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Louis Rossman on soldered SSD
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I've thought about this, and I think a good middle ground would be to have a setting that can be enabled or disabled by the user (requiring iCloud login with MFA, and possibly even additional verification if that's a requirement) to enable a chip (or other sensitive hardware) to be replaced.
This would help them maintain reasonably good security without necessarily compromising repairability for the user. There might be government officials who need more, but frankly they probably already have custom hardware stacks for this sort of thing.
I’ve never had a exhaust system on a car or motorcycle fail on me
I’d NEVER buy a car that was garbage if it did fail though
You mean, the Briddish?The same reason British omit the T in many words
North Americans, obviously.
I think he was trying to add some substance to this otherwise pointless Groundhog Day thread 😆
What really hacks me off is when GE tack welds the heating elements in my toaster. They could just as easily make those things user replaceable, they’re only good for about 10,000 slices of toast and I keep my toasters a long time. Pure greed on GE’s part.
Sure, I could keep a toaster oven around as backup, but it’s time for “right to repair” to come to the toaster industry.
Sure, I could keep a toaster oven around as backup, but it’s time for “right to repair” to come to the toaster industry.
How interesting that you are replying to to questions asked of someone else..... you must be really popular at parties (especially since you took my comment so serious.... sarcasm must be different in Australia).
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Like it or not, Apple devices are generally not cost effective to get repaired through official channels (Apple or AASP) if they're more than a few years old and out of warranty, unless the repair is classified as battery service, which is the one repair that Apple charges near or below cost for parts plus labor.
It's pretty clear that they want everyone to get AppleCare+. Over the past few years they've continued to make the repair experience better if you have AppleCare+ (unlimited incidents of accidental damage, Express Replacement, optional Theft and Loss coverage for iPhone) and more expensive if you don't have it.
I don't have a problem with getting AppleCare+ for all my devices because I see the value in the service Apple provides. People say it's not worth it, but if you know what you're doing, you can ensure you get the most of your AppleCare+ benefits. This is especially beneficial if you tend to hand down your devices to friends and family around when your 2 or 3 years of AppleCare+ coverage is set to expire, as I do.
It's pretty clear that they want everyone to get AppleCare+. Over the past few years they've continued to make the repair experience better if you have AppleCare+ (unlimited incidents of accidental damage, Express Replacement, optional Theft and Loss coverage for iPhone) and more expensive if you don't have it.
I don't have a problem with getting AppleCare+ for all my devices because I see the value in the service Apple provides. People say it's not worth it, but if you know what you're doing, you can ensure you get the most of your AppleCare+ benefits. This is especially beneficial if you tend to hand down your devices to friends and family around when your 2 or 3 years of AppleCare+ coverage is set to expire, as I do.
And he’s right 99.9% of cases. All I see him advocating about is making the devices repair-friendly, or at least not purposefully manufacture them to become bricks.
We need people like him to advocate for the customers. Regardless of being reactionary he’s doing the right thing for everyone and more people should.
Agreed. Everything involves tradeoffs. For me, and most of the people I know, changing internal SSDs isn't a priority, but reliability is.
In all the years I was able to swap drives, I'm not sure I ever did in a laptop. I added drives into additional bays in the towers, but generally left my boot drives intact whenever possible. Now that I don't have additional bays in anything I use, I've got a few Samsung T5/7 drives in a drawer I can use for fast expansion. That's true for all of my personal machines, and all of business machines I encounter follow the same pattern. Buy what you need and when the time comes to replace your hardware, reevaluate your needs.
And I don't generally buy AppleCare on anything.
So for me, and most of the people in my circles, improving reliability at the expense of modularity is an upside that matters with a downside outside my field of view.
Error 53 is an interesting example. Touch ID. Apple has gone through tremendous lengths to preserve user privacy and security in their biometrics and elsewhere, yet one obvious vulnerability is the sensor itself. Remember, Huawei has been essentially banned from selling equipment in the US because of concerns they would backdoor hardware, so this isn't purely hypothetical. Serializing the TouchID sensor and implementing tamper detection is an obvious step to take.
Likewise trying to maintain calibration of FaceID and ensuring that OEM parts are used in 3rd party repairs, and that those 3rd party repair houses don't undermine the customer experience of Apple's products.
The pattern I see over and over here, and in so many other areas these days is people who don't understand the technology assuming they know how things work and when it doesn't go their way they assume conspiracy rather than ignorance.
Rossmann very much included. And it's people like him and MaxTech who appear informed to the ignorant, that just fuel this.
I'm taking your comments a bit out of order here, but these two points are better seen next to each other. Yes, Apple has some of the best engineers in the world, and they've made some of the most advanced, usable and reliable products on the market. That's not a coincidence, I don't think. They have looked at these problems and these are the decisions they've made to enable the company to make hundreds of millions of the most advanced, usable and reliable electronics on the market.
Yes, every decision is intentional, but intentional is not a synonym for nefarious. By implying there's a secret motivation behind certain decisions, people are suggesting that Apple could not only lead the market in things like secure and private biometrics, and make nearly all glass products that drop and survive, but they could do that and also achieve these secondary goals. That's unreasonable.
It's weird to say "Macs are more reliable and they have fewer internal connectors on high speed components" without at least pausing to think that the truth might be "Macs are more reliable because they have fewer internal connectors".
Yep, I agree. People who don't understand why decisions are made, and who are suspicious enough to not believe the answer when they're told why decisions are made, are going to look back to when any teenager could lift the hood of their car and fix anything that's gone wrong and think the world has conspired against them in changing that.
Some people, hopefully, are curious enough to consider less cynical interpretations.
Most people aren't affected either way and don't much care.
Yeah, I don't disagree with you and hope you don't take my commentary on some of the arguments I hear people make that may be adjacent to yours as a way of indirectly tarring your statements with the same brush.
What we're already seeing in the iPhone, for example, is repairability and ease of recycling are other areas of innovation that Apple is pursuing. Battery replacements, for example, have become less onerous. More is likely to come. But I firmly believe those are secondary goals behind making products that push the state of the art on technology, usability and reliability. They have to be in order to stay competitive.
He, like Linus Tech Tips have done a lot of good to amplify the voice of consumer rights and right to repair. I would never say otherwise. That also
doesn’t make him any less of an engagement-chasing self help peddling huckster.
Whilst i respect his capabilities as an electronics repair guy, i’ve never seen anyone whine so much about the things that keep him employed.
Its rage-bait for views.
He does have some points if you were to isolate them in a vacuum, but back in the real world there are trade offs and compromises made for reliability, form factor, performance, etc. There’s no beating laws of physics and shorter wires to components give better performance and reliability, smaller form factor, etc..
Soldered SSD is also more secure which is a major reason Apple are doing it. It’s much more difficult to drop a hardware implant into the device in-line between the SSD and the hosting machine, or replace the drive with one containing malware if its soldered to the board and encrypted with a key in the machine’s secure enclave.
99.9% of customers will never be exposed to such an attack on their privacy/security, but they do happen and have been happening since way before 2010. If you don’t care about such things, you’re free to buy something else.
Its rage-bait for views.
He does have some points if you were to isolate them in a vacuum, but back in the real world there are trade offs and compromises made for reliability, form factor, performance, etc. There’s no beating laws of physics and shorter wires to components give better performance and reliability, smaller form factor, etc..
Soldered SSD is also more secure which is a major reason Apple are doing it. It’s much more difficult to drop a hardware implant into the device in-line between the SSD and the hosting machine, or replace the drive with one containing malware if its soldered to the board and encrypted with a key in the machine’s secure enclave.
99.9% of customers will never be exposed to such an attack on their privacy/security, but they do happen and have been happening since way before 2010. If you don’t care about such things, you’re free to buy something else.
Don't forget the "Little Snitch told me Apple secretly deployed CSAM scanning after promising not to and now we'll have to stop sharing cartoons of the prophet" rant...
There's probably been more since then, but that was the last view I'll ever credit this guy...
Just like how lieutenant is pronounced in the UK.😆So do you think its even remotely conceivable that certain regions in the vast United States will pronounce words differently, including soldering?
Just to educate you, there are many different regional dialects here in the US. Depending on the region you're from, some words will sound quite a bit different.
*in your opinion, where Apple cares about customers, and not profit.
I don't see point of defending 0.01% of users, who care about it, while ignoring e-waste problems and customer rights to control and repair things they buy.
I'm also interested in cases when someone is patched older mac ssd with enabled encryption and get any useful data from it.
Do you really prefer to pay 500$ for new motherboard, when some consumable compenents fails, for this phantom reason?
And yea, best way is to not buy things, if you want them to change next time. But when everyone starts doing this, we can only hope for sane regulation at some point.
Hardware acceleration isn’t user setting, and the same security enclave is used by Touch ID. It’s pretty simple, you want repairability, Apple isn’t the right company. I have so many problems and performance issues with bitlocker on windows, it’s a pain to encrypt devices with out hardware accelerator. But that’s the trade off for wanting my workstation upgradable and use an NVidia GPU.
It’s called evolution. Products get compact, add more to existing features. I used to replace transistors in TV sets. Then came ICs , you had to replace the whole IC. Then TVs became use and throw, now same with refrigerators to most extent. I remember lifting those old TVs needed two people lol. But they were repairable.
I found Rossmann's videos a year or two ago and was into them for awhile. He brings up some good points about Right to Repair, and generally speaking I would rather things be more repairable than less.
But after watching a decent number of his videos, I realized that he's biased, ungrateful, and petulant. He isn't objective about the problems with Apple: he calls them out for certain things that Windows manufacturers do as well, but he acts like Apple is the only one doing them.
He's made his living repairing Apple products, but every other video is him complaining about Apple's failings. He never acknowledges the things they've done right.
He often becomes visibly agitated in his videos, speaking faster and faster and getting this panicked look in his eyes. If I were talking to him in person, it would make me uncomfortable to the point of not wanting to continue the conversation with him.
On a side note, I also got tired of the repetition in his videos. I think he does this to pad out the length of his YouTube videos because of the algorithm or whatever. Make Point A. Elaborate on Point A. Make Point A again. Give another example of Point A. Make Point B. Make Point A again and talk about how it relates to Point B. I'm not saying he should be making 30 second TikTok videos, but he could easily cut the length of his videos by 30% if he removed all the repetition.
At the end of the day, I don't want to sit around watching people complain all the time. I know there are problems in the world, but it's still possible to approach these problems in a positive way.
But after watching a decent number of his videos, I realized that he's biased, ungrateful, and petulant. He isn't objective about the problems with Apple: he calls them out for certain things that Windows manufacturers do as well, but he acts like Apple is the only one doing them.
He's made his living repairing Apple products, but every other video is him complaining about Apple's failings. He never acknowledges the things they've done right.
He often becomes visibly agitated in his videos, speaking faster and faster and getting this panicked look in his eyes. If I were talking to him in person, it would make me uncomfortable to the point of not wanting to continue the conversation with him.
On a side note, I also got tired of the repetition in his videos. I think he does this to pad out the length of his YouTube videos because of the algorithm or whatever. Make Point A. Elaborate on Point A. Make Point A again. Give another example of Point A. Make Point B. Make Point A again and talk about how it relates to Point B. I'm not saying he should be making 30 second TikTok videos, but he could easily cut the length of his videos by 30% if he removed all the repetition.
At the end of the day, I don't want to sit around watching people complain all the time. I know there are problems in the world, but it's still possible to approach these problems in a positive way.
Oh I don't, trust me. You make a lot of very good points (I don't want to do an inline quote of the full post, but I've read it in full and you make a good argument). You mention the moves that Apple is making in the direction of repairability, and particularly their self repair program (which is a big step in the right direction on that front). I agree with you here, and frankly this is more of what I want to see. Apple's reversal on butterfly keyboards (and the extremely minimal port selections from their top of the line laptops of the time) are other decisions that Apple has made where I think they absolutely are moving in the right direction on that front.
Where I'm coming from is largely that things like this are, to an extent, a response to a lot of consumer demand (as well as possibly some pressure from lawmakers) that these sorts of programs have come out. The same could be said about many of the other changes Apple made to their 14" and 16" laptops (really, it's all speculation), but from the outset, it sure seems like Apple did a very good job listening to their customers this time around.
Some folks have a tendency to always side with the underdog. Others have a much more top-down mindset of things. I think that there is value in both ways of thinking, and they tend to balance each other out. That's part of why I absolutely do understand where Louis Rossman comes from, even though his views on these things are much more extreme than mine. I love Apple products (I own four different Macs right now, I guess you could say I like to collect them, though I'm an amateur compared to some). But I also absolutely see the value that the pushback has too, as it encourages Apple to meet in the middle in ways that benefit the consumer in the end.
My 14" MacBook? There's not a thing I would change about it. It's probably (in my opinion) one of the best designed and most well engineered MacBooks Apple has ever put out. I wouldn't have said the same thing about the butterfly era ones, and I have to say, I'm glad Apple backtracked. If it weren't for the people saying "look, can we get these re-engineered, they're failing a lot" - I'm not sure what we would have ended up with in 2021 with the redesign, but all I will say is that I'm happy with the result.
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You got that exactly backwards. Only a small percentage of users care about upgradeability or running the computer for 10+ years where a repair becomes almost inevitable. Most right to repair arguments in computing domain call for a dictatorship of the minority, often making things worse for everyone just do that a small percentage of users get their way (not necessarily the case here, most commonly seen with push for user-replaceable batteries).
What about e-waste caused by modular components? That’s additional material cost you have to pay in 100% of cases as opposed to faulty components you pay in just a small percentage of cases
Nobody takes away that right from you. Repairs are readily available. And you are free to purchase extendable warranty that will cover all defects for the entire period of ownership.
That’s exactly what encryption is there for. What you are talking about is allowing thieves to get access to victims data.
I prefer that Apple takes care of this under warranty.
However, I do agree with you that paying hundreds of USD to replace a failed component is too much. That’s why we need a regulation that limits repair prices of components with limited lifespan like SSDs. But it should be up to Apple how they implement it.
The regulation should target reducing e-waste, component reuse rather replacement, keeping price reasonable, and component level recycling. Modularity is a red herring that doesn’t really solve anything while introducing points of failure. IMO, component-level repair is the superior way to achieve this.
There’s a very clear security reason for it, but for whatever reason nobody really wants to talk about how much machines are targeted by governments all over the world.
Apple Configurator requirements, from my perspective, is one of Apple’s answers to intelligence agencies intercepting shipments to install hardware exploits.
NSA reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spy malware
The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.www.theverge.com
This is apple’s approach to making it harder for things like the TAO division of the NSA to do what they do.
The NSA Uses Powerful Toolbox in Effort to Spy on Global Networks
The NSA's TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency's top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting.www.spiegel.de
Cisco CEO warns Obama NSA 'load stations' threaten the entire tech industry
Cisco's John Chambers has told Obama why the NSA's national security efforts may do more harm than good.www.zdnet.com
Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant
Servers, routers get “beacons” implanted at secret locations by NSA’s TAO team.arstechnica.com
Yup, this was EXACTLY what I was talking about. If you think this sort of thing isn't going on, well... it has been for years (it's just an extension of the cops taking your phone at the border, or if you're arrested, etc.)
You may not be a target, but plenty of people are - and you may end up being a target though no action of your own without even knowing it (due to association with a target).
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