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Comment by AdamJacobMuller | Hacker News Reader

"SSD is soldered on" is a bit of glossing over of the issue with the M-series Macs.

Apple is putting raw NAND chips on the board (and yes soldering them) and the controller for the SSD is part of the M-series chip. Yes, apple could use NVMe here if you ignore the physical constraints and ignore fact that it wouldn't be quite as fast and ignore the fact that it would increase their BOM cost.

I'm not saying Apple is definitively correct here, but, it's good to have choice and Apple is the only company with this kind of deeply integrated design. If you want a fully modular laptop, go buy a framework (they are great too!) and if you want something semi-modular, go buy a ThinkPad (also great!).

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I need macOS for work. Now that the writing is on the wall for Hackintosh (which I used to do regularly while purchasing a Mac every few years, most recently in 2023 and 2018, because I love that choice), I don't have a choice. I used to spend 10-20 hours per third party machine for that choice.

I don't truly mind that they solder on the SSD, embed the controller into the processor -- you're right that it's great we have choice here. I mind the exuberant repair cost _on top of_ Apple's war on third party repair. Apple is the one preventing me to have choice here, I have to do the repair through them, or wait until schematics are smuggled out of China and used/broken logic boards are available so that the repair costs what it should: $300 to replace 2 chips on my logic board (still mostly labor, but totally a fair price).

I love Apple for their privacy focus and will continue to support them because I need to do Mac and iOS development, but I will likely stop buying mobile workstations from them for this reason, the risk of repair is simply much higher and not worth this situation.

I haven't had "chip failures" like that for 15+ years. Has hardware gotten more stable?

The problem is those other options won't run macOS. If the OS is a given then there's no choice.

Day to day I don't mind but when needs change or something breaks it's unfortunate to have to replace the whole machine to fix it.

I'm sure a little hot air rework can fix this right up.

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