I'm having to give up on Apple Silicon and macos

[1am0]

why would you buy a computer which doesn't truly belongs to you? if you erase your Mac from recovery, you'll need an internet to activate it. don't you find it a bit frustrating? why do you buy Mac studio? to pay Apple big money for 2tb ssd? I have a bunch of 16' intel MBP's with just dead ssd's on my table. 3 years of intensive workload and it's gone. is it reasonable to buy a computer which lasts 3 years and then go to trash ? if you think, that you'll be lucky and this is not your case, then you're wrong. it is exactly your case. I don't know, what's going on in USA with rich people and Macs, but here in Ukraine, I usually want to buy a computer which will be reliable and work flawless(I mean hardware part) at least 3-4yrs.
dixi. sorry for hate speech, didn't want to disturb people, but here's my truth.

 

[StoneJack]

This isn't a criticism of Apple really, well it is a bit, but primarily my circumstances are changing and everything is now kicking me in the nuts on Apple's ARM proposition so I'm unfortunately out.

Firstly the day job has landed me right in the middle of x86-land, which is quite frankly where everything still is, and I'm actually finding my MBP to be incredibly difficult to deal with in this space. Firstly the lack of half decent x86 virtualization is a problem. It's slow. Really slow. Secondly it appears that there are no compiler targets for macos/arm64 for some languages out there yet (.net 7 AOT for example) and bugs in some (Go/arm64). And annoyingly some software I need to run has really horrible as hell ports on macOS (mostly CAD). I recently bridged some of this by buying a dirt cheap Intel i5 12400 desktop (at the mere cost of 2/3 an entry level M1 mac mini) that runs windows 10 and virtualbox on it. Unlike the M1 Pro / Mac Studio I can afford to drop 32G of RAM in it without the risk of that custom SKU not being available if it blows up. It's also less hard switching between that and work than it is switching between macos and work.

Secondly, I went through a not particularly messy but inconvenient divorce over the last couple of years. I've finally got myself back on my feet and I find that my priorities have changed. I want to throw the charred remains of my cash into a house but quite frankly the upkeep on the Apple ecosystem is eating into that. If I actually sell all my apple kit and use the crappy PC desktop and a Pixel 7, factor in all upgrades and maintenance, project hardware spend over the next 5 years I am actually nearly £6000 better off if I jump now. With retirement looming in about 15 years I'm looking at whether or not I'm going to be able to keep the upkeep going after this and the answer is that I probably can't justify it. Even a bottom end MBA is a poor value proposition for people in that situation. I feel like I need to exit now and hedge the risk early.

Thirdly, the AppleCare coverage which is pretty much required isn't necessarily the best hedge in retrospect. I just bought a whole damn brand spanking new PC for what I spent on my AppleCare 3y TCO. Comparatively if something breaks you can afford to buy another thing every 3 years and shrug just for the coverage costs.

In retrospect:

• The hardware is too expensive for the lifespan and the expense tradeoff is not favourable any more.
• The custom configurations (32G for example) have limited availability and turnaround which means I can't risk buying anything other than stock configurations for work purposes.
• There are real compatibility issues for technical folk which get in the way of things on a regular basis.

Anyway not sure what the point is of this is past "hrmph!". I think I'm out. I enjoy the platform but I've got to be realistic and it hurts me to do that.

Edit: note that I'm moving from laptop to desktop as well here. My M1 MBP was used as a desktop 99% of the time.

I think its fine, we all are constained by our budgets, so your choice is very understandable. I would recommend one way to evade the Apple tax - order a configuration with more RAM but leave the stock storage option; then buy a cheapest M2 USB C enclosure, put inside a good 1-2TB M2 hard drive and voila you got storage which is very fast and also much cheaper than Apple's. There is some speed limitations but unless you move 100GB files onto and from the hard drive every hour, you will not notice anything different from the internal storage. Indeed, you can even boot from the drive as well.

 

[120FPS]

I think it’s fine, we all are constained by our budgets, so your choice is very understandable. I would recommend one way to evade the Apple tax - order a configuration with more RAM but leave the stock storage option; then buy a cheapest M2 USB C enclosure, put inside a good 1-2TB M2 hard drive and voila you got storage which is very fast and also much cheaper than Apple's. There is some speed limitations but unless you move 100GB files onto and from the hard drive every hour, you will not notice anything different from the internal storage. Indeed, you can even boot from the drive as well.

Too late they already moved back to a Mac as they couldn’t make it work for them.

I think its not about the money for me, its the principle, you do not release a computer with none upgradable main disk storage. I say this as someone who gave Apple the benefit of the doubt and bought into the TouchBar Mac. I had a terrible experience with multiple visits to the Genius Bar and data loss as Time Machine stopped working for me too (it was a time when Apple switched to APFS and broke quite a few things that worked fine before in the process)

Apple seems to be on a crusade to lock everything down, they used to have a more moderate approach that I thought was acceptable but now the motives do not align with doing everything with the customer in mind but doing what is right for Apple and making sure they extract the maximum out of customers at the point of sale.

Obviously most people on here will disagreee with what I have written but I cannot help but feel disappointed especially when I used to really promote their products and I thought they were out to change computing for the better and that they would continue to make decisions in good faith with their customers. If Apple designed computers with user upgradable storage would it really hurt them, would it hurt their customers?

 

[JW Pepper]

I run my entire trading company on Macs. We only have two running silicon the rest are machines going back to 2011. As far as I can see the costs of Apple machines is not higher than PC's if you factor in the long life of the desktop machines.

Portable devices I am less than impressed with. Apple seem to discontinue the battery replacemets just at the point where the batteries need replacing it is very frustrating and third party batteries I have found not only to be useless but also dangerous. Considering the premium you pay for a MBP or MBA it is a real shame the Apple treats users like this. It isn't necessary because the orphaning of the software is doing just as good a job as fewer things continue to work.

So why am I still using 2011 machines, because everything we do is SAS based so we are virtually only using browser functionality. I would have replaced all 2011 and earlier machines with new 27" iMacs but Apple broke the mould so we are soldiering on waiting to see if we are going to have to go MacMini and 3rd party screen.

 

[rworne]

Soldering on with the Mac Studio. First non-user upgradeable Mac I've owned since the first retina MacBook Pro. The latter of which was a secondary machine for travel, so a midrange model there did not bother me much.
I love the Studio. Hands down it is one of the nicest Macs I've owned, with the MBP being the best laptop.

The only issue that really bugs the crap out of me is the issue with the storage. Locking it down for security is OK, but locking out upgrades? I'm waiting for someone with better inside knowledge to spill the beans on exactly what is the roadblock to upgrade, say a 512GB to a 1TB or more. Hardware (like missing controller chip), or just a software lockout.

 

[120FPS]

Soldering on with the Mac Studio. First non-user upgradeable Mac I've owned since the first retina MacBook Pro. The latter of which was a secondary machine for travel, so a midrange model there did not bother me much.
I love the Studio. Hands down it is one of the nicest Macs I've owned, with the MBP being the best laptop.

The only issue that really bugs the crap out of me is the issue with the storage. Locking it down for security is OK, but locking out upgrades? I'm waiting for someone with better inside knowledge to spill the beans on exactly what is the roadblock to upgrade, say a 512GB to a 1TB or more. Hardware (like missing controller chip), or just a software lockout.

Luke Miani did a video about it

 

[bobcomer]

Luke Miani did a video about it

Worst design ever.

 

[mr_roboto]

Luke Miani did a video about it

I'm not gonna watch a Luke Miani video.

Regardless of what he said, it all comes down to how Apple brought SSD design in-house around a decade ago: they acquired Anobit, an enterprise SSD startup. That company's technology and engineering team still influences Apple SSDs to this day.

Standard NVMe SSDs consist of a SSD controller chip, some RAM (if it's a high performance SSD), some flash memory, and firmware. The firmware contains low level driver code specific to the flash memory assembled onto the SSD. (Flash memory is not as standardized and generic as RAM.)

When you upgrade a NVMe SSD, you replace the whole thing. This automatically gets you firmware that knows what flash it's talking to.

When you swap Mac Studio SSD modules around, you aren't swapping the entire SSD, just the flash memory - the modules contain only flash and an interface or bridge chip (these bridges are one of the things that came with Anobit). So it's a bit like you took a NVMe SSD, desoldered its original flash chips, and soldered in new ones.

Forget about the difficulty of the solder rework here, it's not part of the point I'm making. The issue is firmware. The Frankenstein'd NVMe drive won't always understand how to talk to the replacement flash chips. You might also have to figure out how to trick the NVMe drive's firmware into doing the equivalent of what used to be called a low-level format on spinning platter drives.

Same thing applies to the Studio. You may be able to find some things which work, mostly by exactly replicating configurations actually shipped by Apple, but otherwise, chances are good that you'll confuse some part of the firmware/OS driver stack and it won't work.

Could Apple put more engineering into making it possible for end users to arbitrarily mix and match these modules? Sure. Will they? Very doubtful. They modularized the memory for their own convenience (lets them produce fewer variants of the motherboard), not for ours, so what we get is firmware designed to assume the configurations Apple uses and tests. And a Mac Studio that clearly wasn't designed for users to disassemble in the first place.

 

[rworne]

Could Apple put more engineering into making it possible for end users to arbitrarily mix and match these modules? Sure. Will they? Very doubtful. They modularized the memory for their own convenience (lets them produce fewer variants of the motherboard), not for ours, so what we get is firmware designed to assume the configurations Apple uses and tests. And a Mac Studio that clearly wasn't designed for users to disassemble in the first place.

Apple controls the manufacturing of each and every Mac Studio and each flash module. Sure, 3rd party solutions would be great, if at all possible, but Apple could easily offer a flash upgrade program - if they wanted to. Every module they make is compatible with every Studio made, allowing for some variation on the base model to support only one flash port.

 

[maflynn]

Luke Miani did a video about it

Here's my take away - the Mac Studio is a closed system, Apple is in no way advertised the Studio (or for that matter any of the other macs) as upgradeable, or have components that are accessible/replaceable by consumers. I do think they went to extreme steps to stop and prevent people upgrading the machines on their own.

I'm not gonna watch a Luke Miani video.

It really sounds like you're making excuses and trying to justify Apple's actions. I mean, its really a reach to say that Apple is preventing you from using the unpopulated SSD because they're protecting us. Its an overt attempt to stop people from doing upgrades on their own and not paying apple for the upgrades.

 

[Joe Dohn]

It really sounds like you're making excuses and trying to justify Apple's actions. I mean, its really a reach to say that Apple is preventing you from using the unpopulated SSD because they're protecting us. Its an overt attempt to stop people from doing upgrades on their own and not paying apple for the upgrades.

Like many people do on those fan forums.
They don't realize they are actually hurting the company by enabling those behaviors, because it might be good for Apple in the short run, but definitely not in the long run.

 

[maflynn]

Linus, is certainly anti-apple and rants against apple many times, but he does bring up some good points, in how some of the decisions by apple are anti-consumer and how odd that is when viewed in light of the repair kits.

 

[mr_roboto]

It really sounds like you're making excuses and trying to justify Apple's actions. I mean, its really a reach to say that Apple is preventing you from using the unpopulated SSD because they're protecting us. Its an overt attempt to stop people from doing upgrades on their own and not paying apple for the upgrades.

I'm mystified by this take on my post. It was a technical explanation of why module swapping doesn't work well (in short, it's not malice, it's just that Apple didn't bother to make it work because it would require extra work and it doesn't serve their purposes), followed by an opinion that Apple could make it work if it did serve their purposes.

At no point did I say Apple's protecting us. You just made that up, because... ???

 

[Gudi]

... but he does bring up some good points, in how some of the decisions by apple are anti-consumer and how odd that is when viewed in light of the repair kits.

Simple economics 101. Every company needs to offer their products at multiple price points to get the most out of every customer. For this to work there must be slight product differences associated with unavoidable extra costs. If anything, the cheapest M1 Macs with 7-core GPU and 8GB RAM are more capable than ever before. No more spinning disks and the same amazing CPU and SSD performance. Even pro users won't feel a difference between the cheapest and the most expensive Mac for 90% of the time. And the people who can afford to pay up for that extra 10% are co-financing the developments which benefit all customers. I'm very happy with my golden cage, you can chose another one!

 

[120FPS]

I'm mystified by this take on my post. It was a technical explanation of why module swapping doesn't work well (in short, it's not malice, it's just that Apple didn't bother to make it work because it would require extra work and it doesn't serve their purposes), followed by an opinion that Apple could make it work if it did serve their purposes.

At no point did I say Apple's protecting us. You just made that up, because... ???

Well to be frank your reply was a bit unhinged. You wouldn't even bother watching the evidence presented but you went straight into excusing bad behaviour with they couldn't be bothered.

 

[Joe Dohn]

Well to be frank your reply was a bit unhinged. You wouldn't even bother watching the evidence presented but you went straight into excusing bad behaviour with they couldn't be bothered.

B-but MY Apple never gets it wrong! They are Purfect!...

 

[Gudi]

Spinning disks? What mainstream computers still come with mechanical hard drives? What timeline are you in? I don't know what more to say with what you have posted, leave some kool-aid for the rest of us.

The base-model 4K iMac (2019), literally the direct predecessor to the current 24" iMac (2021).

The iMac and spinning-disk disappointment

 

[mr_roboto]

Well to be frank your reply was a bit unhinged. You wouldn't even bother watching the evidence presented but you went straight into excusing bad behaviour with they couldn't be bothered.

Well, to be quite frank, your post expected me to take a half an hour watching two videos made by a YT dude I already know I don't like. You can't be bothered to type out what you think? I can't be bothered to watch a video to find out.

 

[Joe Dohn]

Well, to be quite frank, your post expected me to take a half an hour watching two videos made by a YT dude I already know I don't like. You can't be bothered to type out what you think? I can't be bothered to watch a video to find out.

Facts don't rely on personal opinions. They just exist. You may not like Linus, but he does have a very strong point.

 

[maflynn]

by a YT dude I already know I don't like. You can't be bothered to type out what you think? I can't be bothered to watch a video to find out.

You may not like him, many don't but he raises some really good points. Many of the roadblocks put in place is simply to prevent the user from upgrading their own machine. He's calling Apple out as being anti-consumer and even hypercritical given their repair kits.

 

[120FPS]

The base-model 4K iMac (2019), literally the direct predecessor to the current 24" iMac (2021).

The iMac and spinning-disk disappointment

That’s just Apple bringing the cost down so they can offer an iMac and say it starts at this low price. They could have offered an SSD equipped Mac then but they didn't.

 

[120FPS]

Well, to be quite frank, your post expected me to take a half an hour watching two videos made by a YT dude I already know I don't like. You can't be bothered to type out what you think? I can't be bothered to watch a video to find out.

It's easy to discredit me, a bit more difficult when it's someone with more influence and the opinion shared disagrees with you.

 

[Pezimak]

This isn't a criticism of Apple really, well it is a bit, but primarily my circumstances are changing and everything is now kicking me in the nuts on Apple's ARM proposition so I'm unfortunately out.

Firstly the day job has landed me right in the middle of x86-land, which is quite frankly where everything still is, and I'm actually finding my MBP to be incredibly difficult to deal with in this space. Firstly the lack of half decent x86 virtualization is a problem. It's slow. Really slow. Secondly it appears that there are no compiler targets for macos/arm64 for some languages out there yet (.net 7 AOT for example) and bugs in some (Go/arm64). And annoyingly some software I need to run has really horrible as hell ports on macOS (mostly CAD). I recently bridged some of this by buying a dirt cheap Intel i5 12400 desktop (at the mere cost of 2/3 an entry level M1 mac mini) that runs windows 10 and virtualbox on it. Unlike the M1 Pro / Mac Studio I can afford to drop 32G of RAM in it without the risk of that custom SKU not being available if it blows up. It's also less hard switching between that and work than it is switching between macos and work.

Secondly, I went through a not particularly messy but inconvenient divorce over the last couple of years. I've finally got myself back on my feet and I find that my priorities have changed. I want to throw the charred remains of my cash into a house but quite frankly the upkeep on the Apple ecosystem is eating into that. If I actually sell all my apple kit and use the crappy PC desktop and a Pixel 7, factor in all upgrades and maintenance, project hardware spend over the next 5 years I am actually nearly £6000 better off if I jump now. With retirement looming in about 15 years I'm looking at whether or not I'm going to be able to keep the upkeep going after this and the answer is that I probably can't justify it. Even a bottom end MBA is a poor value proposition for people in that situation. I feel like I need to exit now and hedge the risk early.

Thirdly, the AppleCare coverage which is pretty much required isn't necessarily the best hedge in retrospect. I just bought a whole damn brand spanking new PC for what I spent on my AppleCare 3y TCO. Comparatively if something breaks you can afford to buy another thing every 3 years and shrug just for the coverage costs.

In retrospect:

• The hardware is too expensive for the lifespan and the expense tradeoff is not favourable any more.
• The custom configurations (32G for example) have limited availability and turnaround which means I can't risk buying anything other than stock configurations for work purposes.
• There are real compatibility issues for technical folk which get in the way of things on a regular basis.

Anyway not sure what the point is of this is past "hrmph!". I think I'm out. I enjoy the platform but I've got to be realistic and it hurts me to do that.

Edit: note that I'm moving from laptop to desktop as well here. My M1 MBP was used as a desktop 99% of the time.

Although a bit niche, there exists a solid fanbase of Intel Macs for a reason. And they are certainly holding their values too.

 

[Joe Dohn]

Thirdly, the AppleCare coverage which is pretty much required isn't necessarily the best hedge in retrospect. I just bought a whole damn brand spanking new PC for what I spent on my AppleCare 3y TCO. Comparatively if something breaks you can afford to buy another thing every 3 years and shrug just for the coverage costs.

Think about it: if it were the best deal for you, it wouldn't be for Apple. They are counting on the probability of your machine breaking being very small. It's either that, or the cost for them to repair your device would need to be close to zero – might it might even be, but every time your device is repaired, you will NOT buy another shiny new device.

 

[Pezimak]

Think about it: if it were the best deal for you, it wouldn't be for Apple. They are counting on the probability of your machine breaking being very small. It's either that, or the cost for them to repair your device would need to be close to zero – might it might even be, but every time your device is repaired, you will NOT buy another shiny new device.

Why is my username on the post you quoted? Strange, I didn’t type that, I think the OP did? Or did you quote one of my posts then get the text mixed up somehow?