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Louis Rossman on soldered SSD
- Thread starter danbuter
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The concern isn't the loss of data as much as it is about a $100 part requiring an $800 logic board repair. Incidentally, he identified a regularly occuring failure of THAT $100 part that requires those who purchased this four year old computer and didn't renew AppleCare (which really is a clusterf*ck in and of itself) to pay for said $800 repair. Doesn't sound remotely niche to me. But what do I know?
The smell of Apple Apologism here is truly profound.
What good is Time Machine if you have to spend $1000 on a logic board repair because the drive is soldered in? "Yay, my data is safe! But bummer! I have to buy an entirely new Mac!"
The data on the SSD CAN be read without the TPM. Bitlocker generates a recovery key for this very purpose. The TPM is only one of several possible protection mechanisms. It just so happens to be the easiest one to implement and what Microsoft steers one to by default.
First off, the only Mac that has AppleCare+ costing $99 is the Mac mini.
Second off, warranty terms are dictated by insurance policies subscribed to by the business offering the warranty. Apple selling an extended warranty has nothing whatsoever to do with their attesting any reliability of any or all components and more them taking on an insurance plan for themselves that accomodates a certain amount of risk.
It is not an attestation of reliability of anything.
It's statistically unlikely. However, the entire point of the video is that there is a Mac wherein it is apparently NOT statistically unlikely.
He actually does other stuff like fight for Right-to-Repair and all sorts of other consumer friendly laws that, for some inexplicable reason, people on here are opposed to. His main schtick isn't Apple. It's pushing for right to repair and fighting companies like Apple for opposing it.
As someone who has worked in the computer service industry in varying capacities over the past two decades, the text I've highlighted in bold is categorically false. The USB consortium publishes its standards, Apple designs the board and commissions the board manufacturer to produce the board. The USB standards are a hot mess right now. But they're not SUCH a hot mess that they are causing these sorts of problems.
Actually, having watched his videos (and yes, taking them with a healthy amount of salt), that's not what he purports to do. If anything, he admits to trying his damnest to NOT use defective or dangerous components to use in his repairs. Mind you, I'd rather get a whole board replacement than I would an individual board component desolder and swap, but for those who are trying to keep their 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro alive without AppleCare, it's an option!
Wait, so if it doesn't happen to you, it's not capable of happening at all? Seems like a problematic attitude to have in the context of failure analysis.
(a) Again, the fact that it's a yearly subscription means literally nothing other than that Apple found an insurance company and plan that allows them to offer that kind of coverage. It doesn't attest to anything in terms of reliability.
(b) It doesn't last "as long as you want". It will go until the product is marked as vintage/obsolete.
50 Macs is hardly a telling sample size.
Incidentally, I've been updating the BIOS on PCs for decades and had my very first instance of a bricked BIOS just two weeks ago. Just because you don't see it happen in your sample size doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Regularly occurring how and according on which data? So far we only have Rossman's word on it.
I am talking about AppleCare+ subscription model.
AppleCare Products - Mac
Learn how to set up and use your Mac computer. Get direct access to Apple experts for questions on using MacOS and iCloud, and connecting to printers.
www.apple.com
Warranties are also not sold at loss for the warrantor and warranty prices are modelled on expected failure rates so that the warrantor is left with a profit.
Based again solely on Rossman's testimony.
Which doesn't change my option of him as a manipulating charlatan. He simply doesn't give you the objective truth and uses his charisma and expert knowledge to paint a convincing picture that benefits his narrative.
Yes, in that case we can rest assured that he would never smuggle uncertified and potentially hazardous factory rejected batteries which has been purchased illegally by bribing factory officials.
Make sure you choose your heroes wisely.
The batteries (which were OEM) were seized by customs by Apple's request (not because they were counterfeit, but because Apple got customs to deem them counterfeit because Apple didn't authorize the factory to sell that part to third parties.)
Apple does not sell parts to independent repair shops, nor do they sell batteries to authorized repair shops for products that are considered "vintage". If someone were to want to repair a device that is older than what Apple deems "not vintage," options are much more limited (forcing many to attempt to use third party non-OEM batteries, which are more hazardous than the OEM batteries that Louis Rossmann was trying to import.)
Better availability of genuine or OEM parts is one of the very things that Louis Rossmann is advocating for.
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Having watched Louis Rossman's videos for several years, I still have the reaction - that he is (or could be) a valuable addition to the actual designers of Mac hardware. He is pointing out from a repairmans knowledge, what needs to be fixed or redesigned for the benefit of Apple customers.
A part is not an "OEM" Apple part if the factory isn't authorized to manufacture the part. Not saying this is specifically his fault, but those batteries are effectively bootleg/knock offs.
Yes, it sucks if you tool up and lose a bid, but we don't know the circumstances of why this factory supposedly lost/never got the contract, and if Rossmann does, he certainly isn't sharing. How is he selling the batteries in his shop? From the quoted comments, it seems like they are treating them like genuine Apple parts, which they are not.
He has certainly hurt his own credibility with that sort of stance.
Not that he doesn't have a point about repairability -I agree that it would be fantastic if modern Macs were more repairable, or more affordably repairable, especially outside AppleCare+.
I don't think someone who is as shady/sensationalizing as this guy should be the spokesman for repairability, though.
There are above the board, legitimate sources for batteries, for instance (not SSDs, as was pointed out), that aren't knock-off, or so called OEM batteries. I've used several different models of NuPower's battery replacements, and have been very pleased. Not sure why a supposed champion of The People's rights would shun an enterprising third party in favor of knock-off foreign batteries.
Yes, it sucks if you tool up and lose a bid, but we don't know the circumstances of why this factory supposedly lost/never got the contract, and if Rossmann does, he certainly isn't sharing. How is he selling the batteries in his shop? From the quoted comments, it seems like they are treating them like genuine Apple parts, which they are not.
He has certainly hurt his own credibility with that sort of stance.
Not that he doesn't have a point about repairability -I agree that it would be fantastic if modern Macs were more repairable, or more affordably repairable, especially outside AppleCare+.
I don't think someone who is as shady/sensationalizing as this guy should be the spokesman for repairability, though.
There are above the board, legitimate sources for batteries, for instance (not SSDs, as was pointed out), that aren't knock-off, or so called OEM batteries. I've used several different models of NuPower's battery replacements, and have been very pleased. Not sure why a supposed champion of The People's rights would shun an enterprising third party in favor of knock-off foreign batteries.
Yes, Apple needs someone speaking from outside the echo chamber to advise on Mac needs, across the board. Not sure mister internet famous Apple Nag is the one to be there, though.
You're correct that it can't be labeled as authentic or genuine, but there is a big difference between what he's importing (batteries made by the original manufacturer) and a third party knockoff battery that isn't made by the original manufacturer. If we're going to talk about hazards here, what Louis Rossmann is doing is actually less hazardous than the alternative.
(To be fair, I wouldn't necessarily argue that all third party batteries are necessarily a huge hazard either. It very much depends on who makes it, and on the reputation of the manufacturer.)
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I'm confused about why the batteries he is using are actually more safe/legitimate than any other knock off?
Maybe there is more information elsewhere in the original thread, but what was quoted is the implication that they are made by a factory that might have been in the running to produce products for Apple.
Sorry about the weird quoting, its from the post linked above. See the equivocation in the quote above? He even throws in the misdirect about 'shot wages' - what does that have to do with him buying from a particular manufacturer?
Nothing.
Sorry, the more I re/re-read the less he seems legitimate.
You make a fair point on this, and if I understand correctly, you're stating that it's hard to verify the QA and so forth of a battery that has had to be imported out of the normal authorization and approval channels. That's not an unfair point.
However, here's where I'm coming from on this: This would be a much more easily avoidable problem if Apple sold batteries to people who wanted to purchase them, and more specifically, didn't force manufacturers restrict sales of batteries that are still being made by the manufacturer for products that Apple deems as vintage. This would be a non issue if there weren't millions upon millions upon millions of people still using these Macs, but many of the Macs that are deemed as "vintage" aren't really beyond their useful life (some may deem this to not be the case, but if someone wants to use them and they're under a decade old, I don't agree with saying they belong in the landfill or prematurely at the recyclers).
The fact of the matter is, for many of these people, genuine, authorized, approved batteries aren't available (and Apple themselves won't install one, even if you request them to), despite the fact that the people who make these batteries are still making them. This isn't a problem that's necessarily unique to Apple. If you look in the PC industry, you won't necessarily find the seller of the computer selling every part several years after the fact either, but to criticize people for sourcing batteries elsewhere (even from the company that makes these batteries) as somehow doing something that's inherently and automatically highly hazardous is, in my opinion, highly misleading on the part of the writers of these articles.
Louis Rossmann is actually expressly and openly advocating for better availability for genuine parts, not for circumventing them. Sometimes it's not realistically achievable for every single device, and Apple isn't the enemy for not making parts forever. But Louis Rossmann isn't doing anything wrong by trying to source batteries for computers that Apple won't repair anymore either. People do this all across the industry, this isn't something that is some sort of secret practice.
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We're on the same page about this. In our personal fleet of Macs, we have several in use that are well into Apple's 'Obsolete' rating, and I would love to keep some of those going for quite some time, still.
For batteries, there are non-OEM options from reputable sources (eg the NuPower batteries available from OWC) for many models, and once the AS Macs are a bit older, I'd bet that NuPower and the like will add them as well.
For other items (SSDs especially), there aren't the same options available. I really wish there were, but I don't think that Apple will change any time soon. Did you see any of the newest Mac Pro coverage, where Apple was explaining the benefits of their unified memory model, in reference to supporting external GPUs? It's clear from an engineering standpoint they are committed to the SOC/Unified model. This will keep us stuck with no expandable memory or replaceable SSDs, or wicked fast 'external' GPUs any time soon. On the repair side, this sucks even more.
No matter how much it sucks, though, Rossmann isn't helping. He's harvesting clicks and (at least on the battery front) justifying questionable business practices meant to maximize his profits.
Yes, he is waving the flag of repairability, but in the same vein as Joe Rogan advocates for medical marijuana.
He is implying the parts he are sourcing are genuine or OEM, and they aren't. Maybe they end up functioning as well, but nothing that he has presented has shown that, and the smokescreen that he throws up says he doesn't really think so, either.
Edit: To clarify, that is what is offensive about HIS practice to me. Not that he has to source the parts somehow, but he is invoking the mystique of Apple while balancing everything with a lot of "maybe" or 'probably'. The repair guys down the road that put a new battery in my first gen Retina MBP didn't sell me a load about the poor factory worker's wages or how the battery was basically built in a factory that maybe didn't quite get a contract with apple through no fault of their own.
I mean, it depends on what definition we use for genuine. Personally, I think there is a very big difference between going to the original manufacturer for a battery that just wasn't approved or authorized to be sold outside of the official channels, versus using something made by someone else entirely.
If I were running a repair business, I probably would just use the most reputable third party battery I could find and call it a day. But I also understand where Louis Rossmann is coming from on this.
(Emphasis added for clarity)
No proof that this is the case for the batteries he is using. Note that the reference in his explanation is couched in weasel words. Even his reference to the Apple logo doesn't actually confirm that partial 'possible' explanation. Just that whoever he bought them from had put the Apple logo on them at some point.
Note that the way he words the statement creates all sorts of implication, but when you look at it specifically, there isn't anything that he said that is a positive affirmation of the quality or pedigree of the batteries.
Note also that he doesn't use his own personal reputation to confirm the story he is implying. No "While I cannot reveal the name of the manufacturer, I have confirmed that the factory assembling these batteries was certified to produce them until ____, when certain models were deemed obsolete. The factory continues to operate with the same quality control checks as before."
None of that. Just that they (the shipper? the factory?) usually sharpie out the logo for him, so he doesn't get in trouble, that factory workers are underpaid, that factory investments don't always work out, and that maybe the factory was associated, or sought to be associated with Apple maybe, at some point.
Finally, I'd like to point out that assuming Rossmanngroup.com is the same company, the price list they have up (which is over a year old - https://rossmanngroup.com/macbook-battery-not-charging/ )lists battery replacement prices that are in the same ballpark as Apple's out of warranty ( https://support.apple.com/mac/repair ) battery replacement prices. For those earlier models (especially the pre retina models, when battery replacement was a couple of screws and a connector or two), and for the modern Air battery replacements, his (year ago) prices are higher than Apple's, or higher than a reputable seller like OWC. His modern MacBook Pro battery replacement prices are a savings on Apple's out of warranty price, if they are priced the same as they were at the last update - March 2022.
If one is not backing up obsessively (there is no such thing), then this discussion should be considered a warning 🙂. I do this even on my PC systems where everything is replaceable. Not endorsing soldered parts, though.
We're referring to devices labeled as "vintage" - which are devices that Apple themselves will no longer repair (which is something I mentioned specifically in my previous posts discussing this topic). These devices aren't necessarily decades old, I own devices that I literally cannot repair at Apple anymore even if I were to pay them to do so.
The common response is "well, these are too old to be useful anymore". My response to that is that it doesn't matter if someone considers them too old to be useful. If someone wants to repair them, let them (and there are millions of people who still choose to do this).
I totally understand. We have Vintage and Obsolete Macs at home that get regular usage, and some of whom I've had to pay an independent shop to do work on. I was making the point about his pricing because Rossmann is someone who demonizes Apple for 'greed', while charging a premium on his own work.
Older computers that are useful should stay in service as long as they can, for sure.
Older computers that are useful should stay in service as long as they can, for sure.
How good and trustworthy is the average repair store technician though, not everyone's a Louis Rossman ?
Valid, of course he isn't personally doing every repair. Counterpoint, my local repair place isn't going around implying the batteries they use are basically Apple certified parts.
Since this is still going on, I felt I should actually take some time this week to watch three of the videos (I spared myself the time of watching the “Apple fans say mean things” video which I expect is just an effort to monetize the disagreement he found here). Even on the videos that are meant to be technical, I find the information per unit time painfully low, so I've only gone through the 3 below. Most of these are 30 min or more long and most of the discussion is non-technical ranting or self aggrandizement, but there are a few points that can form a basis for discussion of the actual topic at hand.
The three videos I’m referencing are:
LR1: $3000 laptop turned to paperweight due to ISL9240 unavailability. :'(
LR2: Apple's soldered-in SSDs are engineered in the WORST way possible!
LR3: Horrible design of Apple's soldered in SSDs; it's WORSE than you thought!
If you don't want to spend the time watching, the first two follow a common pattern:
-- Here’s a busted MacBook
-- Drown the board in flux and heat gun the hell out of it
-- The MacBook is still busted
-- Must be Apple’s fault, **** Apple
The third one does away with the bench top content and is mostly "**** Apple, Extended Edition".
He says “If you’re writing a lot to an SSD for 5 years, you can expect to use up a good portion of an SSDs life in that time.”
I'm still looking for anything that looks like broad statistical data, but I've got a couple sources that undermine that assertion and probably better align with most people's real world experience:
techreport.com
First drive failed after >2700 full drive writes. That is rewriting the full drive, every day, for seven and a half years.
The first TLC drive failed after 3600 full drive writes. A full write every day for almost 10 years. If you have a terabyte drive, that works out to about 3 petabytes written over the life of the drive.
And those were the first two failures, the remaining drives kept going 2 or 3 times longer.
This test shows many more results consistent with or more often far better than that (Reddit discussion of Russian primary source):
Reddit Link
I wouldn’t read this as an indication of how any particular model will perform, there’s only one of each. But taken together this is an indication that even under heavy load an SSD is likely to far exceed the published warranty specs we see on drives and last 7-10 years and often far longer.
He describes an alternate world where you could have an M.2 drive installed.
Regardless of whether it is socketed or not, it won’t be a standard M.2 SSD. A standard module includes a controller, these will not. The SSD controller is part of the Apple Silicon now.
There’s a few other problems with this argument. For one, there is a space concern here as I showed before. This is the 14" logic board:
Apple has room for 8 NAND chips in 4 groups of 2 around the board to run in a RAID configuration to increase performance in the top spec’d models. This means you need to find a rectangular space to hold all 8 chips on one board. There’s also a height challenge, putting the PCB, connector, another PCB, and components in the lower housing.
The reason for 8 is that each chip has its own PCIe lane, which is probably what makes these custom chips and what allows them to be spaced away from the controller. I don't see anything to support his claims that each NAND part has its own embedded ARM core running custom firmware "sitting between the PCIe bus and the T2"-- he points to a random post on LTT that points to a notebook check article that points to a tweet that isn't a tweet anymore and also doesn't exist either because it was retracted or because of any one of the reasons tweets and accounts are going away recently. I find the idea that every part has an ARM core running wear leveling a bit hard to explain. He's definitely got the placement wrong (the PCIe bus is the communication to the T2, so it could only be between the PCIe and the NAND array), and I suspect the game of telephone between the now gone tweet and the video scrambled other details.
Anyway this all means the SSD is running over 8 PCIe lanes, while an M.2 module only supports 4. This is likely why the Studio has two bays for modules. So you need to find space for two connectors and two daughter cards to sit above the motherboard. Cards and connectors take space, and forcing a rectangular module takes more space. And now you've made a one connector problem a two connector problem
And I know people don't want to think connectors are a common point of failure because it doesn't feel truthi enough for their guts to believe, but they are.
People get kind of neurotic about heat and their SSDs but heat is a legitimate concern. Most will typically put some sort of heat sink on top of their drives if they have space for it. For a laptop, the heat spreader approach is typically used which pulls the heat from the hottest parts and spreads over a larger surface to radiate and heat more air to be blown or convect away.
But it’s the controller that is the hottest part of the drive, so when you take it out of the thermally managed SoC package and put on an M.2 drive next to the NAND chips it has the effect of taking the heat from the controller and spreading it over and adding heat to the NAND chips themselves:
That’s in contrast to the MacBook Pro approach of putting the NAND chips on a cool area of the board and right where the cool air gets drawn in by the fans:
So Apple's design approach here is actually quite SSD and performance friendly.
He goes into a rant about how the SSD is a “wear part” that will eventually fail. That’s true. Over time SSDs develop a few problems around maintenance of the floating gate, charge accumulation, oxide issues etc. You wind up with bits that fail validation on write or erase, you get bad sectors, etc.
But this is an entirely new thing for me:
LR2 (2:31) “My personal favorite, is when the NAND fails by shorting to ground. Many of these fail by shorting to ground entirely. Not just like a dead SSD where the data went poof, I mean when the actual NAND chips fail and bring down the power line completely because there is a 6 to 0 ohm short to ground on the NANDs main power line.”
Ok, so what about Rossmann’s argument that these parts are all shorting to ground?
Here’s where Rossmann’s credibility is so important to the discussion— he claims that half of the repairs he does on A2141’s is because of SSD shorts to ground. That’s a rather incredible number and one that I can’t find any independent confirmation of. Rossmann claims this has been happening since at least 2019. 4 years is a lot of time for Apple to work with their suppliers, of which they apparently have 4: Samsung, Hynix, Kioxia, Western Digital. It seems odd that this would be a failure point across so many vendors for so long without a correction.
Can a digital IC like this show a short? Sure. But typically it’ll happen on the I/O ring because of some damage inflicted on the chip not as a result of wear. One major culprit would be ESD or some other voltage surge blowing out the protection diodes on the pins. Wear would imply this was a short in a particular NAND cell, which would be a rather bizarre mechanism for sinking that much current. The I/O pins at least are beefy transistors with (relatively) fat bond wires attached, the internal cells are delicate structures with nm scale metal layers that you’d expect to vaporize and open circuit when passing that much current.
And can someone, anyone, explain this statement to me: LR2 (30:42) “It's more likely here that the NAND is what's bad. [...] If the .9V rail has all these little solder balls moving around that means that most likely the NAND is shorted and it is placing a lot of tension on all of the power rails that are powering the SSD which is why there is solder balls there which… **** my life…” WT-actual-F is he going on about? Is he saying the solder balls are formed by "tension" in the power rail caused by a short in a NAND chip?!? Is it somehow getting mechanically squeezed out of the capacitor?
None of the MacBooks Rossmann opens in those videos show any actual evidence of the NANDs shorting to ground. What we see, if you trust his measurement methods, is that something may have shorted to ground and in most cases it’s hard to know what by the time he’s finished throwing chips out and reworking component after component.
And finally, what about the fact that you can't boot from an external drive without a working internal SSD? I think it comes down to what working means to understand how much of a problem that presents. He goes through a sloppy interpretation of an iBoff video that needs some disentangling.
For one, he says that T2 Macs don't have UEFI. That's wrong. They do:
The UEFI firmware sits in the main SSD array rather than in a separate SPI connected Flash chip and the T2 acts as an eSPI client to the Intel chip which reads the UEFI firmware through the T2. So, yes, there is still UEFI firmware.
The T2 also has its own SPI connected Flash that holds the secure iBoot procedure. This is the part that gets updated when you go into DFU mode. iBoot validates the UEFI, UEFI is needed to access the ports on the machine which eventually allows access to an external drive and verifies that you aren't booting from an external drive to roll back to an insecure version of firmware.
If you have a board failure that blows up your power rails, can you boot from an external SSD? No. But I don't see how that's relevant to the discussion. It's no different if you had a modular SSD-- you have a board failure and a power supply failure. You can't expect anything to work. If you held the UEFI in a separate SPI NOR flash somewhere, it still relies on a power supply, it still relies on a working flash chip, and the same failure modes that apply to the main SSD apply to that part as well.
If you wear out your SSD, are you unable to boot from an external drive? Frankly, it's not clear. You only need to read the UEFI code, and it's not likely to be the sectors that wear because you don't update firmware that often. If the SSD reaches end of life, does it lock out your ability to read? It's not clear that there's a reason to-- you can't erase or program any longer, but I don't see why the system wouldn't be able to read the younger cells. The inode table would likely go corrupt, but as I understand it the UEFI is in a separate partition which means a separate and clean inode table. I haven't read about enough drives failing to know for sure-- which is kind of the point, this isn't a common failure.
One thing that is absolutely true here though: you must have a backup to boot from an external drive. For everyone saying that Apple is horrible for how they made their SSDs because it's unreasonable to expect people to back up their data, you need another drive to boot from, folks.
The take away here though is that nothing would be different if the SSD weren’t soldered down. There was a failure somewhere in the system that led to a power line failure. This is why the board is replaced as a unit— once you have that kind of failure there’s no confidence in the performance of anything anymore.
Let’s say a buck converter blows but the SSD was in a module. What difference does it make? The drive is still lost, for all Rossmann’s repeating that the customer really cares about their information it would still be gone, and everything connected to that rail is now suspect. The NANDs have failed because their I/O ring took a surge, which means the SoC itself is now suspect because it’s at the other end of that NAND interface. And what caused the power supply to fail in the first place? It’s not necessarily the root cause either.
Simply put, soldered or not makes no difference here. I just watched Rossmann manhandle a number of boards and none recovered— maybe he has better luck in other videos but I can’t be bothered to keep watching. And the methods he’s using to diagnose and repair jeopardize the rest of the system anyway, so if it wasn’t at risk before he opened it, it is now.
As far as I can tell, this is an entirely hypothetical problem being hypothesized by people with an agenda.
The three videos I’m referencing are:
LR1: $3000 laptop turned to paperweight due to ISL9240 unavailability. :'(
LR2: Apple's soldered-in SSDs are engineered in the WORST way possible!
LR3: Horrible design of Apple's soldered in SSDs; it's WORSE than you thought!
If you don't want to spend the time watching, the first two follow a common pattern:
-- Here’s a busted MacBook
-- Drown the board in flux and heat gun the hell out of it
-- The MacBook is still busted
-- Must be Apple’s fault, **** Apple
The third one does away with the bench top content and is mostly "**** Apple, Extended Edition".
He says “If you’re writing a lot to an SSD for 5 years, you can expect to use up a good portion of an SSDs life in that time.”
I'm still looking for anything that looks like broad statistical data, but I've got a couple sources that undermine that assertion and probably better align with most people's real world experience:
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead
techreport.com
The first TLC drive failed after 3600 full drive writes. A full write every day for almost 10 years. If you have a terabyte drive, that works out to about 3 petabytes written over the life of the drive.
And those were the first two failures, the remaining drives kept going 2 or 3 times longer.
This test shows many more results consistent with or more often far better than that (Reddit discussion of Russian primary source):
Reddit Link
I wouldn’t read this as an indication of how any particular model will perform, there’s only one of each. But taken together this is an indication that even under heavy load an SSD is likely to far exceed the published warranty specs we see on drives and last 7-10 years and often far longer.
He describes an alternate world where you could have an M.2 drive installed.
Regardless of whether it is socketed or not, it won’t be a standard M.2 SSD. A standard module includes a controller, these will not. The SSD controller is part of the Apple Silicon now.
There’s a few other problems with this argument. For one, there is a space concern here as I showed before. This is the 14" logic board:
Apple has room for 8 NAND chips in 4 groups of 2 around the board to run in a RAID configuration to increase performance in the top spec’d models. This means you need to find a rectangular space to hold all 8 chips on one board. There’s also a height challenge, putting the PCB, connector, another PCB, and components in the lower housing.
The reason for 8 is that each chip has its own PCIe lane, which is probably what makes these custom chips and what allows them to be spaced away from the controller. I don't see anything to support his claims that each NAND part has its own embedded ARM core running custom firmware "sitting between the PCIe bus and the T2"-- he points to a random post on LTT that points to a notebook check article that points to a tweet that isn't a tweet anymore and also doesn't exist either because it was retracted or because of any one of the reasons tweets and accounts are going away recently. I find the idea that every part has an ARM core running wear leveling a bit hard to explain. He's definitely got the placement wrong (the PCIe bus is the communication to the T2, so it could only be between the PCIe and the NAND array), and I suspect the game of telephone between the now gone tweet and the video scrambled other details.
Anyway this all means the SSD is running over 8 PCIe lanes, while an M.2 module only supports 4. This is likely why the Studio has two bays for modules. So you need to find space for two connectors and two daughter cards to sit above the motherboard. Cards and connectors take space, and forcing a rectangular module takes more space. And now you've made a one connector problem a two connector problem
And I know people don't want to think connectors are a common point of failure because it doesn't feel truthi enough for their guts to believe, but they are.
People get kind of neurotic about heat and their SSDs but heat is a legitimate concern. Most will typically put some sort of heat sink on top of their drives if they have space for it. For a laptop, the heat spreader approach is typically used which pulls the heat from the hottest parts and spreads over a larger surface to radiate and heat more air to be blown or convect away.
But it’s the controller that is the hottest part of the drive, so when you take it out of the thermally managed SoC package and put on an M.2 drive next to the NAND chips it has the effect of taking the heat from the controller and spreading it over and adding heat to the NAND chips themselves:
That’s in contrast to the MacBook Pro approach of putting the NAND chips on a cool area of the board and right where the cool air gets drawn in by the fans:
So Apple's design approach here is actually quite SSD and performance friendly.
He goes into a rant about how the SSD is a “wear part” that will eventually fail. That’s true. Over time SSDs develop a few problems around maintenance of the floating gate, charge accumulation, oxide issues etc. You wind up with bits that fail validation on write or erase, you get bad sectors, etc.
But this is an entirely new thing for me:
LR2 (2:31) “My personal favorite, is when the NAND fails by shorting to ground. Many of these fail by shorting to ground entirely. Not just like a dead SSD where the data went poof, I mean when the actual NAND chips fail and bring down the power line completely because there is a 6 to 0 ohm short to ground on the NANDs main power line.”
Ok, so what about Rossmann’s argument that these parts are all shorting to ground?
Here’s where Rossmann’s credibility is so important to the discussion— he claims that half of the repairs he does on A2141’s is because of SSD shorts to ground. That’s a rather incredible number and one that I can’t find any independent confirmation of. Rossmann claims this has been happening since at least 2019. 4 years is a lot of time for Apple to work with their suppliers, of which they apparently have 4: Samsung, Hynix, Kioxia, Western Digital. It seems odd that this would be a failure point across so many vendors for so long without a correction.
Can a digital IC like this show a short? Sure. But typically it’ll happen on the I/O ring because of some damage inflicted on the chip not as a result of wear. One major culprit would be ESD or some other voltage surge blowing out the protection diodes on the pins. Wear would imply this was a short in a particular NAND cell, which would be a rather bizarre mechanism for sinking that much current. The I/O pins at least are beefy transistors with (relatively) fat bond wires attached, the internal cells are delicate structures with nm scale metal layers that you’d expect to vaporize and open circuit when passing that much current.
And can someone, anyone, explain this statement to me: LR2 (30:42) “It's more likely here that the NAND is what's bad. [...] If the .9V rail has all these little solder balls moving around that means that most likely the NAND is shorted and it is placing a lot of tension on all of the power rails that are powering the SSD which is why there is solder balls there which… **** my life…” WT-actual-F is he going on about? Is he saying the solder balls are formed by "tension" in the power rail caused by a short in a NAND chip?!? Is it somehow getting mechanically squeezed out of the capacitor?
None of the MacBooks Rossmann opens in those videos show any actual evidence of the NANDs shorting to ground. What we see, if you trust his measurement methods, is that something may have shorted to ground and in most cases it’s hard to know what by the time he’s finished throwing chips out and reworking component after component.
And finally, what about the fact that you can't boot from an external drive without a working internal SSD? I think it comes down to what working means to understand how much of a problem that presents. He goes through a sloppy interpretation of an iBoff video that needs some disentangling.
For one, he says that T2 Macs don't have UEFI. That's wrong. They do:
The UEFI firmware sits in the main SSD array rather than in a separate SPI connected Flash chip and the T2 acts as an eSPI client to the Intel chip which reads the UEFI firmware through the T2. So, yes, there is still UEFI firmware.
The T2 also has its own SPI connected Flash that holds the secure iBoot procedure. This is the part that gets updated when you go into DFU mode. iBoot validates the UEFI, UEFI is needed to access the ports on the machine which eventually allows access to an external drive and verifies that you aren't booting from an external drive to roll back to an insecure version of firmware.
If you have a board failure that blows up your power rails, can you boot from an external SSD? No. But I don't see how that's relevant to the discussion. It's no different if you had a modular SSD-- you have a board failure and a power supply failure. You can't expect anything to work. If you held the UEFI in a separate SPI NOR flash somewhere, it still relies on a power supply, it still relies on a working flash chip, and the same failure modes that apply to the main SSD apply to that part as well.
If you wear out your SSD, are you unable to boot from an external drive? Frankly, it's not clear. You only need to read the UEFI code, and it's not likely to be the sectors that wear because you don't update firmware that often. If the SSD reaches end of life, does it lock out your ability to read? It's not clear that there's a reason to-- you can't erase or program any longer, but I don't see why the system wouldn't be able to read the younger cells. The inode table would likely go corrupt, but as I understand it the UEFI is in a separate partition which means a separate and clean inode table. I haven't read about enough drives failing to know for sure-- which is kind of the point, this isn't a common failure.
One thing that is absolutely true here though: you must have a backup to boot from an external drive. For everyone saying that Apple is horrible for how they made their SSDs because it's unreasonable to expect people to back up their data, you need another drive to boot from, folks.
The take away here though is that nothing would be different if the SSD weren’t soldered down. There was a failure somewhere in the system that led to a power line failure. This is why the board is replaced as a unit— once you have that kind of failure there’s no confidence in the performance of anything anymore.
Let’s say a buck converter blows but the SSD was in a module. What difference does it make? The drive is still lost, for all Rossmann’s repeating that the customer really cares about their information it would still be gone, and everything connected to that rail is now suspect. The NANDs have failed because their I/O ring took a surge, which means the SoC itself is now suspect because it’s at the other end of that NAND interface. And what caused the power supply to fail in the first place? It’s not necessarily the root cause either.
Simply put, soldered or not makes no difference here. I just watched Rossmann manhandle a number of boards and none recovered— maybe he has better luck in other videos but I can’t be bothered to keep watching. And the methods he’s using to diagnose and repair jeopardize the rest of the system anyway, so if it wasn’t at risk before he opened it, it is now.
As far as I can tell, this is an entirely hypothetical problem being hypothesized by people with an agenda.
This is the part that kinda made my skin crawl throughout the videos.
Rossmann goes on and on about how he refuses to use NAND chips from a donor board because they’ll have an unknown write history and he, being very customer focused, would never give a customer a component that might fail in the not so distant future.
But look at how cavalier he is about treating these MacBooks, in particular as regards ESD. You can complain about flash chips being “wear parts”, but if you manage ESD like this then literally every part in the system is made a wear part.
No static mat (that silicone mat is soft, and helps hold parts, but is not a proper static mat), no wrist straps, and a freaking plastic bag holding parts and stored in the machine. Jumping and rubbing clothing while playing dart gun games then dragging his sleeves across the machine, and what really set my teeth on edge: opening a cellophane package to get darts to load his gun and leaving the cellophane next to the machine while he worked on it. Just hearing the cellophane…
Then he takes the metal screws and such from the bench and loads them into a customer’s open machine with a plan to work on it the next day.
He puts sooooo much solder on the BGA pads right after commenting how easily pads short when the chip was removed.
And he must get a buzz from solder flux, because he goes through it by the gallon.
And then there’s the time he replaces one part with another part because the numbers are close. They’re different, he knows that they’re different but doesn’t know how they’re different, and he installs it anyway. His justification is that he thinks it’s ok to put an 1.8V input into a 3.3V chip. It’s not. The minimum high input voltage for a 3.3V chip is 2.3V, the minimum output high voltage for a 1.8V chip is 1.3V. And it’s a power supply chip to boot, so are these pins being used as analog references to the power circuit? He doesn’t seem to care. After saying he doesn’t want to blow anything else up on the board, he puts the wrong part on the pad, powers it up, and then blames Apple.
So, for all the grandstanding around treating his customers repairs with respect, there are so many basic violations happening with the hardware under his care because, in the end, he’s just tinkering.
And while he's trying to explain that solder balls are caused by a failed NAND putting tension on the line, he's digging them out and flicking them around the customers PCB with a pair of tweezers saying he could replace the NAND chips but they might have write cycles on them already… Little flecks of conductive solder littered around the logic board? That's free to the customer...
YouTube makes it easy to see what people actually care about watching and repeating over and over again. In this case:
1. Grabs girlfriend by shoulders and exclaims “you’re learning: it’s an Apple product, throw it away!”
2. Thermal image of the processor overheating, which is objectively cool to see
3. Uses girlfriend as human shield in Nerf Dart war
4. Concluding rant about Apple
1. Apple SSD rant
2. Talking about how he’s too outspoken to be advertiser friendly
3. BGA pad reveal
4. Apple rant while piling loose screws into customer MacBook
5. Story about confronting restaurant customers who commented on his girlfriend
6. Closing Apple rant
So yeah, it seems people spend most of their time replaying his rants, and not so much watching him work.
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Exactly. I mean, if you're importing them by using a sharpie to hide the printing, you know you're doing something shady. Even if you used the tooling, you don't need to print the logo...
Genuine doesn't have a lot of definitions. Is it what it claims to be: an actual Apple battery? No, it is not. Rossmann may want to frame it as Apple stiffing their vendors, but that's not how I typically see these things work. Most often the purchasing company pays the tooling NRE.
At the end of the day, Apple didn't source from these vendors or authorize them to sell products with the Apple logo but they did anyway. That's the definition of counterfeit. It could be because all the vendors were awesome but Apple didn't need them all, but it's more likely that they found a problem with the samples they received-- a failure to maintain quality control, an inability to deliver on time, labor practices that violate Apple's effort to improve how their vendors treat their workforce, finding parts being sold to the black market, could be anything. But they didn't meet Apple's standards.
It could be that they failed safety testing or any of the million compliance tests that you need to pass to import batteries that have very specific markings on them indicating they have been properly tested.
These batteries can't be assumed better than random, but there's every reason to assume they're worse. Apple abandoned their tooling and rejected the material, for one thing. And they're willing to lie right on the package calling everything they claim about them into question.
There's a reason you don't do business with criminals-- they're untrustworthy.
My stand at the end of 20 pages has not changed much. I'm advising everyone to get AppleCare coverage. There is a consistency of service and consideration you can expect from Apple anywhere on the planet.
If I were running Apple, I too would ensure my patrons were well-cared for throughout their Apple experience. If my customer takes his machine to an independent technician and gets an erratic experience, I don't want my reputation taking a hit for it: if this means locking-down the machine, so be it.
Outside Apple coverage, I'd be happy recommending everyone take their machines to Louis Rossman. He's a conscientious and skilled technician. But I would try to come-up with a strategy for people of Louis' quality to be at least partially within the Apple umbrella, while respecting their independence.
If I were running Apple, I too would ensure my patrons were well-cared for throughout their Apple experience. If my customer takes his machine to an independent technician and gets an erratic experience, I don't want my reputation taking a hit for it: if this means locking-down the machine, so be it.
Outside Apple coverage, I'd be happy recommending everyone take their machines to Louis Rossman. He's a conscientious and skilled technician. But I would try to come-up with a strategy for people of Louis' quality to be at least partially within the Apple umbrella, while respecting their independence.
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