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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

The storage isn't soldered to the motherboard on a PC typically so you pay commodity prices for storage instead of Apples markup, making this less of a problem.

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> The storage isn't soldered to the motherboard on a PC

On a PC laptop it often is. Even on many all in ones now.

Compare like for like for goodness sake

Huh? Which PC laptops have soldered storage? Soldered RAM, yes, but soldered SSDs?

literally soldered cases, where you can't even get to the internals (eg. hp)

Many low end laptops, like some chromebook, feature soldered eMMC. For example, the first thing that I found on the google store, a samsung chromebook[0].

[0]: https://www.google.com/chromebook/discover/pdp-samsung-galax...

Those are quite literally not PCs, though. They are laptops, but they are much closer to a cellphone than to a PC. They're far more comparable to an iPad than to a Mac, if we're still in that comparison.

I had an HP laptop that shipped with Windows 10.

32GB eMMC, not enough to do a feature update. The Celeron and 4GB RAM were not ideal either.

I think it was a PC. The low end of PCs is amazingly awful.

That's still a PC, but the letters stand for Piece of Crap, not Personal Computer

I have a Lenovo laptop with eMMC. It isn't unusual. Fortunately they had an undocumented M.2 slot inside but that wasn't ever used in a stock configuration.

Most of them can boot Windows and are x86-64. How are they not laptops?

They said they are laptops, they’re not PCs. “PC” is a Windows term, traditionally. So a Chromebook is quite literally not a PC. You say they can boot Windows, so that makes the argument a bit less solid, but it wasn’t sold as a PC, then. In my opinion, continuing this line of argument is kind of silly, the point is that most decent consumer laptops that come provisioned with Windows still have replaceable storage. Or maybe I’m just very lucky and all the laptops I’ve purchased did. Even my mini-PCs like Intel NUCs have replaceable storage.

2 minutes of searching for various combinations of "windows laptop", "soldered SSD" and "upgradeable SSD" turned up e.g. Dell's XPS 13, which is not an obscure or low-end device by any metric.

You're correct, it seems like from 2022 the base version of the XPS 13 unfortunately can't have it's SSD upgraded. I searched too, but I looked at the XPS 13 for 2023, which only comes in the Plus model, and that one can be upgraded.

Most high end ones that have a slim form factor.

Don’t know if you’ve looked at that segment but, maybe it’s not what you loop for, but it started not long after Apple did (HP & Dell’s MacBook Pro design-ripoff series especially)

Also many lower end laptops have done it for a looooong time.

> On a PC laptop it often is. Even on many all in ones now.

s/even/especially/

This used to be unheard of on PC laptops. Soldered storage in PC laptops is a recent development (past 10 years or so)

I dunno if I’d call a decade “recent” when it’s like… 1/3 of the lifetime of the form factor!

But, yes. It’s a form factor thing really, as people want smaller, thinner, lighter, laptops. Memory (and battery) removability gets sacrificed as those aren’t a priority for most customers

> The storage isn't soldered to the motherboard

What difference does that make? The old version just needs to be kept on disk, not in RAM.

The "disk" is chips soldered to the motherboard.

One of the disks is. Not all of them are. There is this wonderful technology called "external storage".

But even if the backup has to be stored on the on-board SSD for some reason, so what? It's temporary. That storage can be reclaimed when it's needed. MacOS is already using on-board SSD behind the scenes for Time Machine backups when you don't have an external drive attached. I see absolutely no reason why it could not do the same for a rollback image.

The real reason you can't roll back is simply that Apple doesn't want to allow it, because that would make it easier for the market to reject one of their updates.

> The real reason you can't roll back is simply that Apple doesn't want to allow it, because that would make it easier for the market to reject one of their updates.

Bingo. OpenSUSE makes it easy using BTRFS snapshots, enabled by default. Apple and Microsoft could make it easy too but empowering users like this isn't in their interest.

> The real reason you can't roll back is simply that Apple doesn't want to allow it, because that would make it easier for the market to reject one of their updates.

Right. That's why your Time Machine backups stop worki--oh wait, their integrated backup software lets you restore your disk to the state before the update. So your narrative is FUD.

No, it isn't. What you say is true in theory but it doesn't actually work in practice because major upgrades come with non-backwards-compatible firmware changes. Try installing Mavericks on a machine that has been upgraded to Yosemite or later.

(It also puts the burden on the user to actually make a backup before upgrading.)

Wow. Imagine having to update your linux/bsd kernel after a bios update.

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