Apple killed my interest in ARM and Macs

[PaulD-UK]

Quote: "...batteries to be replaceable (by the user preferably, or at least by any shop without restrictions by the manufacturer..."

Google quote: From January 2021 to late November 2022, the Consumer Product Safety Commission received reports of more than 200 “fire or overheating incidents” and 19 fatalities, from 39 states, related to “battery-powered micromobility products”

In London the Fire Brigade attends a battery fire "every two days".

Now all these are for a booming industry where there is NO regulation of the quality of the Lithium batteries being fitted.

The quality of the batteries fitted to devices in our homes can only be guaranteed by regulation.

 

[Gudi]

“fire or overheating incidents” … related to “battery-powered micromobility products”

Can confirm, last fire in my apartment block was an e-scooter. They are an extreme fire hazard. Nobody should buy one. ⚠️

Back to topic!

 

[120FPS]

The claim was that if anything breaks you have to throw the entire computer out, but here you are saying that the board can be replaced. You can replace other components as well like the trackpad, fans, battery, speakers, ports, etc. That being said, the MacStudio has proven that there is no performance penalty to the SSD being a separate component so I welcome any regulations which force Apple to make SSDs replaceable.

How much does a board replacement cost? Do you think users will pony up that amount? So in essence the entire computer will be discarded (recycling is still a resource-intensive process), because most people would rather buy a replacement device when costs approach a new model.

I will agree on the Mac Studio, Apple should really have made that a user upgradable part and made it more accessible. For security they can link it to an Apple ID and if they wanted to they could release Apple Configurator on iPhone/iPad.

 

[darngooddesign]

How much does a board replacement cost? Do you think users will pony up that amount? So in essence the entire computer will be discarded (recycling is still a resource-intensive process), because most people would rather buy a replacement device when costs approach a new model.

I will agree on the Mac Studio, Apple should really have made that a user upgradable part and made it more accessible. For security they can link it to an Apple ID and if they wanted to they could release Apple Configurator on iPhone/iPad.

The base M1-Pro board, for example, is around $550 if you send your old one back to Apple for credit. Some parts aren't available yet, like batteries for a lot of them, but Apple says they are coming.

This article is a year and a half old:

Here’s how much Apple charges for every part to fix your own MacBook

One does not simply replace one’s own 2021 battery.

www.theverge.com

 

[ArkSingularity]

If only google existed.

Here’s how much Apple charges for every part to fix your own MacBook

One does not simply replace one’s own 2021 battery.

www.theverge.com

He knows how much they cost, he's asking a rhetorical question to say "look, the logic board is so expensive to repair that a lot of people would just replace the whole computer instead".

It's a consequence of the design decisions made to solder everything to the board so that it all has to be replaced as a single unit.

 

[darngooddesign]

He knows how much they cost, he's asking a rhetorical question to say "look, the logic board is so expensive to repair that a lot of people would just replace the whole computer instead".

It's a consequence of the design decisions made to solder everything to the board so that it all has to be replaced as a single unit.

14" M1 Pro board starts at $500; 14" M3-Pro starts at $2000.

Like I said earlier, the Mac Studio demonstrates that there is no performance reason for Apple to not have the SSD as a separate item. But yeah, by the time an SSD fails most people will choose to upgrade to a machine thats quite a few years newer.

 

[ArkSingularity]

14" M1 Pro board starts at $500; 14" M3-Pro starts at $2000.

Like I said earlier, the Mac Studio demonstrates that there is no performance reason for Apple to not have the SSD as a separate item. But yeah, by the time an SSD fails most people will choose to upgrade to a machine thats quite a few years newer.

I see it as a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of a situation. Yea, the likelihood of an SSD failing is fairly low, all things considered. But the likelihood of something failing is much higher when you consider everything.

I had two logic boards replaced on my 2012 (I must have done something to chew through two of them but I have no idea what that cause would be). Then the device started spontaneously shutting itself down and requiring the battery to be disconnected and reconnected to work again. I eventually determined the cause to be a short for a component that was connected to the logic board, and was able to fix the short myself. On the modern MacBooks, I would have had to pay someone to replace the entire board again, when the cause was in fact another component.

Luckily those first two logic boards were under AppleCare (I would have never paid someone out of pocket to take care of that if it weren't). The repairs that I have had to pay for outside of AppleCare were quite expensive, I broke a screen on one and it was a $700 repair for that alone. More than half the cost of the computer (lesson learned: Buy AppleCare every time).

These things... aren't cheap. I'm not really here to say that Apple has overpriced the repairs, but I am saying that the repairs are quite expensive as a result of the design decisions that have been made. Unaffordably expensive for a lot of people, and it's a problem that's generally gotten worse and not better with time.

 

[vigilant]

You can agree or not, but last I checked on repairability when it comes to actual hardware issues it requires a full board replacement.

Look at the Microsoft Surface line (The literal Hardware built for Windows).

If you are looking to swap out RAM or CPU your best bet has always been to get a tower of some form.

This isn’t new.

If the major goal is to be able replace anything, I’d recommend getting the Framework laptop.

 

[leman]

You can agree or not, but last I checked on repairability when it comes to actual hardware issues it requires a full board replacement.

Look at the Microsoft Surface line (The literal Hardware built for Windows).

If you are looking to swap out RAM or CPU your best bet has always been to get a tower of some form.

This isn’t new.

If the major goal is to be able replace anything, I’d recommend getting the Framework laptop.

Couldn’t agree more. There should be enough space on the market for different design ideas and approaches. Users should be able to choose which tradeoffs are best for them.

 

[120FPS]

I see it as a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of a situation. Yea, the likelihood of an SSD failing is fairly low, all things considered. But the likelihood of something failing is much higher when you consider everything.

I had two logic boards replaced on my 2012 (I must have done something to chew through two of them but I have no idea what that cause would be). Then the device started spontaneously shutting itself down and requiring the battery to be disconnected and reconnected to work again. I eventually determined the cause to be a short for a component that was connected to the logic board, and was able to fix the short myself. On the modern MacBooks, I would have had to pay someone to replace the entire board again, when the cause was in fact another component.

Luckily those first two logic boards were under AppleCare (I would have never paid someone out of pocket to take care of that if it weren't). The repairs that I have had to pay for outside of AppleCare were quite expensive, I broke a screen on one and it was a $700 repair for that alone. More than half the cost of the computer (lesson learned: Buy AppleCare every time).

These things... aren't cheap. I'm not really here to say that Apple has overpriced the repairs, but I am saying that the repairs are quite expensive as a result of the design decisions that have been made. Unaffordably expensive for a lot of people, and it's a problem that's generally gotten worse and not better with time.

Does anyone know if they sorted out the voltage regulator problem from the previous NAND designs that would short and brick the entire device?

 

[picpicmac]

You've been lucky, that's all.

Or, maybe the others have been unlucky.

What percentage of M1 MBA (he claims one in the pile of laptops in the opening shot of his video) have failed SSDs?

Go back each year, 2020 back to the first Mac SSD (let's ignore the Fusion drive for now) ... and tell me what % fail for each age.

Anything you buy can fail. Electronic devices age (capacitors, transformers, etc.) and fail.

And yes, NANDs fail.

If Apple sold 25 million Macs in, say, 2020, how many have failed SSD by now?

The problem with anecdotal evidence, as in that video, is that the computers which break are the ones people put into videos. The computers that are working just get ignored.

This is true in all products in our daily lives. Also applies to services, and people, and to asteroids causing extinction events.

Yes, Apple has made the NAND a single point of failure. Perhaps that is bad for the planet as a whole. Or maybe not. I suggest that just the fact that people want to buy computers is what is the real issue with regards to sustainability, not that product life spans have shrunk a year or two.

If anyone wants to whine about this design decision by Apple then go for it. But please understand, the rest of the industry is going this way too. The future is not in do-it-yourself boxes or even fix-it-yourself boxes.

How do I know that? Simple: the smartphone is now the dominant computing device on this planet.

 

[leman]

You've been lucky, that's all. A common reason for throwing a Mac in the bin is that the soldered-on-SSD suddenly dies. Only real experts can replace them. See here.

Except that this almost never happens.

 

[AlixSPQR]

Or, maybe the others have been unlucky.

What percentage of M1 MBA (he claims one in the pile of laptops in the opening shot of his video) have failed SSDs?

Go back each year, 2020 back to the first Mac SSD (let's ignore the Fusion drive for now) ... and tell me what % fail for each age.

Anything you buy can fail. Electronic devices age (capacitors, transformers, etc.) and fail.

And yes, NANDs fail.

If Apple sold 25 million Macs in, say, 2020, how many have failed SSD by now?

The problem with anecdotal evidence, as in that video, is that the computers which break are the ones people put into videos. The computers that are working just get ignored.

This is true in all products in our daily lives. Also applies to services, and people, and to asteroids causing extinction events.

Yes, Apple has made the NAND a single point of failure. Perhaps that is bad for the planet as a whole. Or maybe not. I suggest that just the fact that people want to buy computers is what is the real issue with regards to sustainability, not that product life spans have shrunk a year or two.

If anyone wants to whine about this design decision by Apple then go for it. But please understand, the rest of the industry is going this way too. The future is not in do-it-yourself boxes or even fix-it-yourself boxes.

How do I know that? Simple: the smartphone is now the dominant computing device on this planet.

I'll help you in your argument: The reason the NAND's are SPOF is because this design enhances the security for users.

 

[leman]

I'll help you in your argument: The reason the NAND's are SPOF is because this design enhances the security for users.

The reason is very simple: the failure rates are so low that making it modular would be more expensive. It surely sucks for the couple users who do encounter an out of warranty SSD failure, but that's how it is.

To make it clear, I believe that a user has a right to have their equipment repaired for a reasonable cost. Fixing a broken SSD should not cost the same as replacing the mainboard. And I think this should be regulated and ensured by law. But how exactly the company decides to do the repair should be up for them.

 

[giffut]

No, companies should never decide in absolute terms by itself, how and when something is repaired. That is what good regulation should take care of.

We are past total consumerism and never ending choice - we have to take care to not waste anymore nor anything. And do less stuff. No one can be exempted.

Apples engineering of obsolescence and greenwashing is the old way no longer tolerable. We should destroy it by any means.

 

[Gudi]

No, companies should never decide in absolute terms by itself, how and when something is repaired. That is what good regulation should take care of.

And the EU is up to the job, but the Right to Repair won't outlaw SoCs with integrated RAM and SSD. The benefits of integration far outweigh the costs of not being able to swap the CPU independent from the GPU.

 

[Sydde]

We are past total consumerism and never ending choice - we have to take care to not waste anymore nor anything. And do less stuff. No one can be exempted.

We, as a society, are a very long way from "past" that. Some of us are working hard to drag everyone past it, but the progress is glacial and will probably not come into overwhelming effect before the problems it is trying to address result in collapse of the predominant economy. And disposable consumerism is the lifeblood of the contemporary tech industry, so we need to develop some sort of workaround to avoid disaster on that front.

 

[leman]

No, companies should never decide in absolute terms by itself, how and when something is repaired. That is what good regulation should take care of.\

Oh please. Making strong idealogical statements is so easy. But I have never seen a maximalist actually think stuff though. The maximalist interpretation of the right to repair is only and merely about minimising long-term maintenance costs for a tiny group of users, at the expense of resource usage, technological progress, and interests of the majority. This is dictatorship of minority at it's worst, one that messes things up for everyone just because Joe the tinkerer want's to keep using their vintage phone for 15 years.

We are past total consumerism and never ending choice - we have to take care to not waste anymore nor anything. And do less stuff. No one can be exempted.

And I fully agree with this statement. But the maximalist interpretation of RtR does not achieve these things — quite the opposite, as modularity in all things and the forced manufacture of vintage components come with a significant overhead. Maximal resource reuse is only possible with component level repair and recycling, and this can only be done to the greatest effect by the manufacturer.

In fact, in my opinion the maximalist RtR represents the worst kind of consumerism — it's all about making total cost of ownership as low as possible, everything else be damned.

Apples engineering of obsolescence and greenwashing is the old way no longer tolerable. We should destroy it by any means.

I never understood RtR zealots obsession with Apple. The market is flooded with cheap short-lived household appliances and low-quality electronics, should't you go after those first? There is an actual technical reason for soldering DRAM onto the SoC package (reliability, power consumption, performance). There is no technical reason whatsoever in using non-replaceable flimsy plastic gears in a food processor.

 

[SnowCrocodile]

You see, I went the other way.

Lifetime of Windows, seven years on Androids, a four year stint with Linux (while still using Windows as my work OS).

I have had zero, and I truly mean zero, luck finding the perfect Windows laptop. The battery life is beyond bad. The hardware quality is very iffy. My top-of-the-line, as expensive as a decked out MacBook Pro, Surface Pro 9 doesn't last a full four hours on battery when all I do is Teams meeting and some Excel and Onenote work. It also overheats and lags terribly when trying to use it as a tablet (the tablet part overall is absolute trash compared to iPad, to the point where I haven't used it in months). Its keyboard is OK but not as good as my MBA.

Before that, I had a Dell Precision, loaded through the roof with options. Very powerful. Crappy touchpad. Crappy screen. Built like a tank and just as heavy. Large power adapter. It was a desktop that tried to pass for a laptop.

I also looked at Dell XPS. Too many reports of quality problems, battery drains, and also fairy crappy touchpad.

Basically, I've never had a Windows laptop with a touchpad anywhere close to the experience I have on my MBA, or a truly long battery life. Every Windows laptop I had was intended to be used with a mouse, and plugged in if possible.

I do like Windows as an OS - I just couldn't find a laptop that I liked. Am still running a Windows desktop.

I actually really liked Mint OS. In some aspects, even better than Windows. Bit it's not a secure platform out of the box, too many apps don't work all that well, and there's too many hoops to jump if you want integration with your phone or tablet.

As to Android - it has grown better since I gave up on it around 7-8 years ago, but back then, it was a total crapshoot of iffy quality hardware and poorly interacting software, where having cutting edge everything and tons of features got in the way of reliability.

Apple, so far, has performed well for me. But if the ecosystem becomes ******tified, I would have zero issues with switching.

 

[Gudi]

I do like Windows as an OS - I just couldn't find a laptop that I liked.

I present to you, an Intel MacBook Pro with Bootcamp drivers running Windows natively. 💻

 

[Appletoni]

Long term Mac user here. I've had a Mac as a primary machine for 18 years, just switching over when they dropped Intel in there. I had a G3 blue Powermac before that but to be fair it didn't get used that much. My use cases are both professional and academic. From a professional perspective I need admin tooling for Linux machines. From an academic perspective I need mathematical tools and typesetting. From a personal perspective I need basic admin (spreadsheet, word processor) and Lightroom/Photoshop. And shared across I need time management stuff.

I was using an 14" M1 Pro / Studio Display combo as my workstation and portable machine with an iPad Pro as a portable machine.

Over the last year I've started to become very disenfranchised with the ecosystem for a number of reasons I will go into.

1. The M-series ARM processors were supposed to be a major technology jump and in fact they were on the first iteration. Since then things are starting to look a little less than what I hoped. The ecosystem remains pretty much closed. Despite the excellent reverse engineering efforts of many people getting quite far, any hope of retaining use of hardware after the supported OS is EOL'ed is looking unlikely. On top of that the disparity between nearly everything else on the planet being x86-64 is actually quite crippling. It brings a lot of overhead in when you consider things like docker and some commercial packages which have to unfortunately run under emulation. Whilst there are performance and power gains, the friction tends to kick you in the nuts in another way.
   
   
2. The pricing and upkeep costs are insane. The hardware is simply too expensive and the pricing isn't justified by the performance.
   
   
3. The segmentation and SKU breakdown of the M3 series is insane, as is the storage increments and the new "Pro" class machines that aren't Pro. It stinks of desperation and craziness.
   
   
4. The ownership risk is high. Despite some improvements on repair, the devices pretty much aren't what I'd call repairable by any reasonable standard. Sure you can swap ports out etc but battery replacements are extremely difficult and keyboard replacements mean replacing the entire top case assembly and battery via official paths. The one time I've had to execute on AppleCare, they didn't have an SKU in stock and I had to wait 2 weeks without a computer entirely. My only option was to buy another one (I'll get into that later).
   
   
5. The quality of support is declining. Every time I have to phone Apple support, it's a multi day round trip of phone calls passed around departments and broken systems in the background that people have to escalate and raise tickets to get sorted.
   
   
6. Every time there is a minor macOS release, something breaks. Maxima was the last thing that killed me and I ended up using a spare PC I have around for the kids to do work on. That just worked.
   
   
7. iCloud pricing. You get nothing decent for a lot of money. I'd rather give Microsoft the money for Office 365 which I have to buy anyway for Mac.

Anyway so the MBP M1 Pro's D key on the keyboard gave up after 18 months. It's a heavily used workstation. I expect better but I have AppleCare so off to Apple who, as it's a custom build, did not have a replacement or a repair capability. It was gone for two weeks. I ambled around the Apple Store and looked at the base price M2 Studio and the M2 Mini Pro and thought "I am not spending £1600-2000 to cover this". So I sat in a pizza place and scratched out some tradeoffs with a pen and paper.

Adding some experience I had doing some travelling this year with people eyeing up my iPhone 13 Pro uncomfortably because it's about 6 months' salary out there, I've got to say that I also feel a little dirty having all this ****. Also the 13 Pro is just out of AppleCare now so I now risk tanking it and having to pay to repair it or.

So I bought a whole load of PC bits and an Android phone.

1. A custom PC build. Intel i5-13500, Noctua cooler, 32Gb RAM, 1TB SN850X NVMe SSD, MSI B760 board, 850W Corsair power supply, Asus case, Asus RTX 4070 GPU, Dell 27" 4K monitor, Cherry keyboard and Logitech Mouse. That came to £1625, LESS than the 8Gb entry level MBP just announced and only fractionally more expensive than the M2 Pro Mini on its own. What the hell Apple?
   
   
2. A Lenovo ThinkPad T14 gen 3. Intel i7-1265U, 16Gb RAM, 1TB SSD. That came to £1027, considerably LESS than the 8Gb entry level MBP just announced. The battery sucks but you know what, meh, it's not that great on my M1 Pro when I'm doing actual work on it so I have to drag the charger around for that anyway. Also what the hell Apple?
   
   
3. A Google Pixel 7A. £449. This thing is better than my daughter's iPhone 14 and much cheaper. Actually get a 90Hz display and the battery lasts literally 2-3 days no problems at all. The camera sucks just the same as the one on a 13 Pro does. I use a mirrorless camera for anything I care about anyway. And thirdly, what the hell Apple?

All three things are in Apple's new Premium colour as well: black.

I'm in the process of getting all the remaining AppleCare refunded (each £300 in the bank between devices) and selling all the Apple crap.

At the end of the day, I get a workstation, a decent laptop and a phone and fully redundant hardware in case of failure and I'm up £1154 in cash which I will stuff in the bank. I can support this myself without having to deal with the vendor. And I can upgrade this if I need to without having to throw the whole thing away. And all the software I need actually works properly on it. And I get to retain my spare kidney.

Rant over.

Edit: I have a second set of problems I'll raise elsewhere in a few days on iOS ecosystem and what I consider to be the most abhorrently painful to use computer there is: The iPad Pro.

Buy a MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 MAX maxed out. Or 18-inch with M3 ULTRA.

You have macOS.
You have Rosetta 2 and probably soon 3.
Install Windows 11 ARM.
Install Linux.

Install Parallels Desktop Premium.
Install CrossOver.
Install iPadOS Apps.
Install iOS Apps.

 

[Basic75]

You have Rosetta 2 and probably soon 3.

Wait what? What's Rosetta 3 gonna be? ARM to RISC-V?

 

[ArkSingularity]

Wait what? What's Rosetta 3 gonna be? ARM to RISC-V?

ARM v8 to ARMv6. Who needs 64 bit anyway? 😂

 

[Silvestru Hosszu]

You see, I went the other way.

Lifetime of Windows, seven years on Androids, a four year stint with Linux (while still using Windows as my work OS).

I have had zero, and I truly mean zero, luck finding the perfect Windows laptop. The battery life is beyond bad. The hardware quality is very iffy. My top-of-the-line, as expensive as a decked out MacBook Pro, Surface Pro 9 doesn't last a full four hours on battery when all I do is Teams meeting and some Excel and Onenote work. It also overheats and lags terribly when trying to use it as a tablet (the tablet part overall is absolute trash compared to iPad, to the point where I haven't used it in months). Its keyboard is OK but not as good as my MBA.

Before that, I had a Dell Precision, loaded through the roof with options. Very powerful. Crappy touchpad. Crappy screen. Built like a tank and just as heavy. Large power adapter. It was a desktop that tried to pass for a laptop.

I also looked at Dell XPS. Too many reports of quality problems, battery drains, and also fairy crappy touchpad.

Basically, I've never had a Windows laptop with a touchpad anywhere close to the experience I have on my MBA, or a truly long battery life. Every Windows laptop I had was intended to be used with a mouse, and plugged in if possible.

I do like Windows as an OS - I just couldn't find a laptop that I liked. Am still running a Windows desktop.

I actually really liked Mint OS. In some aspects, even better than Windows. Bit it's not a secure platform out of the box, too many apps don't work all that well, and there's too many hoops to jump if you want integration with your phone or tablet.

As to Android - it has grown better since I gave up on it around 7-8 years ago, but back then, it was a total crapshoot of iffy quality hardware and poorly interacting software, where having cutting edge everything and tons of features got in the way of reliability.

Apple, so far, has performed well for me. But if the ecosystem becomes ******tified, I would have zero issues with switching.

I`m in the same boat. I think I exchanged a dozen windows laptops in 5 years. Tried almost everything on the market but had a ton of issues mostly related to battery and system stability (usually patch Tuesday took care of any and every stable system).
No issues with AS laptops.

 

[flybass]

Buy a MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 MAX maxed out. Or 18-inch with M3 ULTRA.

You have macOS.
You have Rosetta 2 and probably soon 3.
Install Windows 11 ARM.
Install Linux.

Install Parallels Desktop Premium.
Install CrossOver.
Install iPadOS Apps.
Install iOS Apps.

It seems like all your posts just tell people to spend an absurd amount of money on the latest MacBook without any connection to the rest of the thread.