Wait, the topic was internal storage, as it was spurred by you responding to socketed NVMe drives and RAM.
What you’re talking about, external media, is an entirely different subject. You’ve moved the conversation to external expansion?
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The end of Tim Cook's reign is near.
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What you’re talking about, external media, is an entirely different subject. You’ve moved the conversation to external expansion?
I was responding to someone saying that there was no room for expandable internal storage. But ejectable storage would take even more room.
I don’t understand? How is the microSD a response to socketed internal storage? I’m lost at where we are right now.
Was the usage of external media meant as an alternative to the lack of socketed internal storage? I think that’s what you were getting at when talking about transfer speeds.
Sorry I’m on allergy meds so my comprehension is a bit lacking right now. Can you rephrase your train of thought for me because I am genuine lost here?
I think you are getting too specific and missing the big picture. Apple keeps blocking simple, low cost, solutions in order to make you pay more. The distinction between internal and external storage isn't that big - they both go against Apple overcharging for storage, and forcing you to depend on their services, such as iCloud.
Thanks for responding. Two main points:
1) You can connect a micro SD card to any iPhone via an adapter; all the ones that I looked up are all easily matching your (for modern standards) very slow transfer rate available on that card. The official adapters are $29, and have been around for quite some time. No conspiracy re: external storage. I believe the 16" pro and the studio also offer SD card slots again, a welcome addition for sure.
2) The very best NVME can match the internal storage on the Mac, from what I understand, but nothing else can. If they are moving the storage to a socketed solution, then it has to meet or exceed the current storage speeds. NVME uses M/.2/NGFF connectors. a quick search shows that they are much smaller than other solutions, but are still 2.3mm in height, 1.8mm of which must be above the MB, with additional clearance for the NVME storage module itself. The space reserved on the motherboard for the NAND chips is very small, so you'd need to work with the smallest NVME modules, if they are available at the comparable speeds.
Upgradeable internal storage isn't 'not doable', but it is extra challenges for a vanishingly small group of users. And that is before the changes/compromises that come on the software side.
To be clear, that SD card tops out at 220/mb a second, the internal storage of the MBP M3 is 6200/mb a second write and 4300/mb a second read... heck my welllll used 2019 Intel MBP (13/i5/16/1TB), 2/3rds full, still clocks at around 2000 write / 2600 read. So the latest MacBook Pro is clocking in 20x - 30x faster than your SD card, while my 5 year old storage is still doing 10x + the SD card's speed. Those things are not comparable. Most NVME on the market at a reasonable price is capped at around 3000/mb a second, which is still half the speed of the current MBP internal.
For external drives, there are much better, easy to connect and use options that are much better than the SD card - TB offers awesome performance, as does proper USB-C connected SSDs.
For RAM - In the past, I used to upgrade this on most of our Macs, at work and home. Then when it became unfeasible, I started buying the "next tier" ram for our work computers - 8 instead of 4, 16 instead of 8. The last Mac I did that for is my 2019 MBP. For the next round of computers I stuck with the base RAM config. We have multiple Apple Silicon Airs and Pros in addition to my intel MBP. I have one user/use case that is currently having RAM issues - My wife works from home, uses her M1 air for work, volunteering and home management - and she Does hit the upper memory limit on occasion; But she also runs multiple user accounts logged simultaneously, with each one having a pile of programs open (Excel, Firefox, Chrome, Music, Safari, Touch Draw, Metes and Bounds, Word, Mail, Messages, Pages and Numbers being the standard - with all the accounts having about the same open, except Metes and Bounds and Touch Draw - and don't ask how many tabs are open in each browser). About once a month she'll get a spat of "out of memory" messages, and she restarts... and they go away. In part, likely because she isn't shutting down or even restarting her computer. When she upgrades we'll get her the second step ram (she has her eyes on the 15 Air instead of the 14 pro...); when I upgrade I'll get the mid level Pro with its 'more base' ram and that will be that.
Techies see the high ram/storage prices and think it's a bait and switch but honestly I think most people look at it and shrug and just buy the base model... and most of them don't even wonder about a 'what if' for more storage and ram. Look at what's available on ebay etc for the post 2016 Macs, how few of them have higher than base storage and ram, if you wonder about what I'm saying.
Just because Apple doesn't sell the exact internal configuration that you desire doesn't mean that there aren't options out there, or that you specific use case makes sense for the consumer base a a whole. Thanks for reading.
People saying he'll announce his resignation at WWDC.... seriously?
Aside from this being simply the wishful thinking of reflexive Cook-haters, the timing makes no sense.
Cook knows that if he were to make such an announcement at WWDC (or any other event), that would be the only thing that gets coverage. No one in the tech press or the mainstream press would say a word about anything else. It would be completely idiotic to make an announcement like this at WWDC.
I know the Cook haters aren't thinking in reality, but come on. At least be reasonable with the rage dream posts left here for the rest of us.
Aside from this being simply the wishful thinking of reflexive Cook-haters, the timing makes no sense.
Cook knows that if he were to make such an announcement at WWDC (or any other event), that would be the only thing that gets coverage. No one in the tech press or the mainstream press would say a word about anything else. It would be completely idiotic to make an announcement like this at WWDC.
I know the Cook haters aren't thinking in reality, but come on. At least be reasonable with the rage dream posts left here for the rest of us.
I don’t follow, but as other have pointed out NVMe drives (what Apple uses) operate at 3000+ MB/s while the SD cards top out at around 300 MB/s, or 190 in the example of the specific card you mentioned.
Even Android isn’t nearly that slow while using UFS storage.
Capacity is only one aspect of storage. SD’s are fine for external storage, but they’re unreliable for OS usage (hence even Android world has largely phased it out) and extremely slow for what smartphones need to do in today’s world. They’re great as a target for cameras to point to, but they’re just not even remotely a comparison to UFS, let alone the NVMe implementation Apple is doing.
That’s certainly a possibility. The question is where do they go?
Windows? Microsoft doesn’t strike me as a brand kids will gravitate to.
Chrome is entrenched in a lot of public schools, but Google doesn’t seem to have converted this to the professional market.
In the mobile space, it’s still a two-horse race and unless some profound shift that makes brands/platforms irrelevant, I’m not sure anything will change the current duopoly.
Leaving aside your pivot from laptops (which have an SD slot) to iPhones (which never had upgradeable RAM or nonvolatile storage), you keep making statements like "there's no reason" and "it's just to support their pricing". I don't understand where you get the confidence for those assertions.
I've seen the teardown of the iPhone-- there's no air inside in which to place anything. So already there's a compromise to make space. Then you need to put another hole in the housing which both weakens it and leaves it susceptible to water and dust ingress. And it would impact the aesthetic design of the product with a hole that most people won't use. The place where you'd put the hole for that card-- the metal band around the outside-- is the antenna array for a dozen or so different radios each carefully tuned to make the most of the available metal.
So yes, there are reasons. Obviously it isn't impossible to do, but it is impossible to do without compromises that affect every owner of the phone. For the small number of users who would use it, there's other solutions.
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I agree with the OP.
Not that Cook’s departure is imminent — I wouldn’t be surprised if he remains another ten years.
But I am disappointed with his work. Losing Ten Billion Dollars on a car project is enough to get any other CEO in the world fired. I could understand if they spent that money and realized that they couldn’t be cost-effective, or that the market wasn’t right, etc. But if the NY Times is correct that they spent Ten Billion Dollars and canceled the project because managers couldn’t agree on a goal... that is a staggering CEO failure. It’s the job of a CEO to get people into a room, understand the disagreements, and set a path to move forward. That’s precisely what management is.
Apple Vision is another story. I think that product is ahead of its time. So was the first Macintosh, by the way. I don’t know if it will succeed or fail; it’s just too early to know. I think Apple was right to develop it.
Apple’s problem seems to be that they have a core set of products which are only being innovated incrementally: Laptop, tablet, watch, phone. They’re great products, the prices are great. I bought Apple laptops for myself, my kids, my wife, and everybody’s happy with them. They’re executing beautifully on the products they have, but Apple Stores don’t have any new products except for Vision glasses which cost too much and do too little. The Car could have been great; who knows?
Not that Cook’s departure is imminent — I wouldn’t be surprised if he remains another ten years.
But I am disappointed with his work. Losing Ten Billion Dollars on a car project is enough to get any other CEO in the world fired. I could understand if they spent that money and realized that they couldn’t be cost-effective, or that the market wasn’t right, etc. But if the NY Times is correct that they spent Ten Billion Dollars and canceled the project because managers couldn’t agree on a goal... that is a staggering CEO failure. It’s the job of a CEO to get people into a room, understand the disagreements, and set a path to move forward. That’s precisely what management is.
Apple Vision is another story. I think that product is ahead of its time. So was the first Macintosh, by the way. I don’t know if it will succeed or fail; it’s just too early to know. I think Apple was right to develop it.
Apple’s problem seems to be that they have a core set of products which are only being innovated incrementally: Laptop, tablet, watch, phone. They’re great products, the prices are great. I bought Apple laptops for myself, my kids, my wife, and everybody’s happy with them. They’re executing beautifully on the products they have, but Apple Stores don’t have any new products except for Vision glasses which cost too much and do too little. The Car could have been great; who knows?
While I don’t disagree, Apple might have mitigated its losses a bit with IP. Most R&D departments will constantly try to patent/copyright every possible thing they can; their successes in doing so have given rise to those annoying “patent squatters” who sue everyone in sight for alleged infringements. More legit firms will license or sell that IP recouping costs or even profiting. I have to believe Apple got many, many patents out of its car development efforts albeit likely not enough to cover expenses.
Since when is the NYT accurate with their reporting? 😂 They are just talking out of their ass, as usual.
The cause of the project's cancellation is likely a lot more complex than anyone gives credit. They were probably facing huge technical challenges and setbacks, and we already know it is exceedingly difficult for any company to enter the car business without blowing a huge sum of cash with a high risk of complete failure.
As for Tim Cook, he is an incredibly uninspiring CEO and I never understood why Steve Jobs recommended to the Board for Tim Cook to be his successor, but clearly his performance meets the Board's ongoing approval. Tim does not work in a vacuum: he is answerable to the Board and must deliver for the company.
Whether or not the Vision Pro fails will likely not affect his position as CEO. If it fails, then the answer is quite simple... they took a risk and screwed up. It's not the first time they've screwed up. The Board did not fire Steve Jobs after the G4 Cube failed spectacularly, or after the MobileMe debacle. There usually has to be a systemic issue with the appointment of a CEO before the Board of any large company takes drastic action like that.
The likely outcome is that Tim Cook will stay on as CEO until he retires.
The cause of the project's cancellation is likely a lot more complex than anyone gives credit. They were probably facing huge technical challenges and setbacks, and we already know it is exceedingly difficult for any company to enter the car business without blowing a huge sum of cash with a high risk of complete failure.
As for Tim Cook, he is an incredibly uninspiring CEO and I never understood why Steve Jobs recommended to the Board for Tim Cook to be his successor, but clearly his performance meets the Board's ongoing approval. Tim does not work in a vacuum: he is answerable to the Board and must deliver for the company.
Whether or not the Vision Pro fails will likely not affect his position as CEO. If it fails, then the answer is quite simple... they took a risk and screwed up. It's not the first time they've screwed up. The Board did not fire Steve Jobs after the G4 Cube failed spectacularly, or after the MobileMe debacle. There usually has to be a systemic issue with the appointment of a CEO before the Board of any large company takes drastic action like that.
The likely outcome is that Tim Cook will stay on as CEO until he retires.
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True, but you wouldn't be booting from it. Use the fast storage where it is needed, and the slower stuff for your music collection, photos, and such. Fusion drives used to do this automatically, but I suspect that they worked too well.
Currently, if you want to back up your iPhone to your Mac, Apple forces you to put your backup on the super-expensive, too-small, internal SSD. For an iPhone backup that would work fine on a platter drive! It's sadistic.
My point is that Apple goes out of their way to make simple things difficult so that they can sell you monthly services to fix problems that they themselves cause. It is probably easier to move to the EU than to switch to Android/Windows, so I am hoping that they have some effect.
I own two of these and have used it. But they are too clumsy for most purposes and most programs won't recognize the external storage. For example, you can't record video directly to any external storage, you have to copy it. That can take a huge amount of time, and is useless if your internal storage is near full.
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I once had an incident where I was at a friend's house and recorded some video with a Sony camcorder, and also my iPhone. It was easy to copy the Sony footage into his mac, just eject the SD card and plug it in. But copying the video from my iPhone to his Mac was completely impossible! His Mac could not run a version of iTunes new enough to connect to my phone!
Even if I had thought to bring that SD adaptor with me, we still would have had to copy the footage twice: Once to a card, and then from the card to his Mac. Apple used to say "It just works." Now no one else makes things this complicated.
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And he won't feel any pressure to deliver, even after the announcement, that the "Vision Air" has been cancelled, marking the "Vision Pro" as a dead end?
What announcement?
The rumors and reporting that the AV PRO 2 has been “cancelled”?
You’re mixing up your rumors and not even getting that right…
…and this is how I will remember him, both the numbers and the reasoning. From the 2023 proxy statement.
Tim Cook is Steve Jobs' greatest failure. A pure, unmitigated disaster move by Jobs.
Agreed
I give Steve a pass, however, as he was fighting for his life and it surely clouds judgement to be in that situation.
Don't remind me….I don't give him any space in my mind. There's a lot of better things to think about, for sure.!
He will disappear, and soon be replaced, and easily forgotten by me at least.
Apple and all of us will move on.
True, at some point all CEOs become ex-CEOs. Replacements though are rarely cheaper, usually more expensive than predecessors. All depends upon how good their headhunters negotiate or how outrageous their stretch goals are (Elon Musk, you there?).
The AAPL Board of Directors have a fiduciary to maximize shareholder value. The view of Tim Apple's tenure as CEO is neutral at best No real successful product launches since Steve. The Vision Pro is a disaster. Guys like Eddy Cue are nowhere to be seen or pushing visionaries like Scott Forstall out for not signing up for other people's disasters.