Why is Apple soldering the hard drive (ssd) onto the main board and how is this supposed to help the customer and environment in the long run? How is this supposed to be seen as a technological innovation versus a scientific, economic and sociological failure?
Mac mini, macOS 12.2
matthewfromoxted wrote:
Totally agree
Bad for customers and bad for th eenvironment
The shop I bought the mac from tild me I could upgrade later. But they wree wrong and now denying it
I suspect thatthey dod not know as previous mac book airs could have their disks increased.
What a stupid stupid stupid decision by apple
I agree it is a terrible design. However, your only two options are to provide product feedback to Apple as already suggested, or just don't buy those Apple products with the soldered SSDs (called voting with your wallet).
FYI, when you do get a Logic Board replaced by Apple, users should immediately check & verify that the SSD is not nearing end of life. Our organization had a Logic Board replaced and within three months the integrated SSD on the Logic Board had failed completely. I checked the SSD's health and discovered the health attributes indicated an SSD showing years of heavy use. There was absolutely no way the SSD could have become worn out through normal use during that time as at most a few 100GBs of data would have been written to the SSD if we had been given an SSD whose health/life matched the SSD on the bad Logic Board. Luckily we were within the 90 part/repair warranty so Apple replaced the Logic Board for free (we had to fight for the free repair since had been just over 90 days by the time I got time to process it with Apple). I'm not entirely certain the SSD's health information can even be relied upon since the SSD's on replacement Logic Boards seem to always have zero hours on them yet have TB's of data written to them.
It is highly unlikely Apple will change their minds on the soldered SSDs because any 2018+ Macs with the T2 security chip or M1 CPUs automatically use hardware encryption to encrypt the data on the internal SSD which may not be possible with third party SSDs. In fact the only consumer level SSDs I'm aware of with built-in hardware encryption (SEDs) tend to be mostly Crucial and Samsung SSDs (at least their higher end models).
John Scott1 wrote:
I just do not find it cost effective to have to replace an entire board because one part soldered is defective such as a RAM module, WiFi card, or even storage. Sure, I will give those who argue soldering is better over a physical connection. But that is also permanent in other ways like being more difficult to repair. It also means that to make a repair, many times an entire board will have to be replaced simply because it's easier. For the consumer, that may not be so cost effective. Electronics do fail, maybe not at soldering joints specifically, but certainly the parts soldered do. I get that people here mostly defend Apple so that's fine.
That’s about the exact opposite direction from longstanding industry trends toward increased integration and decreased parts and interconnections, and decreased repairs.
With M1, the various processor codes and the memory are on the same carrier. There is no separate RAM, it’s co-resident with the cores.
I well remember doing wire-wrap and later solder repairs too, and that got time- and cost-prohibitive. Some Motorola radio gear (1970s, 1980s) used to break certain solder joints all the time. But Field repair techs stopped carrying rosin and the rest decades ago, stopped the related hardware troubleshooting and circuit diagram training, started carrying spare boards, and the parts went to central depots for repair or for recycling.
Some ripples around bad caps and adopting to RoHS materials requirements aside, newer gear is vastly more reliable than that of decades past. Motorola and other vendors re-designed their products to reduce flex and connectors and other failure-prone features. The service and repair business has been consolidating for decades, and most vendors have fewer or have outsourced their own hardware service offices. Apple still has these offices (Apple Stores, and Authorized Repair Providers), but they still board-swap and box-swap and send a whole lot back of work to Apple repair depots.
Again, send your feedback to Apple.
As this increasing density and decreasing internal expansion has been happening for most of forty years and probably longer than that within the computing industry, fewer internal connectors and fewer connections means better hardware reliability with commensurately reduced repair requirements, and means fewer parts to recycle, and means fewer and larger parts to stock for repairs.
Connectors tend to fail, whether due to thermal cycling, or contact corrosion, or connector wear, or damage while swapping parts.
I recall discussions similar to this one from decades ago, as folks were no longer able to acquire the circuit diagrams allowing them to re-wire and patch failing circuit boards themselves, or to perform other similar hardware maintenance and upgrades.
Surface-mount soldered connections—once the changes wrought by RoHS were mostly sorted—are vastly more reliable than are mechanical connectors. ||| In all the decades I've worked with drives and cables, connector integrity and failure rate was never a significant factor and a reason to move away from it. When cables get plugged in over and over again or there are shocks, soldering is best. But when is this a thing for end users? It isn't. Even for mobile divices. In the military yes. Computers for vehicle use would be better served by soldered but with the light weight and tight fit of M.2, I'd wager it wouldn't be phased. So, the connector argument isn't enough under the circumstances to justify soldering the SSD. I haven't even touched on the argument in IT that redundancy is a thing and how backups of backups of backups was the rule. In my case, if my main drive fails, I can be up and running easily thus leveraging the rest of the investment I have in the box which at this point is insane. Yeah, if the box was a $350 throw-away it may fly but for $2900 /pop, this mac mini just became a massive waster of not just my resources. but everyone else's. What's really going on here is similar as well to what we've seen in the automotive industry. Motors no longer get rebuilt after the rings are gone, the entire thing is scrapped and recycled. This is such BS and I don't even know where to begin.
[Edited by Moderator]
But if everything is soldered you have to replace the entire board instead of the one component. Solder joints fail with heat and cool cycles too. When you have everything soldered you prevent an extension of life or expansion internally. Yes, this is happening in technology in many places. But it is definitely creating a planned obsolescence in some ways.
Surface-mount soldered connections—once the changes wrought by RoHS were mostly sorted—are vastly more reliable than are mechanical connectors.
There’s a reason why a classic computer troubleshooting technique is to eject and re-seat all socketed system components, and it’s not because SMT connections fail.
That you are among the few folks that want to disassemble and upgrade your device later seems likely, and whether that’s to save money with third-party add-on gear, or because you missed and under specified your purchase, or for ecological and better recycling, or whatever.
There are comparatively fewer of us disassembling and repairing or upgrading our gear with each passing year too, and this realization goes back decades.
And the field-replaceable units are getting both bigger and fewer as integration increases, and depot service and replacement and recycling becoming ever more common.
Again, as they may or may not see it posted here, send your feedback directly to Apple: Product Feedback - Apple
John Scott1 wrote:
...Solder joints fail with heat and cool cycles too....
Only very rarely and only if that solder joint was not properly made in the first place.
One good example, car radios (or infotainment centers as they are referred to these days) are in an extreme environments, basically any where on planet earth, and see temperature cycling way bigger than what a desktop PC sees and failure rates on those units are literally minuscule and when they do fail. 99.9% it is due to faulty connectors or faulty semiconductors.
Having worked in the electronics industry, the most reliable product is the one with the fewest mechanical connectors.
Another reason is that Apple is more tightly coupling OEM hardware with the OS. Note all the posts about not being able to update Mac Firmware with non-Apple SSDs.
dogh2o wrote:
Why is Apple soldering the hard drive (ssd) onto the main board and how is this supposed to help the customer and environment in the long run? How is this supposed to be seen as a technological innovation versus a scientific, economic and sociological failure?
If you are not happy with the way Apple designs there computers you can send feedback here:
or write a letter to Tim Cook.
Or, just don't buy a Mac and get a DYI PC instead.
I just do not find it cost effective to have to replace an entire board because one part soldered is defective such as a RAM module, WiFi card, or even storage. Sure, I will give those who argue soldering is better over a physical connection. But that is also permanent in other ways like being more difficult to repair. It also means that to make a repair, many times an entire board will have to be replaced simply because it's easier. For the consumer, that may not be so cost effective. Electronics do fail, maybe not at soldering joints specifically, but certainly the parts soldered do. I get that people here mostly defend Apple so that's fine.
John Scott1 wrote:
...I get that people here mostly defend Apple so that's fine.
It's not a defense of Apple, that is what all electronics manufacturers are doing or soon will be. TVs, stereos, radios, cell phones, etc. all have one main circuit board and something goes wrong it is replaced. You may not like it but it is a fact of life.
So, if you don't like these manufacturing practices, don't buy any products from these companies and slap together your own DIY computer.
Totally agree
Bad for customers and bad for th eenvironment
The shop I bought the mac from tild me I could upgrade later. But they wree wrong and now denying it
I suspect thatthey dod not know as previous mac book airs could have their disks increased.
What a stupid stupid stupid decision by apple
We are not privy to Apples engineering decisions.
If my main drive fails, I switch to my bootable clone and I am up and running quickly.
Even with connectors, working on modern electronics is no walk in the park:
LED 2 lights won't stay on at 2011 iMac 2… - Apple Community
Soldered SSD
