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If swapping was causing SSDs to fail on M1 Macs, we would never see the end of the hysterical articles about "NANDgate". Since we haven't seen any in all these years, it's seems pretty certain it's not happening.

Exactly. If some sort of random Dell model has a failure, you'll never hear about it because there's only a few thousand or so in circulation. But if any Apple product which sells in the tens/hundreds of millions has an issue, you'll hear about it whether you want to or not.

Hysteria would be if all had an issue like the keyboard gate, but this isn't an issue, it's a design limitation for certain uses cases which not everyone has. Some users will wear out faster than others due to usage patterns. If their M1 dies after 6 years of heavy usage, do you think they'll investigate if it was the NAND that died and go online to tell the news, or will they chuck it and buy new one?

NAND is still the same wearable part that regular X64 laptops have, Apple doesn't use some magic industrial grade parts but same dies that Samsung, Micron and SK ship to X64 OEMS, and those are replaceable for a reason, because they eventually fail.


The reality is most 8GB M1 Macs are still working just fine 6 years later. Power users know they need more than 8GB of RAM and will buy a MacBook Air or Pro with 16GB+.

The MacBook neo is for students, grandparents, travel, etc.

Hell, even if it dies after 6 years it was still a better experience than using a $500-600 windows PC and the cost comes out to ~$8/month spread over 6 years.


>The reality is most 8GB M1 Macs are still working just fine 6 years later.

Do you think SSD drives are replaceable for no reason? Just because M1 mac aren't failing left and right doesn't mean their NAND won't fail.

Even though I like the NEO, I can't in good faith buy a machine with soldered wearable parts. That's like buying a car with soldered brake pads because "in 6 years average users don't feel like they need changing".

I still had laptops on my hands from 20 years ago that work fine simply because you can swap their drives with fresh ones. How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?


"How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?"

Probably quite a few, MacBooks have had soldered SSD's for over 10 years now. My 2018 McBook Pro still has a perfectly functioning SSD. I still see people using 2015 and older MacBooks all the time. There is no widespread SSD failure issue after 10+ years of Apple soldering the SSD's.

For most people the SSD's are lasting longer than the useful life of the device.


> Do you think SSD drives are replaceable for no reason?

The number one reason why laptop OEMs primarily use replaceable SSDs is so that they can switch SSD vendors on a monthly basis to whoever is the lowest bidder at the moment. The number two reason is so that they can offer multiple storage capacity options without building different motherboard configs (though in practice, a lot of OEMs never get around to actually selling the alternative configs). Repairability is a very distant third place.


Just because it's soldered doesn't mean it can't be replaced.

(But it's encrypted, so you'd better have backups because you can't read it off the chips.)


They decided that the 14th amendment prohibition on insurrectionists being able to hold Federal office did not apply to Trump because he is not an officer of the United States (despite the fact he holds the "Office of the Presidency"). If that isn't deliberately misreading the actual words of the statute to get the result you want, what is?


This was a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court and I think a large part of it was that an individual state could use this for political gain. As Kagan said during oral arguments: "I think the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States..."


The Republican majority on the SCOTUS announced that Trump is immune from all laws, which is insane and not supported by the Constitution in any way, but directly lead to what's happening. If you tell somebody they won't ever be held accountable for breaking laws, why follow them (except for your internal moral compass, and we've established that Trump doesn't have one).


> The Republican majority on the SCOTUS announced that Trump is immune from all laws

This is factually untrue; the Court, in Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), held that the President has:

(1) absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercises of core constitutional powers, (2) presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts, (3) no immunity from criminal prosecution for unofficial acts.

This is—while still problematic—very far from the President being “immune to all laws”.


Apple's not great, but Microsoft is worse.


Nothing about Apple's naming schemes seems immediately rage-inducing. Sure, their stuff is bland, and I think it's stupid how people refer to doing things "on iPhone" instead of "on an iPhone", but otherwise Apple's products are mostly descriptive. Garage Band has to do with music, Pages is a word processor, iCloud is a cloud storage thing, etc.

But even the Labrador licking his own balls that someone else mentioned would be better than Microsoft at naming things. I'm surprised they haven't changed Windows to Microsoft Azure Copilot Platform .NET 365 yet.


The power creep on their flagship device names is pretty bullshit though. Pretty soon we'll have the "iPhone 20 ultra pro max++ sublime retina unlimited"

Every generation the base iPhone becomes a lower and lower tier product.


Should I get an M4 Max MacBook Pro, or an M4 Pro Macbook Pro? Or a Mac Pro? Or skip the computer altogether and get an iPhone Pro Max?

I mean, c'mon. They are deliberately trying to be confusing.


Use the real product names and that problem largely goes away:

MacBook Pro (M5)

MacBook Pro (M4 Ultra)

MacBook Pro (M4 Pro)

Mac Pro (M2 Ultra)

Once you remember the general rule that Pro costs/does more than the base model, it’s really not that hard to keep track of.


What about max (or is there no "max" in macbook land)? Is ultra better or worse than pro?


It's a vacuum cleaner. All you want it to do is suck.


But not at navigation.


Scientific vocabulary is designed to be precise. The reason papers are written the way they are is to try to convey ideas with as little chance of misinterpretation as possible. It is maddeningly difficult to do that - I can't tell you how many times I've gotten paper and grant reviews where I cannot fathom how Reviewer 2 (and it's ALWAYS Reviewer 2) managed to twist what I wrote into what they thought I wrote. Almost every time you see something that seems needlessly precise and finicky, it's probably in response to a reviewer's comment, and the secret subtext is "There - now it's so over specified even a rabid wildebeest, or YOU, dear reviewer, couldn't misundertand it!" Unfortunately, a side effect of that is that a lot of the writing ends up seeming needlessly dense.


Yeah, they are putting two facts together to heavily imply that they are part of a single story, but there is no evidence presented that they are. "UN leaders are gathering!" "There is a huge SIM farm that could disrupt communications!" Both true, but seemingly unrelated. All those car warranty texts have to come from somewhere - this is probably where.


Don't anthropomorphize robots. They hate that.


One problem you might run into is that a lot of common plastics are opaque to NIR light, so you might find certain materials gave you strange results (water bottles that appear transparent to the eye would not actually pass the NIR light needed to make the mask layer).


Chrome worked on the Mac, Safari didn't.


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