

At no point has any CPU chip integrated the RAM unless it was a micro-controller designed for robotics/embedded systems. So you pay a very high price for integrated RAM or integrated storage in that the SoC becomes unsalvageable. Now in a laptop situation, you might accept soldered RAM or soldered SSD for an increase in durability, but any argument to the tune of "it makes it thinner" or "it makes it lighter" is not a viable excuse, especially when a socketed M2 or RAM is no higher than the rest of the parts on the PCB. A socketed CPU, yes, does make the PCB significantly taller.

 

Which is why there's only three ways for Apple to go to make "right to repair" a thing again for it's devices:

- Make the entire SoC replaceable, at a the cost of height

- Make a double-sided LGA "socket" that goes between the RAM and the CPU, which would make the RAM replaceable, though that would also require an innovation in RAM just for this design. This would cost more height than SO-DIMM's

- Return to SO-DIMM's at the cost of memory bandwidth.

 

Now I do want to make a point here. Perhaps there is a way to "have our cake and eat it" if any GPU vendor wants to play ball. Either make the RAM socketed, or make the GPU chip itself socketed, and let the AIB design the board and cooling around those parts being replacable on the high end models (Eg RTX 3070Ti/3080/3080Ti/3090) instead of selling six variations of cooling/overclocking models. This would give more life to those parts.

 

With Apple, I feel, at least with something like a MacMini/MacPro, would permit the creation of a socketed SoC/Socketed RAM on top of the SOC which would also solve the potential problem of having too many SKU's for otherwise identical configurations. It's not like Apple is BYO'ing iphone and macbook configurations.

 

[hishnash]

12 hours ago, mr moose said:

Doesn't have too, and certainly not by 50%.   We are literally only talking about a plastic case 1mm in thickness. 

Quote

The issue with putting  battery in a solid case is that it is a solid case, for current generation of batteries we have this means that there is no expansion options fo rate battery so when it starts to swell (it will) the chances of it catching fire are much higher! so yes the case might be only 1mm thick on each side (so 2mm) but you then also need to add extra space within the case for the battery to expand into. Most users will not replace it however easy it is to replace and you cant risk there being fires started with your device even if the device warns the user to replace the battery.

So your likely going to take another few mm of the battery size to ensure it has expansion room within the plastic housing. 
 

[saltycaramel]

9 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

To a certain extent, you need to have a very high value-added reason to accept a soldered-in or integrated SoC logic block over an expansion-card.

 

For example:

8088, 8086, 80286 and 80386 motherboards did not integrate the Super I/O , Hard drive, or Floppy Drive controllers, because at the time, all of these things were in flux. As of the 486, PCI motherboards integrated the Super-I/O into the motherboard, and VL-Bus still had the Super-I/O on a VL-bus expansion card.  L1 cache got integrated into the CPU.

With the Pentium, Pentium II, and Pentium III, the Super-I/O completely disappeared, and now Ethernet, USB and Sound cards were being integrated on the ATX platform. Likewise L2 cache got integrated into the chip package between the Pentium and Pentium II

 

With the Pentium 4, Ethernet, Firewire, USB, Sound, Super-I/O, Hard drive, Floppy Drive, IrDA had all been integrated, and now iGPU's started being integrated into the south bridge. However unlike previous expansion card integrations, the GPU's were always outpacing the capability of functionality to be integrated into the south bridge (which was still the memory controller until the Core-series) 

 

All that's changed since the Pentium 4 is advances in USB, Firewire being swapped with Thunderbolt, and the older AC97 (which was a PCI device) replaced with "HD Audio" (which is PCIe), very little has changed with onboard audio or onboard ethernet since 1999. In fact we've actually lost features with audio, as MIDI functionality has been lost.

 

Video cards and Sound cards at one time had expandable memory, GPU's stopped having expandable memory once GDDR became a thing. Sound cards got integrated into chipsets and thus the RAM expansion for the MIDI wavetable was thrown away.

 

At no point has any CPU chip integrated the RAM unless it was a micro-controller designed for robotics/embedded systems. So you pay a very high price for integrated RAM or integrated storage in that the SoC becomes unsalvageable. Now in a laptop situation, you might accept soldered RAM or soldered SSD for an increase in durability, but any argument to the tune of "it makes it thinner" or "it makes it lighter" is not a viable excuse, especially when a socketed M2 or RAM is no higher than the rest of the parts on the PCB. A socketed CPU, yes, does make the PCB significantly taller.

 

Which is why there's only three ways for Apple to go to make "right to repair" a thing again for it's devices:

- Make the entire SoC replaceable, at a the cost of height

- Make a double-sided LGA "socket" that goes between the RAM and the CPU, which would make the RAM replaceable, though that would also require an innovation in RAM just for this design. This would cost more height than SO-DIMM's

- Return to SO-DIMM's at the cost of memory bandwidth.

 

Now I do want to make a point here. Perhaps there is a way to "have our cake and eat it" if any GPU vendor wants to play ball. Either make the RAM socketed, or make the GPU chip itself socketed, and let the AIB design the board and cooling around those parts being replacable on the high end models (Eg RTX 3070Ti/3080/3080Ti/3090) instead of selling six variations of cooling/overclocking models. This would give more life to those parts.

 

With Apple, I feel, at least with something like a MacMini/MacPro, would permit the creation of a socketed SoC/Socketed RAM on top of the SOC which would also solve the potential problem of having too many SKU's for otherwise identical configurations. It's not like Apple is BYO'ing iphone and macbook configurations.

 

 

I have 5 questions

1) What % of laptops in the wild get their RAM upgraded during the machine’s lifetime?

2) What % of laptops in the wild get their SSD upgraded during the machine’s lifetime?

3) Why MXM GPUs never took off?

4) I look at that “owl-shaped” motherboard in the MBPs and I’m not sure I see much X/Y-space for RAM sticks and SSD sticks (plus SSD would need to be pricey proprietary controller-less flash sticks anyway, ‘cause the fast controller is in the M1 or in the T2 since 2016, so we wouldn’t get the convenience of buying an off the shelf m.2 ssd on Black Friday anyway), not just Z-space as you mention; the owl-shape allows for superb cooling and out of this world (for a laptop) speakers, are we sure that space would be better used for sockets?

5) Why does Sony force PS5 users to become SSD geeks reading excel spreadsheets on reddit to pick compatible fast enough SSDs? Is this really the way? What if Apple bundles their SSD to guarantee that kind of baseline speed?

 

Once we answer these, we can ponder about design trade-offs. 

 

One thing I would ask Apple: soldering more chips to those pre-wired BGA patches on the motherboard looks trivially doable for them, wouldn’t it be cool if they offered a pick-up service to take the laptop and upgrade it themselves in a couple of days/weeks? Pretty sure some mom&pop shops in Asia are already doing it for iPhones. Fact is, if there was the possibility of upgrading after the fact, customers wouldn’t be upsold into buying bigger SSDs right away. That’s the Stockholm syndrome we’re living in, but hey they make great products. 

[hishnash]

23 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

4) I look at that “owl-shaped” motherboard in the MBPs and I’m not sure I see much X/Y-space for RAM sticks

 

Lets be clear there is no such thing as socketed LPDDR5 and if you wanted to get the same bandwidth with regular DDR5 dims that would draw a LOT of power (we are talking about the memory subsystem drawing more power than 2 to 4 of the high perfomance cpu cores running at full speed)

Also just because the memory dies are soldered does not mean they cant be upgraded later! yes you personal cant upgrade them but any skilled board level reapir show should not have much issue with the BGA standard off the shelf LPDDR5 memory dies that in a few years will be cheep as chips as you will be able to extract them from dead phones or even buy new easily (buying them wright now of course is costly since it is top of the line).

When it comes to SSD the key thing to remember again is power draw, a NVMe SSD that has the same perfomance as the solution apple have opted for would draw a LOT more power, apples SSD controller is intreated into their 5nm SoC and they are using the existing LPDDR5 memory as the cache for the SSD with he NAND chips connected directly to the SSD. If you go with NVMe to get that perofmance your will be running a few lanes of PCIe gen 4 flat out this is not only power draw in the SoC but also for the NAND controller die on the SoC (not build on the current 5nm node more like 14nm or 22nm) and powering another memory die (also not going to be as low power as the LPDDR5). Like the memory you can replace the NAND dies as well and apple even provide the software needed to re-set the SSD controller (something you cant say for most SSD manufactures).

in a laptop expirance you want to reduce the power draw of all of these parts as much as possible so as to provide the SoC the most power it can to get the best perfomance for a give battery/thermal solution.  

 

[mr moose]

9 hours ago, hishnash said:

The issue with putting  battery in a solid case is that it is a solid case, for current generation of batteries we have this means that there is no expansion options fo rate battery so when it starts to swell (it will) the chances of it catching fire are much higher! so yes the case might be only 1mm thick on each side (so 2mm) but you then also need to add extra space within the case for the battery to expand into. Most users will not replace it however easy it is to replace and you cant risk there being fires started with your device even if the device warns the user to replace the battery.

So your likely going to take another few mm of the battery size to ensure it has expansion room within the plastic housing. 
 

That's not really true at all. 

 

 

 

There are literally 100's of millions of these batteries in grossly substandard packaging all over the world.  Hardly any fires and many of the packages are not only removable but are sent through normal post to buyers without protection. 

 

Battery tech has not changed that much over the last 10 years, they are just as prone to swelling and explosion as they ever were.  If they could make them removable 5 years ago they can do it today.

 

If owners put the battery into their phone when they buy it, then they know straight up how to replace it when it degrades.  And they will,  if you think majority of the market is going to throw out a perfectly good phone instead of easily replacing the battery then you are being incredibly disingenuous about it.  No one is risking a fire by changing the battery in this way,   in fact you are much more likely to break the battery and cause a fire removing one that is glued in.

 

Stop believing the BS apple tell you about why you have to have glued in batteries,  it's all lies to make people buy more phones (either through replacement or to be trendy with their 0.005mm thinner device), it has nothing to do with fire hazard or engineering.

 

 

 

 

 

[saltycaramel]

Good thing these laptops will have a better battery life at end-of-life than x86 laptops at beginning-of-life  

 

Apple: comes up with power-sipping silicon to give batteries the best chance to shine and give  the user excellent battery life throughout the machine’s lifetime

 

Bashers: but you have to pull adhesive tabs! they may even break!

[mr moose]

21 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

Good thing these laptops will have a better battery life at end-of-life than x86 laptops at beginning-of-life  

 

Apple: comes up with power-sipping silicon to give batteries the best chance to shine and give  the user excellent battery life throughout the machine’s lifetime

 

Bashers: but you have to pull adhesive tabs! they may even break!

 

It doesn't matter how good the device is at being power efficient (either on it's own or compared to any other device), it's about extending the life of the device through serviceable parts and not being a dick with consumers.  Everyone had a massive shit dump on MS for doing it with the surface (and rightly so) and they are now doing the same with Apple.   If the battery lasts 5 years in this device, then having the battery being user replaceable will mean it can last 10 years.

 

Glued in batteries are a BIG PROBLEM because when the device does reaches the end of it's serviceable life (be that battery death or becoming obsolete) it needs to be able to be recycled,  and if a recycler has to put man hours into disassembly then the viability of recycling goes out the window and the device becomes fucking landfill.  

 

 

The biggest load of horse shit many people have swallowed is the idea that a laptop or phone has to be replaced when the battery dies (and if you think apple aren't sending that messages to consumers then you are delusional). 

[Blademaster91]

47 minutes ago, mr moose said:

That's not really true at all. 

 

 

 

There are literally 100's of millions of these batteries in grossly substandard packaging all over the world.  Hardly any fires and many of the packages are not only removable but are sent through normal post to buyers without protection. 

 

Battery tech has not changed that much over the last 10 years, they are just as prone to swelling and explosion as they ever were.  If they could make them removable 5 years ago they can do it today.

 

If owners put the battery into their phone when they buy it, then they know straight up how to replace it when it degrades.  And they will,  if you think majority of the market is going to throw out a perfectly good phone instead of easily replacing the battery then you are being incredibly disingenuous about it.  No one is risking a fire by changing the battery in this way,   in fact you are much more likely to break the battery and cause a fire removing one that is glued in.

 

Stop believing the BS apple tell you about why you have to have glued in batteries,  it's all lies to make people buy more phones (either through replacement or to be trendy with their 0.005mm thinner device), it has nothing to do with fire hazard or engineering.

 

 

 

 

 

I've gotten battery banks in the mail that were only packed in a padded envelope, if retailers can do this then batteries aren't seriously prone to fires or explosions.

But yeah the scare tactics companies use like battery fires, needing to glue in batteries and use water resistance as an excuse is a bunch of BS to make everyone replace their device sooner.  The annoying thing is people actually believe it, and the nonsense companies put out that they care about the environment, even though the best thing you can do is make a laptop or phone last longer, recycling should only be used when a device isn't worth fixing.

2 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

I have 5 questions

1) What % of laptops in the wild get their RAM upgraded during the machine’s lifetime?

2) What % of laptops in the wild get their SSD upgraded during the machine’s lifetime?

3) Why MXM GPUs never took off?

4) I look at that “owl-shaped” motherboard in the MBPs and I’m not sure I see much X/Y-space for RAM sticks and SSD sticks (plus SSD would need to be pricey proprietary controller-less flash sticks anyway, ‘cause the fast controller is in the M1 or in the T2 since 2016, so we wouldn’t get the convenience of buying an off the shelf m.2 ssd on Black Friday anyway), not just Z-space as you mention; the owl-shape allows for superb cooling and out of this world (for a laptop) speakers, are we sure that space would be better used for sockets?

5) Why does Sony force PS5 users to become SSD geeks reading excel spreadsheets on reddit to pick compatible fast enough SSDs? Is this really the way? What if Apple bundles their SSD to guarantee that kind of baseline speed?

1. It was actually pretty common, electronics stores used to offer RAM upgrade services for laptops.

2. Replaceable storage should always be an option, especially if the laptop breaks for whatever reason and the user doesn't want to send the SSD in with the laptop for repair.

3.  MXM GPU's were expensive, and companies probably want to cut cost by not using a MXM slot, and not having to design a cooling system around having a replaceable GPU.

4.  There is empty space on the 14" macbook pro, and a M.2 2230 SSD doesn't take much room at all.

5. Consoles have to be built to a cost, adding in a pci-e 4.0 SSD would raise the cost by a lot, and it isn't difficult to upgrade the SSD in the PS5.

2 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

One thing I would ask Apple: soldering more chips to those pre-wired BGA patches on the motherboard looks trivially doable for them, wouldn’t it be cool if they offered a pick-up service to take the laptop and upgrade it themselves in a couple of days/weeks?

Well it's apple, I doubt they'd offer anything like that, I mean they turn away plenty of customers from repair, so it would be unlikely they would offer any BGA soldering upgrade service, and apple would rather you buy another laptop.

12 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

Bashers: but you have to pull adhesive tabs! they may even break!

I guess iFixit are just bashers then since they mention pull tabs breaking.

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, Blademaster91 said:

The annoying thing is people actually believe it, and the nonsense companies put out that they care about the environment, even though the best thing you can do is make

Amen to that,  the closest thing these companies care about the environment is the PR they get from virtue signalling.   A device that can have it's battery replaced should last twice as long,  meaning half the number of devices even needing to be recycled let alone in landfill because design principals make recycling much harder.

 

1 minute ago, Blademaster91 said:

I guess iFixit are just bashers then since they mention pull tabs breaking.

Anyone with half a critical thought who cares about the environment must be a basher.

[saltycaramel]

Apple: makes products that have speed/power in excess (i.e. will feel fast for many years), battery life in excess (i.e. will feel adequate even after a -50% down the road), years of software support in excess (OS updates), that people regularly keep for many years (there are 10yo iPads nowadays being still used) and even after that change hands many times (much bigger secondary market than the competition, there’s data backing it up, unlike the “opinions” I’ve read above about ram/ssd upgrades commonness in the general population and even in the professional population) before ending in a dump or into Apple’s recycling program 

 

Bashers: but the environment 

 

 

Thank you Apple for coming up with a way to make current battery tech shine by doing more with what we have  forever grateful  

Just canceled my 16” M1 Max order and made a new order for a 16” M1 Pro: I want it all. All the battery life. Others prefer worse products that are somewhat easier to service (because apparently unscrewing 4 security screws per battery piece would be so less labor-intensive than pulling some adhesive tabs and getting good enough at it to avoid breaking them routinely). To each his own.

[HenrySalayne]

10 hours ago, hishnash said:

The issue with putting  battery in a solid case is that it is a solid case, for current generation of batteries we have this means that there is no expansion options fo rate battery so when it starts to swell (it will) the chances of it catching fire are much higher!

If you don't put spikes on the inside of your case facing the battery, you will be fine. It's literally impossible to build a laptop-sized case with the rigidity to withstand a bloating battery without bulging (turning it into a fire hazard or "explosive device").

 

16 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

Don’t make the mistake of going for the Max if you’re not sure you need it. Go for the Pro and configure the RAM to 32GB if needed. (no 64GB tho) 

The Max not only allows you to get more RAM altogether but also doubles the memory bandwidth.So it will impact the CPU performance as well.

And I'm not sure about if the difference in battery life measured by The Verge. It is (more or less) exactly the difference in transistor count of the SoC. But stuff like the display, (flash) memory and external components should add a substantial "base load". I'm not really sure why the Max SoC is drawing more power than the transistor count would suggest compared to the Pro SoC. Maybe there is still some software optimization for the Max left or maybe the silicon is a bad design. On x86 machines we see only negligible differences in battery life for different sized dedicated GPUs. On light workloads only the iGPU is active so the additional silicon real estate is just doing nothing. This doesn't apply to the M1 (because the iGPU is the main GPU of the system) but I still think with an aggressive power management additional cores should decrease the power draw per core and not increase it.

14 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

That’s definitely different from r2r “purists” who refuse to see the advantages of some integrated solutions and fail to explain why some things are acceptable on smartphone/tablets but not laptops. 

M.2 drives would be quite hard to fit into a phone. But if you reach something in the neighbourhood of 10 inches of display size, there is always enough space to fit an M.2.  (and Microsoft proved that with their newer Surface Pro).

The same applies to crappy webcams ("we cannot fit a decent webcam in this device because of the thin bezel" - spare me the lame excuse if every phone nowadays can do it with bezels well below 8 mm).

The level of integration on phones is a necessity, on larger devices it is a choice.

[mr moose]

32 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

Apple: makes products that have speed/power in excess (i.e. will feel fast for many years), battery life in excess (i.e. will feel adequate even after a -50% down the road), years of software support in excess (OS updates), that people regularly keep for many years (there are 10yo iPads nowadays being still used) and even after that change hands many times (much bigger secondary market than the competition, there’s data backing it up, unlike the “opinions” I’ve read above about ram/ssd upgrades commonness in the general population and even in the professional population) before ending in a dump or into Apple’s recycling program 

 

Bashers: but the environment 

 

 

Thank you Apple for coming up with a way to make current battery tech shine by doing more with what we have  forever grateful  

Just canceled my 16” M1 Max order and made a new order for a 16” M1 Pro: I want it all. All the battery life. Others prefer worse products that are somewhat easier to service (because apparently unscrewing 4 security screws per battery piece would be so less labor-intensive than pulling some adhesive tabs and getting good enough at it to avoid breaking them routinely). To each his own.

 

Making something serviceable does not mean it has to be worse.  Apple just wants you to believe that so you won't repair it.

 

 

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

 

I have 5 questions

1) What % of laptops in the wild get their RAM upgraded during the machine’s lifetime?

It used to be a thing, and I've upgraded all but one laptop I've ever owned to the maximum capacity

4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

2) What % of laptops in the wild get their SSD upgraded during the machine’s lifetime?

None, because they (256, 512, 1TB SSD's) outlast the typical laptop. unless you have dropbox/onedrive/google drive, and then those background processes will fill up the drive blindly.

4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

3) Why MXM GPUs never took off?

They took off, they just were not the right trade-off. To have a MXM GPU you need a laptop the thickness of a phonebook /s

4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

4) I look at that “owl-shaped” motherboard in the MBPs and I’m not sure I see much X/Y-space for RAM sticks and SSD sticks (plus SSD would need to be pricey proprietary controller-less flash sticks anyway, ‘cause the fast controller is in the M1 or in the T2 since 2016, so we wouldn’t get the convenience of buying an off the shelf m.2 ssd on Black Friday anyway), not just Z-space as you mention; the owl-shape allows for superb cooling and out of this world (for a laptop) speakers, are we sure that space would be better used for sockets?

There is no reason why any laptop has to be designed to min-max everything. Apple, Dell, HP, have min-maxed their laptops in certain ways both today and before, and it results in high numbers of repairs being sent back under warranty. Like with Dell and HP, they learned, and put the "DC in" jack on a tiny replacable PCB, because people break them. 

 

There is no viable reason to make a SSD or RAM soldered to anything other than the OEM pinching pennies. "thinner" is not an excuse, and neither is "higher performance", you absolutely could find a solution, you (as the OEM) just don't want to, because it's in your best interests to sell more product. It is however in your best interests to make BYO options available because that means you can make more identical units and have the store/retail end make the final upgrade without needing to to commit to the "auto dealership" model where the dealership is forced to sell whatever the manufacturer sends them, even if the color/option/trims are unsellable, the dealership will put in after-market features if you absolutely want them. 

 

That's the problem with soldering everything to the board, the OEM saves maybe a $1 on BOM, but makes servicing it 100x more expensive. If you want to see a rapid reversal in this soldered-everything, start lobbying your politicians for the right-to-repair and much longer (eg 10 year) warranties.

4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

 

5) Why does Sony force PS5 users to become SSD geeks reading excel spreadsheets on reddit to pick compatible fast enough SSDs? Is this really the way? What if Apple bundles their SSD to guarantee that kind of baseline speed?

Sony doesn't care what SSD you put in the PS5. You do. Which means you need a SSD that actually has PCIe 4 speeds, contrary to people on this forum asserting that any old SATA SSD is more than viable to play games on.

 

5500MB/s is "recommended", which we know in computer-lingo to mean "required, if you don't want to suffer"

 

4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

Once we answer these, we can ponder about design trade-offs. 

 

One thing I would ask Apple: soldering more chips to those pre-wired BGA patches on the motherboard looks trivially doable for them, wouldn’t it be cool if they offered a pick-up service to take the laptop and upgrade it themselves in a couple of days/weeks? Pretty sure some mom&pop shops in Asia are already doing it for iPhones. Fact is, if there was the possibility of upgrading after the fact, customers wouldn’t be upsold into buying bigger SSDs right away. That’s the Stockholm syndrome we’re living in, but hey they make great products. 

Honestly, Apple can figure out a way to make a SOC with a socket on top to put the RAM on if they wanted to, there's just been nobody asking for it. It's not so much I care about Apple specifically doing this, rather I care that Intel and AMD might follow suit on their mobile SKU's and make laptops even more disposable, and then bring it to the desktop.

 

SSD's I especially hate being soldered, because, even though they may be reliable enough to do so, it makes it impossible to move the drive to another machine if the board is damaged/fails. At least if the RAM fails when soldered on, you in theory can send it to the OEM to have them repair or replace it, but when the SSD is also soldered, you data goes bye-bye. See Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Wii U, Nintendo Wii, and various other devices like PDA's and Smartphones where the storage was effectively lost when the device was damaged and the OEM replaced it with a refurbished one. Just put these in any kind of socket and stop trying to pinch so many pennies.

 

Back in the 80's and 90's, seemingly every card had removable chips all over it, that changed around the time of AGP video cards. 

[saltycaramel]

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

If you don't put spikes on the inside of your case facing the battery, you will be fine. It's literally impossible to build a laptop-sized case with the rigidity to withstand a bloating battery without bulging (turning it into a fire hazard or "explosive device").

 

The Max not only allows you to get more RAM altogether but also doubles the memory bandwidth.So it will impact the CPU performance as well.

And I'm not sure about if the difference in battery life measured by The Verge. It is (more or less) exactly the difference in transistor count of the SoC. But stuff like the display, (flash) memory and external components should add a substantial "base load". I'm not really sure why the Max SoC is drawing more power than the transistor count would suggest compared to the Pro SoC. Maybe there is still some software optimization for the Max left or maybe the silicon is a bad design. On x86 machines we see only negligible differences in battery life for different sized dedicated GPUs. On light workloads only the iGPU is active so the additional silicon real estate is just doing nothing. This doesn't apply to the M1 (because the iGPU is the main GPU of the system) but I still think with an aggressive power management additional cores should decrease the power draw per core and not increase it.

M.2 drives would be quite hard to fit into a phone. But if you reach something in the neighbourhood of 10 inches of display size, there is always enough space to fit an M.2.  (and Microsoft proved that with their newer Surface Pro).

The same applies to crappy webcams ("we cannot fit a decent webcam in this device because of the thin bezel" - spare me the lame excuse if every phone nowadays can do it with bezels well below 8 mm).

The level of integration on phones is a necessity, on larger devices it is a choice.

 

1) Anandtech said that even with 400GB/s RAM the CPU alone would top (using all cores, including e-cores) at 243GB/s anyway, that’s not worth it compared to 200GB/s if one isn’t doing GPU-based workloads

 

2) Yeah The Verge’s test is pretty unscientific, it’s pretty annoying that they made such a big claim (both in video and in the written review, where they also confirmed directly with Apple that the Max draws more power at idle but not how much) based on different (undocumented) usage by two different people; that said, while the difference found by The Verge sounds a bit too much, there’s no doubt that the M1 Pro is the battery life champion and people shouldn’t buy the Max if they’re not gonna use the GPU at its fullest

 

3) Android/iPad tablets and smart TVs are pretty large, why can’t I upgrade the main boot storage and the RAM?

 

4) phones have waaaay more Z-space for webcams than laptop lids because they’re thicker than any laptop lid

[Obioban]

Is there a product category Apple plays in where their products don’t have the longest average service life? 

[saltycaramel]

4 hours ago, mr moose said:

 

Making something serviceable does not mean it has to be worse.  Apple just wants you to believe that so you won't repair it.

 

 

 

Never said it’s worse because it’s serviceable.

 

It just happens to be “worse” AND more serviceable. 

 

Like, of course a very serviceable x86 laptop (without on package very-fast low-power LPDDR5 unified memory, without the SSD controller being a first class citizen on the main die and with potential for CPU-like year-over-year speed bumps, without the flash storage baseline speed being guaranteed by the laptop maker picking the flash modules besides creating and fine-tuning the controller, without everything that’s on package being pretty close to each other which as we know generally is a good thing, etc.) could be proven (for many usages, scenarios and most people) to be worse (or to say it better: NOT WORSE IN GENERAL, just built with different priorities, priorities that just happen to make it worse for most people) IF it does less work while using more battery juice than an M1 Pro MBP or an M1 MBA. 

 

Even iFixit is kinda beginning to admit that there may be some correlation there. I loved the humility in their approach. “We still can’t say for sure”. They don’t have all the answers and they don’t automatically think they’re better than Apple’s engineers. The hearts of one thousand anti-integration r2r integralists when they said that maybe on such products soldered RAM and soldered flash modules shouldn’t be penalized in the score: