Live data from Hacker News

Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

bombich.com

151–160 of 422 posts

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silly idea in tech, the hardware will be long outdated before someone look for parts which are going to be overpriced, and the company might be gone forever. You can buy common business laptops such as thinkpad and swap the parts easily and cheaply. People aren’t swapping their 2011 i3 for a 2011 i7 if they care about performance; they’re getting an i5 from 2018. None of these swappable parts are unique aside from th…

I disagree. My thinkpad x230t is still going strong nearly 10 years later (extreme example). With 16GB of ram and an SSD it's still a decently capable machine. If you're the type of person that needs the _fastest_ computer then yeah obviously you're upgrading every year. Or if you work on large codebases, etc. But if you don't care about that, you can easily go 4+ years with your laptop. Yes computers have gotten fas…

I still use a ThinkPad T420 running Linux for some projects. It's a tank, practically everything is replaceable (unlike in my MBP, which has already had one Butterfly Keyboard failure...) and Sandy Bridge CPUs are honestly still modern enough that I'd honestly say most complaints about modernity are artificial consumerist nonsense.

We're at the point where computers, cars and phones are good enough and commoditized to the point where they should be lasting 10+ years. Instead, we're moving toward a 4-year maximum with everything sealed up and soldered, so you can throw it on the e-waste pile and replace it to keep "infinite" growth chugging. The iMac is particularly offensive.

What Foundation is doing should be the norm, by law.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#152
post #25
post #3

Sounds like something a software update could fix. Probably a scenario that was never tested.

You assume it's a bug and not as designed.

If they didn't want people running their own stuff on it, they would have locked it down like an iPad. The fact that they didn't means they wanted it to be possible.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#153

Consider options like Framework laptops that let you actually own your hardware, and repair it.

Silly idea in tech, the hardware will be long outdated before someone look for parts which are going to be overpriced, and the company might be gone forever. You can buy common business laptops such as thinkpad and swap the parts easily and cheaply. People aren’t swapping their 2011 i3 for a 2011 i7 if they care about performance; they’re getting an i5 from 2018. None of these swappable parts are unique aside from th…

My AMD Turion 2 based laptop has a "new" SSD and it rocks.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#154

General grumpiness about this particular design decision aside, it appears that since the T2 Macs, the main SSD was being used to store core system firmware. On T2 I think it's BridgeOS that sends the EFI image to the Intel side to boot it, and it does the firmware verification and loading. This setup has a benefit; namely, it is now impossible to brick the system with a bad BIOS/EFI flash, and you'll never need to u…

》The primary argument against soldering the SSD, or really any other part, down like this tends to be that "Oh, now you can't just save money by upgrading it yourself|replacing it when it breaks

Are you trolling? The primary argument is data recovery. Anything on laptop can die: charging port, motherboard... With soldered ssd your data are gone! You need to resolder SSD into exact same machine type, it may take 5 weeks if you are lucky!

It takes 5 minutes to swap normal SSD into new machine and reboot! Maybe 1 hour if you have to go into shop!

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#155

I get that for people from IT it sounds surprising, but from a hardware perspective I would say it’s a good change. Instead of having a SPI flash memory with the firmware they’ve gone ahead and merged that into a single flash memory. It’s weird because we are used to see disks as independent modules, but for these devices that’s simply a useless distinction, something that we keep for legacy reasons, not because it p…

Being able to swap disks is a meaningful advantage. After all, it's the part most likely to fail first, and often first limitation people hit on a machine.

Storage tech is still advancing at a decent clip. In 5 years, there will probably be 4-6TB drives on the market with 2-4x the throughput for the same price as 1TB drives today.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#156

I get that the memory bandwidth and performance of the SoC is intimately tied to the CPU, GPU and memory being on the same silicon (grossly vulgarizing the approach). However, there is no reasonable justification (as far as I can tell) for why the SSD would have to be soldered onto the same SoC, and even less reasonable justification for why the iBoot stuff couldn't be located on an EEPROM or something of the sort, l…

Does anyone laugh a bit at these types of comments?

Using these "stupid" and "unjustifiable" approaches, apple has delivered highly reliable / fast machines to lots of users. They come with applecare if you want, which gets you walk in fix/replace at their stores.

Note, they've already don't this on iphones - millions shipped.

They are going for as much reliability / speed out of this for the 90%+ of users who are not going in to manually swap out SSDs. They are also huge on part simplification, they probably got rid of the bios flash and are just using the SSD flash.

My own predication, as in many other areas others will COPY this "stupid" design - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. My guess is others will also stop shipping another set of chargers with everything (again copying apple).

They now also sell indefinite applecare, by getting normal breakage down low enough you can keep apple care as long as you want if you keep paying.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are using old information. Any modern SSD should be good for a few hundred to several hundred TB and may reach a PB. It would be very hard to use a personal computer that heavily. Most people would take 20 years or more.

Video editors have workloads that can write a ton for each project in 4k and 8k resolutions, if its pro res even more. First thing they do is grab the largest fastest storage they can work off externally.

That is a fairly write-heavy use case. But SSD endurance is measured in drive writes per day (over a typically 5-year warranty period). Rewriting the entire contents of your drive every workday for 2.5 years is only enough to put a typical consumer SSD out of warranty; actual failure due to write endurance will come much later.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opening them doesn’t mean it’ll be taken up. Everyone had a commandore so there was enthusiasm for it. This is another generic very niche laptop that has no defining benefits over others and so will find it hard to convince anyone to make some niche parts that doesn’t have a large install base.

"Very niche laptop" It's largely a laptop aimed at being a general computer, just like a Dell or HP. With two exceptions: - Freedom of choice over operating system - Freedom of choice over repair components From the looks of it, there doesn't appear to be much of a detriment to it over other laptops.

The parts are niche, they don’t work anywhere else. Nobody will touch making niche parts for repairing one with a niche marketshare. You don't expect anyone to take up custom parts to a WilyFox phone even though its a much larger marketshare device do you? So why do you think they will for this laptop nobody has? Yes, it’s a general computer, nothing unique in computing to choose it over the other.

Dell and HP have plenty of aftermarket parts and don’t limit my OS either.

They start at $999 and the base is 8GB, 256GB SSD, with an i5 and you need to wait with a deposit and it only has 1 year of warranty with no strong aftermarket products. None of these are incentivizing for performance, for repairable, or for cost.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#159

I get that for people from IT it sounds surprising, but from a hardware perspective I would say it’s a good change. Instead of having a SPI flash memory with the firmware they’ve gone ahead and merged that into a single flash memory. It’s weird because we are used to see disks as independent modules, but for these devices that’s simply a useless distinction, something that we keep for legacy reasons, not because it p…

Being able to swap disks is a meaningful advantage. After all, it's the part most likely to fail first, and often first limitation people hit on a machine. Storage tech is still advancing at a decent clip. In 5 years, there will probably be 4-6TB drives on the market with 2-4x the throughput for the same price as 1TB drives today.

We keep on hearing about folks needing to swap out disks out that are broken who ALSO don't have apple care AND are out of warranty? I mean, how many people is this vs the millions / billions of idevices out there? Apple simplifies / integrates like crazy - that is a focus for them. No separate bios flash - my guess is others start copying them personally.

Because apple products hold value so well, I just sell me 2 year old stuff and it can really knock down cost of the new stuff.

Post reply on HN