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narn74

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 17, 2022
5
3
My Macbook Air M1 (2020) suddenly shutdown with in 2 seconds of log in, unable to power on Again and last 20 months i used moderately only. After analysing apple service centre team said M1 logic board failure and they can't retrieve back data and entire mother board need to be replaced. Mother board replacement cost is half of new Mac book air prize. why is apple not repairing logic board only? even if i replace mother board apple will give 90 days warranty only, if it happens again after 90 days then what is the use of spending 600$.
 
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TightLines

macrumors 6502
Jun 10, 2022
338
464
That is BS they don’t unmount and use existing SSD and RAM and Graphics processor too… that will be just one of many very negative things to attribute to Apple computers… thats total BS especially on the SSD where you endure a loss of data too!!!
 
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okkibs

macrumors 65816
Sep 17, 2022
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The modern Macbooks are essentially made out of the top case with the input devices, the logic board, the battery and the display assembly. If one of these has even a smaller issue, that entire part is swapped out by Apple. That's why the repair bill is so high, there is just nobody at the Apple Store who could fix a broken logic board, no matter how small the issue may be.

You can try an independent repair shop like what Louis Rossmann offers, outside NYC you can mail in the device as well. They do repairs of the individual components to keep the cost down.

Saving your data is not possible unless the logic board is repaired instead of replaced, because while the data can be read from the soldered SSD, it is always encrypted on M1 and the encryption key is bound to the logic board (it sits within the M1 in the secure enclave). So even if the SSD were swappable like it is in the Mac Studio, it is impossible to read data in a usable state from it.
 

jav6454

macrumors Core
Nov 14, 2007
22,303
6,264
1 Geostationary Tower Plaza
My Macbook Air M1 (2020) suddenly shutdown with in 2 seconds of log in, unable to power on Again and last 20 months i used moderately only. After analysing apple service centre team said M1 logic board failure and they can't retrieve back data and entire mother board need to be replaced. Mother board replacement cost is half of new Mac book air prize. why is apple not repairing logic board only? even if i replace mother board apple will give 90 days warranty only, if it happens again after 90 days then what is the use of spending 600$.
That's cause the SSD is soldered into the logic/motherboard. Hence, if it fails, data is lost as you can't connect the SSD externally.
 

mi7chy

macrumors G4
Oct 24, 2014
10,622
11,294
2 years is very premature failure compared to other laptop brands that last 12 years or longer. Contact Tim Cook executive management team to voice your displeasure. If they don't work with you then publicize your experience everywhere such as reddit.com/r/apple. $600 for a motherboard replacement with 90 day warranty is a rip off when a complete new base M1 MBA with 1 year warranty goes for not much more than that.
 

okkibs

macrumors 65816
Sep 17, 2022
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1,005
data is lost as you can't connect the SSD externally.
That's not exactly the issue. If it was just a regular SSD that's soldered on you could still recover data from it, for example by soldering it from the broken Mac onto a working Mac. The underlying issue is that the data is only readable by the specific M1 chip on the broken M1 Mac. Otherwise you could recover the data on a Mac Studio which does not have soldered storage. But if you move the storage from one Studio to the other, it is impossible to recover data.

Essentially the M1 chip together with the soldered-on flash storage forms the SSD, so at this point you can no longer say what's the CPU, what's the GPU, what's the SSD, what's the RAM, because the M1 chip is all of those.

The distinction isn't entirely useless, because this means that whether or not the storage is soldered on, data is never recoverable if the Mac doesn't start up.
 

jav6454

macrumors Core
Nov 14, 2007
22,303
6,264
1 Geostationary Tower Plaza
That's not exactly the issue. If it was just a regular SSD that's soldered on you could still recover data from it, for example by soldering it from the broken Mac onto a working Mac. The underlying issue is that the data is only readable by the specific M1 chip on the broken M1 Mac. Otherwise you could recover the data on a Mac Studio which does not have soldered storage. But if you move the storage from one Studio to the other, it is impossible to recover data.

Essentially the M1 chip together with the soldered-on flash storage forms the SSD, so at this point you can no longer say what's the CPU, what's the GPU, what's the SSD, what's the RAM, because the M1 chip is all of those.

The distinction isn't entirely useless, because this means that whether or not the storage is soldered on, data is never recoverable if the Mac doesn't start up.
I didn't know that this was an extra layer of protection.
 
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theorist9

macrumors 68040
May 28, 2015
3,880
3,060
Some credit card companies will extend your warranty by a year when you purchase the item using their card. That's worth looking into for your laptop, since that would extend the warranty from one year to two:

For example:

And please remember these two things going forward:
a) *Always* regularly back up your data. I'd recommend both a nightly local backup (using an attached HD or SSD; I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner for this), and also having a backup you store offsite, either at a remote location or in the cloud.
b) If it's available in your country, *always* buy AppleCare+, especially for their laptops.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,521
19,674
Consumer electronics can fail at any time. Failure as described here is rare and probabilistic. In other words, you got unlucky. To protect yourselves from such risk in the future consider purchasing extended warranty next time.
 

ian87w

macrumors G3
Feb 22, 2020
8,704
12,638
Indonesia
Sorry to hear about your problems. This is what I'm afraid of with these new macs where everything is soldered. Not only they are overtly expensive, it's probably worse in my country where we only have authorized distributors and service centers, no actual Apple stores.

Imo for the price of these macs, one should probably include the cost of Applecare into the price. That rumored Apple hardware subscription service doesn't sound so bad anymore.

As for personal data, this is also why I have swallowed the bitter pill and simply use the cloud OneDrive for my personal files, part of Office 365 plan. That way, if my device is borked and the internal storage is bye bye, I can just log into a new machine, log in my onedrive, and done.
 
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narn74

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 17, 2022
5
3
Sorry to hear about your problems. This is what I'm afraid of with these new macs where everything is soldered. Not only they are overtly expensive, it's probably worse in my country where we only have authorized distributors and service centers, no actual Apple stores.

Imo for the price of these macs, one should probably include the cost of Applecare into the price. That rumored Apple hardware subscription service doesn't sound so bad anymore.

As for personal data, this is also why I have swallowed the bitter pill and simply use the cloud OneDrive for my personal files, part of Office 365 plan. That way, if my device is borked and the internal storage is bye bye, I can just log into a new machine, log in my onedrive, and done.
thanks
 

narn74

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 17, 2022
5
3
Consumer electronics can fail at any time. Failure as described here is rare and probabilistic. In other words, you got unlucky. To protect yourselves from such risk in the future consider purchasing extended warranty next time.
sure, thanks
 

narn74

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 17, 2022
5
3
The modern Macbooks are essentially made out of the top case with the input devices, the logic board, the battery and the display assembly. If one of these has even a smaller issue, that entire part is swapped out by Apple. That's why the repair bill is so high, there is just nobody at the Apple Store who could fix a broken logic board, no matter how small the issue may be.

You can try an independent repair shop like what Louis Rossmann offers, outside NYC you can mail in the device as well. They do repairs of the individual components to keep the cost down.

Saving your data is not possible unless the logic board is repaired instead of replaced, because while the data can be read from the soldered SSD, it is always encrypted on M1 and the encryption key is bound to the logic board (it sits within the M1 in the secure enclave). So even if the SSD were swappable like it is in the Mac Studio, it is impossible to read data in a usable state from it.
thanks, i will try
 

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
29,239
13,310
I'm thinking that in the future, a lot of Mac (m-series) owners who don't keep regular backups are going to lose everything when their logic boards or drives fail. Similar to the failures of fusion drives we're seeing now.

All the "security features" that Apple incorporates to "keep one's data secure" on the internal drive, are going to PREVENT data retrieval or recovery when there is a serious component failure.

This has made Apple's computer line essentially high-priced "throwaway items".
They work... as long as they keep working.
If they "break"... they're non-fixable, "get a new one"...
 
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w5jck

Suspended
Nov 9, 2013
1,516
1,934
2 years is very premature failure compared to other laptop brands that last 12 years or longer. Contact Tim Cook executive management team to voice your displeasure. If they don't work with you then publicize your experience everywhere such as reddit.com/r/apple. $600 for a motherboard replacement with 90 day warranty is a rip off when a complete new base M1 MBA with 1 year warranty goes for not much more than that.
Sounds like OP didn't have AppleCare+. Also, I've got old Macs from 2012 and 2014 that are still working fine having never experienced any issues, so one MacBook Air M1 going south doesn't mean Macs are proned to failure. If anything, my 40+ years of owning Macs and Apple IIs has shown me that Apple computers tend to far outlast the other brands.
 

okkibs

macrumors 65816
Sep 17, 2022
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I'm thinking that in the future, a lot of Mac (m-series) owners who don't keep regular backups are going to lose everything when their logic boards or drives fail. Similar to the failures of fusion drives we're seeing now.
That is true, however whenever you plug any external drive into a Mac Timemachine will ask you if you want to use it as a backup drive, and at least I have hammered into friend's brains to take backups regularly that it's become a running gag with some to ask me if my backup is up to date. Many people are aware that hardware can fail and just choose not to bother doing backups.

I "forced" a good friend to take a backup of their external drive and while it was finishing up they accidentally knocked the whole thing off the desk and that external drive (2.5 HDD) from that point on just clicked without spinning up. They got 90% of their data back and lost merely an hour of work (thankfully I used rsync) and ended up blaming me because none of this would have happened if it wasn't for creating the backup in the first place.

And another friend keeps their one year university project on a Mac with no backups - I replaced the old HDD for them with the most expensive non-qlc Samsung SSD I could find to give the data a better survival chance. But when I ask them to make a backup they laugh and literally refuse to.

At this point it's hard for me to emphasize with someone for losing their data, if you buy a computer you should at least research the basics and just googling "should i make backups" would do the trick.

Of course that does not excuse the repair-unfriendly Apple designs.

All the "security features" that Apple incorporates to "keep one's data secure" on the internal drive, are going to PREVENT data retrieval or recovery when there is a serious component failure.
If it was about security they could let you recover data and keep the security in place, it's not about that. Before M1 they had to put extra components on the logic board to handle the SSD, which meant more complexity as well as buying chips from third parties. Since the M1 they have moved all this into the M1 chip and the only thing left to solder on is the raw flash storage.

Apple does that because it has so many advantages for them, the entire logic for storing data is now in their control, both software and hardware required for the SSD to function is now made by Apple. This is part of what enables the insane SSD speeds on the Mac Studio and 14" and 16" Macbooks, the only limit is how many flash chips they can pack onto the logic board and how good their own implementation is.

And it's a cost-saving measure, not in terms of getting a worse product, but in terms of reducing the amount of components you need to pack onto the logic board.

If they "break"... they're non-fixable, "get a new one"...
But you had that same issue when you could still swap out memory and storage. I had logic boards of Macbooks 2007 and 2008 break due to the Nvidia defect, half a dozen times per device (!). A friend had a flexgate 2016 model (a too short display cable rips off the connector thus damaging the logic board and the display assembly) they had to bring in for repair, and so on.

How many dead Macbooks can be brought back to life just by swapping memory or the SSD? There will very often be a shorted component or blown capacitor on the logic board, or bad solder points like on those 2007 and 2008 models with the Nvidia graphics.

I would rather be able to swap out the SSD and the RAM, sure, I am not saying Apple shouldn't offer that or that I like their business practices. The point is that "if they break" it will still be "get a new one" because whether a manufacturing defect kills the logic board or liquid damage does the trick, that logic board is toast no matter what.

I don't run a repair shop or anything, so I can't claim to know the numbers, but it is my opinion that most Macs break due to a defect unrelated to storage or memory. When you look at what the worst issues with Macbooks were over the past years it was butterfly keyboards breaking, batteries swelling, staingate, flexgate, and some lesser known issues, for example the early 2015 13" models have a faulty component on the logic board that Apple to this day never offered a repair program for.

Not once have I ever seen a ssdgate or ramgate issue. Again, I don't say these components never fail, but if we take the case of the OP in this thread with his broken M1 Air, it's very likely that even with swappable ram and ssd he would still have to get the logic board replaced and "get a new one" would apply. Of course then he could rescue the data, which he can't now.
 

K_hurramshahzad

macrumors newbie
Sep 22, 2022
1
0
My Macbook Air M1 (2020) suddenly shutdown with in 2 seconds of log in, unable to power on Again and last 20 months i used moderately only. After analysing apple service centre team said M1 logic board failure and they can't retrieve back data and entire mother board need to be replaced. Mother board replacement cost is half of new Mac book air prize. why is apple not repairing logic board only? even if i replace mother board apple will give 90 days warranty only, if it happens again after 90 days then what is the use of spending 600$.
I am also facing Same issue and 2 months warranty Left, but I don’t remember tha Apple ID of laptop, is there any solution to find apple ID from serial? Apple store asking first turn off Find My Location, then will replace.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,521
19,674
I'm thinking that in the future, a lot of Mac (m-series) owners who don't keep regular backups are going to lose everything when their logic boards or drives fail. Similar to the failures of fusion drives we're seeing now.

All the "security features" that Apple incorporates to "keep one's data secure" on the internal drive, are going to PREVENT data retrieval or recovery when there is a serious component failure.

This has made Apple's computer line essentially high-priced "throwaway items".
They work... as long as they keep working.
If they "break"... they're non-fixable, "get a new one"...

How is this different from any other computer that uses SSDs? Already with HDDs recovery is practically impossible (unless you are willing to pay a hefty price to a specialist).

Backups are a vital part of using a computer. There are no ifs or buts here.
 

xraydoc

Contributor
Oct 9, 2005
11,023
5,485
192.168.1.1
All electronic devices can fail. Even if the SSD was a separate, unencrypted component, a failure of the main board could still damage the SSD to the point of being unrecoverable. The reason new Macs have such fast storage as they're no longer a separate system part, but deeply integrated to the whole system.

Back ups are not optional. I'm amazed at how many people in 2022 still are surprised when they, for example, crush their iPhone and are shocked that their photos are irretrievable because they never bothered to turn on any backup system.

Please, for anyone reading this -- back up your stuff.

I take no chances. My data is worth more than the laptop itself. My data is:
1) continuously synced to either iCloud or Dropbox (everything goes to iCloud and some work stuff goes to Dropbox); almost no data files are stored only locally on my laptop.
2) wirelessly backed up via Time Machine to a network drive when my machine is home and on wifi.
3) backed up via Time Machine to a USB SSD when my laptop is docked at my desk (as well as continuing with #2 above).
 

theorist9

macrumors 68040
May 28, 2015
3,880
3,060
2 years is very premature failure...
Yes, it should absolutely last longer than that.
...compared to other laptop brands that last 12 years or longer.
Compared to what brands? Here are the results of Consumer Reports' survey of laptop brand reliabilities:
1663951732900.png

1663951742689.png

*************************************************
From your signature line:
1663951807952.png

Yes, and you should really stop contributing to that.
 

okkibs

macrumors 65816
Sep 17, 2022
1,070
1,005
Already with HDDs recovery is practically impossible (unless you are willing to pay a hefty price to a specialist).
It was about the distinction of a different part of the logic board failing that has nothing to do with the storage. If the computer that the HDD is attached to fails, you can plug in the functioning HDD somewhere else to get the data back. Now that the entire logic board is essentially the SSD, any failure involving the logic board will now wipe your data (if you give it to Apple, since they will switch out the entire board).

But I do agree, I have told family, friends and strangers online to create backups so many times but as I mentioned previously, some people are disinterested to the point where they'll simply refuse to backup their data. "This computer has lasted me since x years, it's certainly not gonna fail me now!" And if it breaks eventually, they'll say that particular brand is terrible and caused them to lose so much data...

I have really given up now, even if you give them an external harddrive and force them to make an initial backup, they'll have lost the drive faster than you can blink.

I am also facing Same issue and 2 months warranty Left, but I don’t remember tha Apple ID of laptop, is there any solution to find apple ID from serial? Apple store asking first turn off Find My Location, then will replace.
The Mac will display parts of the e-mail address used for the Apple ID. Have you lost access to your e-mail address as well? Apple can help you to restore access to your ID. If you can't restore access to your Apple ID, nobody can tell if you are the actual owner of that ID. The device might belong to someone else who locked it on purpose. You do not need to know your password to restore access, but surely you must know your own e-mail address...

I have seen legitimate owners having connected their Mac, or other accounts, to some random friend's e-mail address and then facing similar issues as you. I don't know why anyone would do that, but your best bet is to call up Apple and ask them for assistance to recover the Apple ID.
 
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theorist9

macrumors 68040
May 28, 2015
3,880
3,060
The reason new Macs have such fast storage as they're no longer a separate system part, but deeply integrated to the whole system.
Agree with everything you said about needing to do regular backups. But this statement isn't correct.

The storage on the Mac Studio is just as fast as on the laptops, and it's on removable sticks. So there is nothing about their integrated CPU-GPU architechture that precludes replaceable storage.

[Yes, they integrated the controller with the SoC, so only the NAND itself is removable, but there's nothing about their architecture that requires that.]
 
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okkibs

macrumors 65816
Sep 17, 2022
1,070
1,005
The storage on the Mac Studio is just as fast as on the laptops, and it's on removable sticks. So there is nothing about their integrated CPU-GPU architechture that precludes replaceable storage.
...and you can indeed replace the storage on a Mac Studio just fine. But one of the reasons of it being so fast is indeed placing the controller with the M1 chip. And while that doesn't preclude replaceable storage, it still makes data recovery impossible, which I think was the point here. Data recovery from a non-bootable Mac Studio is impossible.

But socketed flash modules on a Macbook would make repairs and upgrades easier, and would still fit together with Apple's design. I honestly can't tell if they still solder it on latest Macs because it's better for transfer speeds and reliability, or if they genuinly want to to make their users write them fat checks anytime there's an issue.

But I am sure Apple uses only the highest quality flash they can find, if that broke too often their soldered design would be costly for them as well.
 

theorist9

macrumors 68040
May 28, 2015
3,880
3,060
...and you can indeed replace the storage on a Mac Studio just fine.
Yes you can replace them. But, as an aside, note that testing has shown they can't be upgraded. The storage can be swapped between same-sized MacStudios, but linus tech tips and others found that NAND from a higher-TB Mac Studio won't run in the socket of a lower-TB MacStudio.
But one of the reasons of it being so fast is indeed placing the controller with the M1 chip.
Could you please provide evidence to support this? I don't have time to check this is in detail now but, from what I recall, a conventional SSD (i.e., one containtan a controller, like the WD SN850X) is just as fast as the Apple SSD's.

I suppose it's possible that having the controller in the T2 chip helps reduce the encryption speed penalty, but I'm just guessing.
 
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