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

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

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get attached to their machines. It's like a car.

Haven't ever seen that myself ever, most people don't care, they just don't want to replace the machine if it still works if that counts, but nobody is using a classic all original parts device or seeks a classic HDD for their old computer. If you present them with a better one though, I bet most would be jumping for joy, but you have to make sure its "better" to them.

Some older machines just have a "look" that is different than anything made today due to a different design language being used.

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

#412
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and Sandy Bridge CPUs are honestly still modern enough that I'd honestly say most complaints about modernity are artificial consumerist nonsense. Just because you don't personally see any benefit to the advancements being made doesn't mean others don't. They're certainly still performant enough to be useful but even something like h.264 decoding puts a huge strain on my haswell laptop, which is a trivial task to…

>even something like h.264 decoding puts a huge strain on my haswell laptop. I never had that problem even before haswell. They have hardware decoding built in, thats probably caused by another issue. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration I agree about not enforcing viewpoints on others. If you don't like it, don't buy it.

Apologies, I think I may be thinking of h.265 and vp9. At any rate, the point is that particular laptop cannot play back any youtube video beyond 720p30 without protesting. very loudly.

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the people buying your used devices have no apple care and are out of warranty, so they’ll complain if they can’t repair it. Apple devices will stop holding value so well the less repairable they get, which in turn will also increase your costs.

The "unrepairable" apple devices have far FAR higher resale value and lifetimes than most the Huawei / OPPO / etc used phones out there. This is really the proof point. This is a combination of apples total system engineering and software update story. You don't need applecare to get updtes on an iphone. For example, looking at recently sold items on Ebay - Iphone 5S 32GB is going for $100. That's an 8 year old phone…

The 8 year old iPhone has such high value because it can still be repaired.

A 2021 iPhone will hold less of its initial value in 2029 than the mentioned 5S holds today.

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like you're using "state actor" as a motte and bailey. It usually means targeted espionage affecting very few, with strong motives for why security services are interested in them specifically. Whereas that article is ultimately talking about a dragnet surveillance system, which is technically a state actor but affects literally everyone.

I don't mean anything special by "state actor", I plainly mean: actions taken by a state. Whether you consider those actions to be a threat would depend on an individual person's or organization's assessment of the impact of those actions.

Using your loose definition of "state actor" means that every single person who uses mainstream cloud solutions has "state actor" as a threat, whether they acknowledge it or not. It's not just the occasional person super focused on security as you're making it out to be - in fact people less in touch with security have a larger threat from their system being hijacked and used to distribute contraband bits, thereby running afoul of cloud scanning.

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean anything special by "state actor", I plainly mean: actions taken by a state. Whether you consider those actions to be a threat would depend on an individual person's or organization's assessment of the impact of those actions.

Using your loose definition of "state actor" means that every single person who uses mainstream cloud solutions has "state actor" as a threat, whether they acknowledge it or not. It's not just the occasional person super focused on security as you're making it out to be - in fact people less in touch with security have a larger threat from their system being hijacked and used to distribute contraband bits, thereby ru…

No it doesn't mean that, because threat assessments consist of multiple variables, including the footprint, probability, and impact of a potential threat.

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using your loose definition of "state actor" means that every single person who uses mainstream cloud solutions has "state actor" as a threat, whether they acknowledge it or not. It's not just the occasional person super focused on security as you're making it out to be - in fact people less in touch with security have a larger threat from their system being hijacked and used to distribute contraband bits, thereby ru…

No it doesn't mean that, because threat assessments consist of multiple variables, including the footprint, probability, and impact of a potential threat.

That's a fancy way of saying "I've got nothing to hide".

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

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't mean that, because threat assessments consist of multiple variables, including the footprint, probability, and impact of a potential threat.

That's a fancy way of saying "I've got nothing to hide".

No it's not. Consider the risk that a street criminal could throw a rock through my window and steal my computer off of my desk. Do I put bars on my window? No. Why? Because I have nothing to hide? No, because I don't consider that attack vector to be a high enough priority that I need to take steps to mitigate it.

Threat assessments are purely an engineering exercise. This is orthogonal to the ethical, philosophical, and political discussion of civil liberties. If you have ethical, philosophical, or political concerns about this topic, those are something to be addressed in their respective realms. It is naïve to believe that engineers have power to protect anyone from abuses of civil liberties. Apple hardware engineering team is neither capable nor equipped to be addressing these concerns in their designs.

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

#418

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…

I just had to check. But I have replaces the drive on every computer I've owned. Not because of failure, but because the size and speed vs cost steadily improves over time. But most of the other parts don't change as much. (eg I can put a 2TB ssd in my 2015 macbook pro for $400, which I doubt I could've done in 2015)

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with different machines? The framework laptop doesn't work this way, afaik

Too bad i switched to Mac OS from Linux. The OS matters to me and OS X is still the least annoying.

Apple is not about giving you options. Either you go the Apple way or you leave the ecosystem entirely, and except for the very beginning when Steve Wozniak still had some influence, Apple has always been like that.

It has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is obvious: few options. But the advantage is that they can make a consistent ecosystem, with sensible choices, and not dragged down by compatibility issues. It "just works". Not my thing but I totally understand those who love Apple.

The way you do recovery with Apple is via Time Machine backups, use that.

Desktop Linux is the opposite, lots of options, but perhaps because of it, it doesn't have the same polish as Apple, and even Microsoft products, or, using your words "it is annoying".

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What drive? What was the end of life behavior you observed? Catastrophic failure, or SMART data showing wearout?

Intel 535. I was showing some alerts and the Intel SSD tool said the remaining life was ~ 5%, then it got to zero so I replaced it.

That model had a known issue with excessively high write amplification, for which Intel published a firmware fix: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/18821/26452...

In general, you should be aware that the "life remaining" indicator may merely be the "warranty remaining" indicator. If the unused reserved block count isn't approaching zero, a drive can usually keep operating long past the official write endurance rating. However, in addition to the above bug, Intel is also known for putting a kill switch in their SSD firmware tied to the "life remaining" counter, so you might have actually experienced the SSD going read-only when that hits zero.

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