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

[leadeater]

49 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

And 10+ years into SSDs being mainstream, we’re not witnessing an epidemic of dying SSDs, both of the soldered and the non-soldered type. 

It doesn't have to be an epidemic to be a problem, at least 2 MacBook Pros at work had storage failures, I know this because I had to restore the data backups for the devices back on to them after they had mainboard replacements.

 

Neither am I demanding any particular length of time at all, just an illustration of how easy it is to keep a device going if parts can be replace easily and the more that can be the more likely you can keep the device functional.

 

37 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

The ship of (user-) servicing RAM and boot storage has sailed.

Why? Because some devices do it yet have no or limited benefit to it at all. SoC + DRAM yes there are technical advantages however that does not detract from the issue of late life ram upgrades no longer being an option.

 

Far as soldered NAND storage, no benefit there at all. It takes just as much space in the device to offer an M.2 slot and a screw down point as it does to solder the NAND directly.

 

Just because a brand you like is doing something doesn't make it a good idea or of benefit to you, you can either be objective and assess each particular thing for it's merits alone or your can be subjective and like the brand and their products. A subjective assessment is not equivalent to an objective assessment.

 

37 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

There we no pitchforks when it happened to smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, etc.

Because it was never a thing on phones other than batteries and 100% there was a massive amount of complaining when easy access swappable batteries went away. History is not as you recall it.

[saltycaramel]

However we square it, the most successful personal computer in the world (the smartphone) has lived and is living an happy life with no upgradeable RAM and no upgradeable boot storage. 

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

That's really cool. I guess the death of that Laptop is going to ultimately be determined by the life time (for security updates) of Windows 10, given that Windows 11 requires TPM?

 

Unless your sister runs / starts running Linux of course.

Yea, but it is rather slow so we're looking to replace it early next year. Will be an ex-lease laptop, sort of like this one was other than it was my mothers laptop originally. It's pretty hard to beat a grade A refurbished laptop that comes with a new battery cost wise, sure it might only be an Intel 4th-8th Gen laptop but it'll come with a 60Wh+ battery, 8GB ram and a 256/512GB SSD so it'll be soooo much faster than the current one.

 

It'll probably be a Lenovo T440-T460 or an HP 840 G1-G3.

[leadeater]

11 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

However we square it, the most successful personal computer in the world (the smartphone) has lived and is living an happy life with no upgradeable RAM and no upgradeable boot storage. 

Well then the next time you need to use a computer only ever use your phone, when a phone is able to service every single need you have then laptops will both no longer need or would be desired to have upgradable storage or even exist at all.

 

It makes no difference how you want to twist, dress it up, paint over it, simply having an M.2 slot has no real downsides in the same way not having it has no real up sides. It doesn't matter what phones do, phones aren't laptops and vice versa.

 

Edit:

Also an M.2 could actually be more space efficient as traces or SMDs could go under the M.2. Placing everything on a physical 2D plane is less space efficient than utilizing 3D space.

[saltycaramel]

11 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Well then the next time you need to use a computer only ever use your phone,

I just spent an embarrassing amount of money on a laptop based on a glorified phone SoC, so..

[saltycaramel]

25 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Why?

 

Boot storage deserves to be super fast, super secure, getting MooreLaw-like yearly speed refreshes, getting an ever-raising baseline performance guaranteed by the OEM of the laptop. 

 

RAM deserves to be super fast, low power, with a super wide bus, unified to democraticize access to big VRAM. 

 

Once one or two OEMs do this, it’ll be hard to convince consumers to get the old way of doing things, if the advantages can be felt in daily usage. (speaking of which, life is short, maybe a refurbished M1 Air would better serve your sister..)

[leadeater]

38 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

Boot storage deserves to be super fast, super secure, getting MooreLaw-like yearly speed refreshes, getting an ever-raising baseline performance guaranteed by the OEM of the laptop. 

Not exclusive to soldered NAND so irrelevant.

 

38 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

RAM deserves to be super fast, low power, with a super wide bus, unified to democraticize access to big VRAM. 

To a degree sure however a single SoC is going to be more power constrained than a CPU and GPU package separately and technology already exists to allow these to share the same physical memory.

 

You're still making the critical mistake over attributing what is currently the most power efficient and performant laptops on the market to having the best design in every component inside it which is not true. Also such a position is dangerously close to saying these devices are already perfect and there is no way to improve them so innovation will now cease in laptops.

 

46 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

I just spent an embarrassing amount of money on a laptop based on a glorified phone SoC, so..

The SoC in the device does not define what the device is

 

Ultimately the primary issue here is that a good product does not mean in every aspect it is of the best design or done in the best way possible. A product can be the best product on the market while also having flaws or design choices which aren't a necessity. Criticism and critique  is one of the most important processes to improving products, it's a good idea to learn to be accepting of it for products you like, it doesn't actually make them worse than what they are. A game doesn't or shouldn't be less enjoyable to you to play because some reviewer only gave it 6/10 and you believe it to be a 9/10.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, saltycaramel said:

 

Apple will happily repair it for an hefty price (or a small price if you pay them for their AppleCare+ insurance, which now in the recurring form can go on indefinitely).

 

Pay for the repair (or pay for AppleCare+), don’t be a cheapskate environment-destroyer. 

No they will not,  apple will squirm and squeem there way out of any repair they can. Experienced it first hand myself.  Seen plenty of videos of them doing it online, read way to many posts of people complaining about it. 

 

Making devices that cannot be repaired and are not user serviceable is a shit dump on both the customer and the environment.

[HenrySalayne]

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

Remember back when MacBook Pros used DIMMs and replaceable storage and how they had really high failure rates? I don't remember that at all 

Oxidation or dirt/dust on contacts can lead to failures. Introducing more failure modes into a system (while keeping everything else the same) will reduce reliability.

Which doesn't mean you will get a noticeable difference. But we can only talk about reliability as a theory because we don't have any numbers and it would be quite cumbersome to do a fully-fledged FTA.

 

3 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

Apple will happily repair it for an hefty price (or a small price if you pay them for their AppleCare+ insurance, which now in the recurring form can go on indefinitely).

 

Pay for the repair (or pay for AppleCare+), don’t be a cheapskate environment-destroyer. 

The only piece of non-mechanical failure I ever had was the GPU in a Macbook Pro. It was a known serial fault and Apple would have replaced the motherboard free of charge, but - just my luck - the support for the product ended 2 weeks prior to my failure. And to make things worse, Apple seems to have a guy in a logistics centre somewhere, carefully watching the clock and dumping all spare parts into a giant shredder once it turns midnight on the day the support ends. Neither Apple nor a single official partner or repair shop could get a replacement motherboard.

Luckily, I was able to remove the SSD with all my data (it took only minutes to disassemble a Macbook back then). And I even found a repair shop which would replace the defective GPU by soldering a new one onto the board. But only because the AMD GPU was a bog-standard part and you could easily just get the GPU. This changes with Apple's own silicon. After the support ends for their products (generally 5 years after launch), it might be quite hard do get any replacement parts especially the mainboard and even if you are willing to spend the money.

Moral of the story: My Macbook is still working fine after 10 years. I'm not blaming Apple for ending support after 5 years, but it would be nice if Apple would sell all the leftover inventory to a company specialized in EOL service and they could give you the phone number of said company. Especially after they now make their own silicon.

[saltycaramel]

Good thing this approach has been “beta-tested” for a decade now on iPhones and iPads.

 

Some takes could age like fine milk when a couple of years down the road most laptops will be fully integrated SoC affairs like Apple’s M1 ones. 

 

That said, criticism and complaints lead to constant iteration and hopefully improvement. These laptops are literally a “sorry for 2016” backpedal-fest in many ways. Looks like further integration and soldering is not one of those ways though. We’ll see where this leads.

[Obioban]

17 hours ago, leadeater said:

And what exactly makes it a hunk of junk? Let me guess it's plastic so it's automatically junk, or some other silly reason. Yet IBM/Lenovo laptops have always been industrial plastic, look like ass, yet last for decades and the chassis doesn't degrade over time.

 

No, I don't care about the wider PC average. Consumer laptops and Business laptops are literally different markets, you can go check this on HP/Dell/Lenovo website they make it very obvious by having business product sections on their websites that automatically filter the products for you. Also why is it Intel and AMD have specific business focused products and marketing if there wasn't a differentiator in the market? Never seen an Intel vPro sticker on a laptop or marketing around it? Never seen AMD Ryzen Pro Mobile CPUs?

 

How come there is so much parts and products dedicated business product lines if no such thing exists?

 

Their longevity is not hidden, it's very well known that business laptops last longer than consumer laptops, you not being aware of this difference only make you not aware of it and not that it is not a thing.

 

So back to the entire beginning, you asked a question, I gave you the answer, business laptops. Because I consider Apple MacBook Pros to also be business products.

It's a piece of junk because the trackpad is terrible, the keyboard is terrible, the screen color accuracy is terrible, the web cam is terrible, the speakers are terrible, the microphone is terrible, the battery lasts less than an hour if I'm working on a big model, it's heavy to carry around, it sounds like a jet taking off if I open a large model, and, yes, as you point out, the plastic case (Lenovo) feels like junk. Plus the usual windows update being hugely disruptive at the worst times. 

 

Interesting theory on windows based windows laptops having a longer service life than windows based consumer laptops. Do you have any data to back it up? Or, for that matter, how the service life of windows business laptops compares to Apple laptops?  It's pretty easy to find data comparing Mac lifespan to PC lifespan, or breaking it down by brand, but I can't find anything that breaks it down by target market. 

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, Obioban said:

Interesting theory on windows based windows laptops having a longer service life than windows based consumer laptops. Do you have any data to back it up? Or, for that matter, how the service life of windows business laptops compares to Apple laptops?  It's pretty easy to find data comparing Mac lifespan to PC lifespan, or breaking it down by brand, but I can't find anything that breaks it down by target market. 

Well firstly let me just say much of the online talk about Apple laptops having longer life is also just mostly opinion based and commenting on personal experiences, proper statistical data of large sample sizes just don't really exist and that is true for business laptops as well. Further issue is if you do go looking much of the online sources you'll find are highly questionable as I've seen some rate Microsoft Surface devices as the most reliable devices which is complete nonsense.

 

Anyway I've been working in IT for a very long time and I've primarily supported HP, Lenovo, Apple and to a lesser degree Acer products (all for their business range ofc). Not so much in the last 5 years since now I'm exclusively in infrastructure engineering but I am the backup infrastructure engineering lead and provide the endpoint backup service so I know when devices fail and need to be restored on to replacements or repaired devices.

 

Each year while I was doing more direct support of end user devices I, and my team, would have been processing thousands of laptops as they get cycled through our standard 5 year support life and then get upgraded. My total personal experience may only be in the tens of thousands of devices and not millions, which would be a sample size approaching actually good enough for this discussion, I have a good enough understanding of the rates of failure of these devices and how often we had to log support cases to get them repaired, very rare. I am of course ruling out stupidity like tipping water on it or driving away with the device still on the roof of the car (yea happened more than just a few times lol).

 

Also just so you know I have done a lot of support of Apple laptops as well, my sector I work in is education where Apple devices are used a lot, and I was also JAMF Pro trained as well (not all that relevant to device longevity other than I wouldn't bother with such a thing if I weren't supporting a very large amount of Apple products).

 

At the end of the day, or the 5 years, very few devices ever had support cases for them for repair and since we (I and my team) also had to data cleanse every device we touched every device on the way out not just on the way in so I know very well how useable they all were after 5 years. These laptops were just as usable as they day they first came in save for reduced battery run times which is trivial to rectify if you really wanted to, run time were still fine. Of course the best run times were all the Apple laptops but they also started out better too.

 

But you don't just have to do the whole "trust my opinion" on this matter, you can read many an article online extoling the benefits of buying business laptops instead of consumer laptops.

 

Quote

In general, it’s safer to buy laptops designed for business users rather than consumers. Many IT departments expect to be able to replace batteries and install memory and SSD themselves. Business laptops are also built to higher standards, and should be more durable in the long run.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2019/may/30/can-i-buy-a-future-proof-laptop-to-last-10-years

 

Quote

You don’t have to run a business to benefit from a business laptop. They’re easier to repair and upgrade than other laptops, and they’re built with sturdy materials that will hold up well to traveling and frequent use. We’ve tested dozens of business laptops over the years, and HP’s EliteBook 840 G7 is the best for most people: It’s lightweight, it has plenty of ports, it offers all-day battery life, and it comes with a great, reliable keyboard and trackpad.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-business-laptops/

 

Or you can check iFixit's, limited, reparability score list: https://www.ifixit.com/laptop-repairability?sort=score

 

To absolutely no surprise to me all of the laptops at the top of the list are business range products.

 

Summary: There is and has always been a stark difference between business range laptops and consumer range laptops and there is a much greater likelihood to be able to be still using a business range laptop 5-8 years after it was purchased (or on the extreme end 14 years heh).

 

7 hours ago, Obioban said:

It's a piece of junk because the trackpad is terrible, the keyboard is terrible, the screen color accuracy is terrible, the web cam is terrible, the speakers are terrible, the microphone is terrible, the battery lasts less than an hour if I'm working on a big model, it's heavy to carry around, it sounds like a jet taking off if I open a large model, and, yes, as you point out, the plastic case (Lenovo) feels like junk. Plus the usual windows update being hugely disruptive at the worst times. 

So a few of these are just subjective taste, like the Lenovo plastic and design as I actually like the plastic Lenovo (IBM back in the day) uses on their Thinkpad products and they are very durable which is a huge positive to me when having to support them and in general since I know they won't break easily or get deformed. One of the problems with metal chassis is if they do get dropped or impacted they can get permanently deformed, that said they are very strong so low chances. Cheaper plastic chassis just shatter so easily the worst by far. So in a match up between HP EliteBooks and Lenovo Thinkpads the chassis are stronger and more durable from Lenovo.

 

I've also never minded the trackpads on the Lenovo Thinkpads, certainly not the best but really larger is the only thing I'd actually want from them. Webcam and speakers are terrible and that's true across the board for almost every Windows laptop, Dell XPS being part of the smaller exception group and that's still not as good as the sound on a MacBook Pro.

 

I can't comment on the screen color accuracy since it wasn't an important factor for me, however that can depend on what exact screen option you get with the device too. I know HP and Dell have more color accurate options available, no idea about Lenovo.

 

Battery life on a high end workstation Windows laptop, and cooling/sound, will always be a problem while they are putting in 65W+ CPUs with 130W+ GPUs. The Lenovo W series workstation laptops the engineering department used were very much portable devices in the extent of portable between power sockets.

 

Where I currently work we just simply no longer buy such laptops and use VDI/VMware Horizon so high performance remoting in to VM instances backed with GPU is done instead. We have CAD designing and video editing being done this way very successfully and was even largely preferred over using the Apple devices, that will 100% change when we get M1 Pro/Max devices though.

[Obioban]

^ these days I leave my work provided laptop in a drawer and remote into my desktop work station using my personal MacBook Air, to avoid using it, as you say. 

[hishnash]

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

Far as soldered NAND storage, no benefit there at all. It takes just as much space in the device to offer an M.2 slot and a screw down point as it does to solder the NAND directly.

 

There is a power saving and space saving advantage of doing what apple are doing with the NAND (not  a lot but still some). 

They are not just soldering the chips you would find on an NVMe driver to the mainboard, the SSD controller is in fact embedded within the SOC and uses the attached memory for its cache so you are saving that space of the controls chip but also you are saving the power. The SoC is manufactured on a 5nm node, your regular SSD control is not and running an SSD controller at the speeds of the SSDs in the M1 Pro/Max would draw a lot of power not just in the controls but also over the PCIe connection (the controls within the SoC, if it is like the M1, is not attached over the PCIe Bus but rather directly to the rest of the system like the GPU, CPU, NPU etc).  

 

 

8 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Moral of the story: My Macbook is still working fine after 10 years. I'm not blaming Apple for ending support after 5 years, but it would be nice if Apple would sell all the leftover inventory to a company specialized in EOL service and they could give you the phone number of said company. Especially after they now make their own silicon.

I would expect the contracts apple have with their suppliers make this not easy to do. Since apple will put in massive bulk orders that have fixed lower prices than the factories other customers I would be very surprised if these contracts do not include terms that explicitly restrict apple from selling these parts on unless they are within a product.  And some parts (intel laptop cpus chipsets for example) are alway sold under these contracts, you just cant (legally) buy a un-used intel laptop cpu/chipset unless your buying direct form intel and integrating it into a system.

 

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, hishnash said:

They are not just soldering the chips you would find on an NVMe driver to the mainboard, the SSD controller is in fact embedded within the SOC and uses the attached memory for its cache so you are saving that space of the controls chip but also you are saving the power.

I know but that still doesn't require the NAND to be soldered. You can have the SSD/NVMe controller in the SoC and the NAND on an M.2. This is of course not as serviceable because it would still be propritary to Apple since controllerless M.2 NAND isn't a thing but it would be very easy to get 1st and 3rd party parts with this implementation. 

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

You can have the SSD/NVMe controller in the SoC and the NAND on an M.2. This is of course not as serviceable because it would still be propritary to Apple since controllerless M.2 NAND isn't a thing but it would be very easy to get 1st and 3rd party parts with this implementation. 

could do, like the iMac Pro and the macPro (were the T2 is the control an the NAND is on removable boards). Those boards do end up having a duplexing chip since the NVMe sized connector has nowhere need enough pines to provide a direct coper connection to the controller for each pin. To do it in a  removable way you would need to use a socket rather than a board or a very very fine connector (more likely to be a ribbon cable style than a NVMe style.

Signal quality would also be a factor, i would expect that therefore the only removable solution on a portable device would be a socket that can be held in place much more securely.

Of course having soldered BGA NAND dies does not impact reparability (since apple, unlike most NVMe drives) provides the software tools to reset the SSD controller (DFU mode).  It does require you to got to a board level reapire place but they can de-solder and re-solder a BGA NAND dies very quickly this is a lot simpler than most of their repair jobs (from water damage or nasty chargers).  

They can also upgrade these (at least for the M1 this was possible so i expect it is on the M1 Pro/Max), cost wise since your not throwing out the most costly part a PCIe Gen4 SSD controller depending on the labour costs this could be quite readable in price, a lot cheaper than buying some custom Socketed NAND die from apple.

[HenrySalayne]

46 minutes ago, hishnash said:

I would expect the contracts apple have with their suppliers make this not easy to do. Since apple will put in massive bulk orders that have fixed lower prices than the factories other customers I would be very surprised if these contracts do not include terms that explicitly restrict apple from selling these parts on unless they are within a product.  And some parts (intel laptop cpus chipsets for example) are alway sold under these contracts, you just cant (legally) buy a un-used intel laptop cpu/chipset unless your buying direct form intel and integrating it into a system.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. Apple doesn't sell individual GPUs or CPUs, they'll sell the entire motherboard as a replacement part. I would have been fine with buying the entire motherboard but I couldn't. Luckily I could get a the GPU alone as a replacement part (not through Apple, they were no help at all).

I'm pretty sure Intel keeps their EoL products for quite some time to allow OEMs to still source them as replacement parts. Especially for embedded products you can get a replacement CPUs probably for the better part of a decade.

Apple told me they would have repaired my Macbook two weeks prior to the incident. So they must had some mainboards left in stock. But there was no chance of getting one after the support ended.

 

[hishnash]

39 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

I'm pretty sure Intel keeps their EoL products for quite some time to allow OEMs to still source them as replacement parts. Especially for embedded products you can get a replacement CPUs probably for the better part of a decade.

 

Yes they do but only their OEMs, 
 

40 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Apple told me they would have repaired my Macbook two weeks prior to the incident. So they must had some mainboards left in stock. But there was no chance of getting one after the support ended.

 

From my understanding once devices end up over a few years old apple most repairs them using trade ins, when you get a replacement moth bard that is likely one that has been harvested from a trade in. It would be great if at the end of life point they put these trade in parts on a site to purchase (with cpus/gpus attached to ensure they are not in breach of stupid contracts).  In fact i think apple should put these `recovered` parts up for sale long before they drop support, maybe as soon as the first orders warranties expire. 

 

[mr moose]

15 hours ago, leadeater said:

long post about business grade laptops

 

There is a reason many secondary schools don't waste their money on consumer laptops. 

[Dracarris]

16 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Luckily I could get a the GPU alone as a replacement part (not through Apple, they were no help at all).

According to Rossmann that is impossible (also for CPUs) unless you settle for one that has been taken off a board and reballed in China, then sold as ‚new‘.

 

That means someone that takes the time to do a 40min soldering job to replace it has no idea whether he go a bad CPU/GPU or borked up the solder job if the device doesn‘t work afterwards.

[IAmAndre]

Quick question: can we expect to see the Mac Mini upgraded with higher end M1's?

[Spindel]

2 hours ago, IAmAndre said:

Quick question: can we expect to see the Mac Mini upgraded higher end M1's?

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I don't want that, I will feel forced to buy that and wife will murder me for getting a new "toy" since it's just a year ago when I got my M1 Mini  

 

EDIT:// My guess is we will see them, but earliest in a couple of months. My guess is apple will focus production capacity on the MBPs initially, when that wanes we'll probably see maybe and iMac with Max and Pro chips and a Mini with the same. 

[saltycaramel]

4 hours ago, IAmAndre said:

Quick question: can we expect to see the Mac Mini upgraded with higher end M1's?

 

They have been rumored to exist.

 

Two factors are probably holding their release back

1) attention span management: currently all the media/public attention must be directed to the new MBPs; in March 2022 all the attention will need to be directed to the iMac Pro 27”; in-between (January?) there could be a window of opportunity to launch the new Minis. 

 

2) chip shortage: probably MBPs have higher priority and bring Apple higher margins. Why sell the same chips in an head-less form factor if they can’t make them fast enough for the highly sought-after Pro laptops?

 

The latter factor is more worrying than the former. 

 

Here’s a leaker’s tweet from last summer about the attention/marketing issue

 

 

[Video Beagle]

Sizewise...would a pro or max fit into a M1? I know there's rumors of redesign, but I don't think they'd change the general footprint.

[Spindel]

25 minutes ago, Video Beagle said:

Sizewise...would a pro or max fit into a M1? I know there's rumors of redesign, but I don't think they'd change the general footprint.

If you are talking about the M1 Mini yes then the pro or max should fit with no bigger problems. 

 

The current M1 mini has a really low tech cooling solution that basically is just a solid block of finned aluminium. So there is room for better cooling if needed. I personally have never gotten the fan in the M1 mini to spin above 2100 rpm (still inaudible) so there is plenty of head room to dissipate more heat (the fan should be able to go to 4500 rpm). When not torturing the M1 mini the fan sit constantly at min rpm of 1700.  

 

The 2018 6 core intel mac mini has a max power consumption of 122 W, that is more than the M1 Pro and Max chips, with the same footprint as the M1 mini.