My MacBook Air M1 is dead
medium.com
medium.com
The issue with having only first-party repair is that you have no choice other than to lose data.
This is one of the reasons the cloud storage services became so popular. Properly backing up data, with multiple backups, not all piled in the flood prone corner of a closet, is not fun.
Edit: typo
Right-to-repair is great and all, but trusting the storage on a laptop is crazy. I've had basically the same thing happen with Dells, etc.
Forget just laptops, though they are more failure prone. Trusting the storage on any single machine for critical work data for any longer than necessary is unprofessional.
But now the poor guy needs to recover a huge partition from partial backups, and that sucks. And it was totally avoidable..
(FWIW: I don't understand your point about not trusting storage on laptops. Modern SSDs are extremely reliable. Sure they can fail, and you should always have a plan for what happens if they do. But in practice you should absolutely trust your laptop storage.)
As a consumer this is perhaps practical advice.
> Trusting the storage on any single machine for critical work data for any longer than necessary is unprofessional.
But if you were a customer, would you be okay with a business losing your vital data because they wanted everything on a single machine? It doesn't matter if it's a laptop, it may be a server on the cloud.
Just plugging them in often isn't enough to make them notice and refresh all data - the SSD doesn't have a clock in so doesn't know it's been unplugged for a long time.
The real answer is "for every month an SSD is powered down, leave it powered up for a day"
Wrong. Stop repeating nonsense.
The original poster stated, "They start heavily corrupting data if left unpowered for around a year or two though, in case this gives anyone false confidence in a use case they aren't designed for." A person asked if all SSDs do that and you said, "Yes, all SSD's suffer this effect." This statement is wrong.
The AnandTech article even mentions the falsehoods and states it wants to clear up the confusion. A drive must meet certain conditions before data loss begins. Simply putting a backup or thumb drive in a safe for several years isn't going to cause data loss and the AnandTech article comes to this conclusion.
Here is another article from PCWorld with commentary from the authors of the 2015 JEDEC presentation that started this hysteria.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2925173/debunked-your-ssd-wo...
This is what I meant. Not that you expect your laptop to fail (or be stolen), but any important work should exist in a recoverable way. OP claims to have lost a lot of data when this happened to them. That should approximately never happen, at least not more than the day's worth when you were off network.
We need right-to-repair (the sane version), but that’s really not the issue here.
And while the RTR laws would have helped here, let's remember there's only one thing we can do in the meantime to put pressure on these companies: don't buy hostile hardware in the first place.
Nobody's perfect. I use an iPhone and I just bought a watch from them. But I think it's equally true that you should be able to keep two thoughts in your head at once: even when buying Apple hardware because you're more or less forced to (or really want to), keep talking about how this is unacceptable and lobby every lawmaker you can. It's not cool.
What was frustrating to me was that I knew my model had a diagnostics port that allowed direct access to the SSD (see https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/24/apple-special-cdm-tool-macboo...) to pull the data off of it, but the service wasn't offered when I went to get my machine repaired. I was forced to accept the data loss from having the logic board replaced.
I later had bluetooth issues on the same laptop, and that required another logic board replacement. Which, surprise, came with data loss once again. Also had a lot of fun learning with that repair that Apple changed the extension backups are stored as, and Time Machine can't recognize the new one as a restore source for some reason unless you rename the folder to use the old one. Wasted quite a few hours on that, and Apple's phone support had no idea about why Time Machine wasn't seeing it.
Anyway, moral of the story is, backup often, and have more than one backup method, unless you like losing your data.
And I would recommend that no one use Time Machine for backups. I have several anecdotes of my own where TM backups became silently corrupted or a seemingly good backup refused to restore, and you can find many more examples in the Apple forums. An unreliable backup isn’t a backup at all.
On the other hand, all of my experiences were not recent; maybe Time Machine is fine now. Or maybe the corruption is random enough that you’re safe with 4 copies. In any case, I’d check on your backups regularly to make sure they’re still good.
Maybe because of no internet?
Not for me (I host me own), but for the next time it comes up. I don’t want to tell people “don’t use Medium” without an alternative to suggest.
Seriously, though, if you have an inch of computing skills, any of the static site generators combined with a free tier CDN like Netlify. The most popular generators are pretty easy to use.
But perhaps I'm underestimating how hard that actually is.
The whole point of medium is anyone can go write without any.
I still hate it, but that's why it continues to exist.
It is archived though. The developed stopped working on it I believe
But yeah, fucke medium
This issue is quite well known for those who followed the Apple M1 rollout closely. My suspicious is that
1. It is the same USB / Thunderbolt Charging issue again as with previous Intel Mac. Where basically the USB-C somehow fried the CPU. ( Louis Rossmann has tons of video on it )
2. The CPU / System is simply not designed for these type of usage. Especially with zero cooling. ( Sometimes, I would even leave the machine switched on for overnight rendering ) And it could also be other component that overheat.
Apple needs to sell an official Time Capsule and Make Encrypted Backup to iCloud as option for Offline Backup.
Maybe they shouldn’t advertise it as such then?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a $2400 machine to be left on overnight without worrying about it being fried in the morning.
I really dont think they did. It should be MacBook Pro with proper cooling. And personally I dont think overnight rendering, that is 100% CPU usage for 8+ hours should even be done on a laptop with no cooling fans.
The $2400 price tag was because of Apple's ridiculous memory and Storage upgrade cost.
While I agree that consumer hardware in general and laptops in particular aren't designed for this usage, internal overheating should never be the cause for catastrophic failure.
A system should be designed to throttle down or shut down before risking permanent damage. Should this be a heat related problem, I'd consider it a design flaw.
Degraded performance is acceptable, permanent damage to non-replaceable internal hardware isn't.
> Apple needs to sell an official Time Capsule and Make Encrypted Backup to iCloud as option for Offline Backup.
Not going to happen. Since they disbanded the router team 3 years ago, there's zero chance of a Time Capsule product coming back anytime soon.
They want customers to use iCloud and I think that's the better option for most users. People like the person in this blog are professionals and should use professional backup solutions (whether offline or online).
Agree, except Apple dont think like that anymore.
I was in a similar situation once. My laptop suddenly died, and it just wouldn't turn on; plugging in the charger would instantly extinguish the charger light, and that light would only come back if I unplugged the charger from the wall and plugged it again to the wall (but not to the laptop). The solution was also similar: the entire motherboard had to be replaced under warranty. The cause was probably a short somewhere on the motherboard's power delivery subsystem.
The main difference: my laptop's storage wasn't soldered onto the motherboard. I lost nothing other than the time it took before the technician came to do the repair.
Devices are lost (failed, stolen, burned, destroyed) as a simple fact of life. Anyone who doesn't have an immediate recovery process with negligible loss simply isn't being a professional. His laptop could have easily been nicked from a coffee shop.
It's why most of us simply don't sweat this at all. I will never be in a situation where I'm desperate to recover what's on a device.
Remarkable that the comments are full of people speculating about failures and then, remarkably, getting angry and on a soap box about their speculation. Computing device failed. Amazing story at 11!
I will never be in a situation where I’m desperate to recover two months worth of data, but even losing a day is pretty inconvenient.
Key escrow has been a solved problem for decades, Apple just doesn't implement it (AFAIK, anyway).
And it's not like user-managed keys are that hard anyway. I mean, just install any modern Linux distro with a decent pass phrase and you can securely and safely move that SSD between almost any two laptops on the planet.
OS X does board-locked enclave-managed storage because iOS does board-locked enclave-managed storage, not because it's the right choice for the problem area. It's not a phone; the guy in the linked article lost 800G of video editting work!
If the T2 failed (it is now integrated right into the M1, so any failure of the mainboard), the data is gone. Everyone should know that by now.
So he went in with his scheme regardless of that. And his work had so little value that if his laptop were stolen, if a single rank of the storage failed, etc, he'd be in the same situation.
He lost data because he was careless in the same foolish way that we read about so often. But people get to beat their ridiculous anti-Apple drums, so here we are.
"OS X does board-locked enclave-managed storage because iOS does board-locked enclave-managed storage"
This is boorish noise. Apple does it because it provides strong storage encryption while imposing no performance or usability problems. You like something better - good for you. I don't. I have zero issues with this reality.
"I lost all my data!" stories are ridiculous nonsense 99% of the time, and this isn't in the 1%.
The linked article and this thread argues otherwise. But regardless, even if everyone understands "the deal" that doesn't constitute a reply to an argument that this is a bad deal.
In my experience, video editors are the least backed-up PC users.
Large videos are too much data to back up quickly and easily, the deadlines are always yesterday, they're always pushing the hardware's limits, the data is ephemeral so just not quite important enough to pay extra for redundancy, and they know just enough about computers to get themselves in trouble.
That disk can be moved around, you just need the passphrase to open it.
We've been doing this for decades now in linux land...
... again.
I suspect by far the majority of people who know this, learned this the hard way. I know I did.
(And even _after_ learning that, I once left a backpack with my laptop at an outdoor table at a cafe. It also have both the USB drive with my primary backup and the iPod with my secondary backup. I was extremely fortunate that a friendly waitress grabbed it and told management it was mine, and I only spent one sleepless night before collecting it after calling up the next morning... In my defence, this was back before "cloud backup" and high bandwidth internet to make that practical was a thing here. )
I hadn't really thought of this, but it's a concern for personal use. Not so much for data - I do backups - but because I tend to keep my laptops for ages (currently using an 8 year old MBA). Something to think about, certainly.
It’s not a question of if it will fail, just when. If you want that data tomorrow, run an automatic, continuous backup solution.
I'm not sure how that would have accomplished anything (except a smaller repair bill, but that was footed by the warranty) in this story: either the logic board died and since the storage is encrypted at rest with the key stored in the Secure Enclave, the data is not recoverable; and if the storage is dead, well, the data is gone. Either way the data is as good as gone.
So either way, one lesson. Backup. Twice.
(Also, a brand new laptop has just as much chance of being stolen or suffering water damage or mistaken file erasure or a thousand other things that would destroy the data. Two months without backup is lunacy)
The drive encryption design is a holdover from iOS, and... a Macbook isn't a phone. People do very different thing with them (the linked article is by a video producer!) and need different solutions.
Encryption is done using a key. You are the owner of the machine, so you have the key. Just use that key to decrypt your files. Simple.
Bitlocker on W10 allows you to export the long key it to a file or printer. I've used this to swap SSDs from family members laptops with out much friction. This makes for simple upgrades or getting them going quickly after a failure. Perhaps Apple's implementation is different, but it doesn't need to be.
> (Also, a brand new laptop has just as much chance of being stolen or suffering water damage or mistaken file erasure or a thousand other things that would destroy the data. Two months without backup is lunacy)
For laptops used mostly at home, it's surprisingly difficult to kill the SSD inside them. Everyone's risk is different.
Heed this advice folks. Even the new Surface Laptop SSDs are replaceable.
I don’t know what the symptoms of an SSD reaching EOL are, would it just stop responding at all?
I don’t think we still have heard anything from Apple about the massive SSD writes and that for me is the biggest concern before making an M1 based purchase.
I’m amazed this person had 800GB of important data on a laptop and yet zero backups. Especially when a backup service like backblaze is $5 a month and you just set it up in 2 minutes and it runs on its own.
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone reaches for someone else's computer to look after their important things.
Sad though it is that they learned their lesson the hard way, they can't really be faulted for it.
From what I’ve read, Apple has fixed this problem in a recent Mac OS version. Apparently, it was a swapping bug.
Posters had narrowed down the excessive writes down by limiting memory usage, so they knew it was a swap problem, and some users said the latest OS fixed it. Now that I’ve checked it again, they’re saying it’s better but not fixed.
See this: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=m1+writes
I guess one problem is that cross-system data synchronisation is still a non-trivial task.
Well, you can, but even that wouldn’t get you your data back. It’s all encrypted, tied to the hardware.
There are data recovery tools for MacBooks, but I suppose in this specific case an essential part for that was broken.
The data probably isn’t worth the price of doing it (no warranty, all money gone if it fails), but if it was you could’ve called up a component level repair shop, which can sometimes fix issues at a fraction of what Apple charges and preserve your data by replacing only broken components instead of rushing to replace the whole board.
And that's a terrible idea to begin with. Yes, encryption is a good thing. But it's only good as long as it's not tied to a particular piece of hardware against user's will. You should be able to remove an SSD from a dead laptop and plug it into a working one, and, after entering the correct password, be able to access it. Apple seems to view this exact scenario as an attack for some reason.
The special device could even be another laptop of the same model that supplies power. Disassemble both, connect a cable, and essentially "move" the drive to a different computer even though it's physically still unmoved.
EDIT: Could they in theory add a port to machines going forward that as long as the T2 chip (or what ever they use today, i think they incorperated it into the M1 chip itself) was still functional (as it holds the keys). Sure, why not? But they would have create a way to unlock the T2 (or what ever chip) but apple could create a way either by having a master key or devise keys based on serial numbers, etc etc etc. The Mac they use to recover data via the life boat connector could phone home to Apple and with the right auth be granted an auth to unlock the chip and allow data retrival.
If I were to give apple the benefit of doubt, they might not want to as they don't want a way to be compelled to decrypt customers data on their hardware (Be it a 3 letter agency or a rouge employee).
If you were to replicate that hand shake between the OS and chip, sure apple could have created a “lifeboat connector” on T2 based macs. However the “isolated island” of the PCB communicates with would get more complex (you don’t want to be back powering the whole board from the connector, if there was a simple short on the board somewhere which was preventing the machine from powering on, then with no isolation you could be also “powering that short” from the lifeboat connector and be unable to recover data without more work.
On M1 MacBooks things have been stepped up a notch. The Application processor and the security processor that handles the encryption are now the same chip, so you would have to power a “whole lot more”. To top it off the flash chip which is to your SSD and the RAM chip are on the same package as the M1 unit as one big System On Chip.
Think of it like this, it’s like if a Intel I7 processor also had the ram and SSD on that chip you brought when you built your machine.
Now it’s a lot more harder to create a lifeboat connector. Not impossible but harder.
Now as Apple will have a lot of data on their own repair program they can look into how often they were able to / could be bothered to recover data off their older models and how much it pissed the customer off and probably decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.
If I were giving them the benefit of the doubt. They think their customers data will be more secure without it.
But it’s another reason why right to repair is important. As we have seen with phones, people are willing to write off the phone and pay decent cash to recover the pictures of their kids they had on their phones. With schematics, 3rd parties could much easier create tools and fixes to get the SOC in a workable state just long enough to recover data (Apple R&D prob even have have test boards where they can swap the SOC, If the SOC, Ram, Flash are all ok and not had LCD backlight voltage sent down the data lines... And recover the data. But their "repair techs" have to now learn how to remove the SOC package from the main board).
If the chip that contains the keys itself is dead, even with all documentation and access to parts you wanted, you are SOL as these chips are typically designed to create the keys on chip and never let them out.
Eventually same or similar issue where it just wouldn't boot. I took it to Apple and they said they had to send it off somewhere else but they suspected gpu failure, they noticed some screen tearing and said they could do that for me no problem and warrantied it.
Got a call later that my MacBook had passed the gpu tests and they had to do more to figure out what was up. Another call and they said my MacBook had water damage and they wouldn't touch it. I called bs because they wouldn't have warrantied the screen if it had water damage, and also I babied the hell out of the thing. The person I was talking to said she was going to get to the bottom of it and would call back.
They replaced every component in the damn laptop, but only after it broke and they tried to take no fault. I'm never going to stop complaining about this experience but at least I still have this laptop for now
There's a reason the Mac Mini has a fan.
That’s, like, really bad, right?
> macOS Big Sur 11.2.2 prevents MacBook Pro (2019 or later) and MacBook Air (2020 or later) models from incurring damage when they are connected to certain third-party, non-compliant powered USB-C hubs and docks.
And Apple replaces the entire motherboard if a component on it fails. The agreement that you may lose data has been around awhile and it's just boilerplate. When mucking around on a board they aren't going to guarantee anything - and I don't know if third party repair shops would do that either. There is always the chance someone screws up and breaks something.
Not having backup is a cherry on top. People just literally asking for disaster to happen. Curious why Medium even bother with publishing articles like this.
I really feel motivated to digest a blog post where even the writer admits that the title is click bait.
good point, thanks.
I am very satisfied in my decision to wait a few generations on this.
It never hurts to wait for Apple to fix these issues. By then the software for Apple Silicon will be optimised on a faster chip. (M2 and higher)
Back up your shit.
And while MacOS sometimes has issues expediently clearing space the was previously used for snapshots, tools like DaisyDisk and others can force its hand if you need.
Bottom line, you don't lose available disk space by using Time Machine.
And yes, you can nuke snapshots preemptively, but often the first visible sign was Mail having corruption issues because it’s database was borked, at which point it was too late.
If your Mac HD is that low on space, you're going to be getting horrible performance. You should sort that out and try to keep around 10% free.
Do NOT trust Time Machine. Back up your data.
And restore it once in a while.
"Backups not issue. Backups very boring. Restore is issue. Restore very exciting."
But yes, you need to check that it can restore every now and then.
Time Machine deletes old data. That is not a good backup plan.
Time Machine is not a long term backup, it’s a safety net.
Migrating Time Machine backups from a USB drive to a network share is not supported, but it's doable, not impossible. (This is something I've done before, and in fact I'm doing this for family right now.)
I think the horror stories are going to just explode.
If Apple has any weakness here (and this might be the butterfly keyboard all over again), then their products are going to get absolutely trashed in the media.[0]
[0] - I use apple products pretty much everywhere, so I'm not looking forward to this, just presuming it will highlight any SSD weakness they might actually have.
It's possible, but the "farmer" would have to be very serious about Chia and also not have read any FAQs, not watched any videos, not visited any forums, etc. A healthy fear of plotting on one's boot drive is the first thing drilled into Chia-heads' heads.
That's a problem, for everyone using SSD, and for Apple, for not managing write, monitoring it, warning about it, ec., but this not a problem unique to the M1.
The author should add an update to this effect.
Which means that a customer really needs a backup... Which by definition can't be locked to the motherboard. SMH.
Apple™ apologists come up with any justification, no matter how implausible, for Apple™'s user-hostile self-serving design choices.
I guess it's just a happy coincidence that then they can charge customers for using their Cloud as a backup, because they've removed any autonomy that the customer might have had otherwise.
One button saying, "set your own recovery password", and one 20c connector, and then any customer or lowly genius bar™ Logic Board™ replacement drone could easily transplant the drive into another PC when the self destructing crap Apple™-designed Logic board™ with tiny inadequate heatsink or secure enclave™ linked touchbar or dust-powered exploding keyboard switch or whatever other obvious self destruct mechanism they've designed in inevitably kicks the bucket.
The cherry on the shit sundae is that they would still get to sell another mac to the lucky 𝚟̶𝚒̶𝚌̶𝚝̶𝚒̶𝚖̶ customer, so there is no advantage to them in preventing this.
Apple™ just doing asshole things because Apple™.
It's like the story of the scorpion and the frog [1]. "I couldn't help it. It's in my nature."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog#Syno...
Not even Apple support knows the cause of this issue. You are better off skipping it altogether and waiting for the M2 or higher. Losing a $1000 laptop due to heavy work is already one unacceptable thing, but replacing the whole unit and losing your work in order to 'fix it' is another unacceptable 'solution'.
Always have a backup handy. I doubt the regular folk buying this machine would be bothered to do this anyway so the risk of this event runs higher for them. Especially when the SSD is baked into the motherboard.
I rest my magnificent case.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26247531
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26247333
> I rest my magnificent case
Perhaps people didn’t care about what you had to say because you come off as insufferable.
Well I guess we'll have to see if the fanatics and the hype squad have learned their lesson into jumping into immature first-gen Apple products.