Hacker News Reader

Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

The first MacBooks with non-replaceable SSDs came out in 2016. We don't seem to have seen a significant problem with SSD failures.

View on HN

I have a coworker that has lost two MacBooks due to drive failure in the past two years. I would never touch one of them unless I wanted to lose my data.

Ok? But I have 4 Macs (MacBook Pro 2011,MacBook Air 2012, Mac Mini 2012 and a MacBook Pro2017), all with SSDs and heavy usage-- absolutely no failures so far. Almost all of my previous Macs with HDDs have failed.

So maybe your co-worker is unlucky or you are saying this for another reason.

On their older hardware, I replaced a HD after about 6 years (that never actually had errors) with an SSD for another ~6.. With 8GB and an integrated SSD, I would be extremely nervous after year 2 or 3.

Ok? You don't have a Mx Model that relies heavily on using the SSD, so who cares about your anecdotal experience?

Welcome to HN my friend :)

I mean sure, SSDs can fail, but they were clearly very unlucky.

The unlucky should be able to swap broken components too.

>We don't seem to have seen a significant problem with SSD failures.

We don't seem to have seen a significant problem with SSD failures for Intel Mac. But all the Apple Silicon Mac has seen significantly higher percentage of SSD failures. Louis Rossmann has ranting about this for sometime already.

>Louis Rossmann

Not exactly the most reliable source for this kind of thing. I have not seen any hard evidence of greater numbers of SSD failures. Even if it's true that MacOS swaps more aggressively with Mx chips, 8GB of RAM is going to require substantial use of swap regardless of how exactly the OS tunes things.

The 2018 Macbooks had already 8 or 16GB, I'd argue in 5 years the average space needed for a program has significantly risen since then, causing greater wear now then in 2016/2018. https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2018.h...

Exactly, so those old MacBooks' SSDs should be failing en masse by now, if indeed there is something to worry about. There are plenty of them still in use.

When my 2015 MacBook Pro's SSD died, I could still book off an external and replace the original.

All storage dies eventually. There's a huge difference between needing to replace a broken or obsolete part and needing to replace an entire bricked laptop.

Sure, but all laptops have loads of parts that can break and that can't easily be replaced. The question is whether SSDs have become reliable enough that the advantages of making them replaceable no longer outweigh the disadvantages.

eh... basically all 12 inch 2016-2018 macbook airs have failed ssds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com