Comment by bigyabai
1 day ago
> Apple’s desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage
"Modular" does not mean that it's serviceable, repairable or upgradable. Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec is a pretty glaring example of that.
1 day ago
> Apple’s desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage
"Modular" does not mean that it's serviceable, repairable or upgradable. Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec is a pretty glaring example of that.
> Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec
I get the ideological angle, but in practical terms that's not a barrier: https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-apple-ssd-adapter.html...
Those are all for Intel Macs, and not even the recent Intel Macs. You can't use a passive adapter to put a NVMe SSD into a current Mac like you could a decade ago, because back then the only thing non-standard about the SSD was the connector. Now most of the SSD controller itself has moved to the SoC and trying to put an off the shelf SSD into the current slot makes no more sense than trying to put an SSD into a DIMM slot.
This is the USB-C dongle argument all over again, but with a proprietary connector that a total of one (1) company uses.
Honestly I don't care, but Apples SSDs don't have a storage controller on them, and those adapters are designed to "bypass" the controller on m.2 drives.
You can argue that it's different for the sake of being different, but
A) I personally don't always hold that monopoly is a good thing, even if we agree m.2 is fairly decent it doesn't make it universally the best.
B) I'd make the argument that Apple is competing very well with performance and reliability..
C) IIRC there are some hardware guarantees that the new filesystem needs to be aware of (for wear levelling and error-correction) and those would be obfuscated by a controller that thinks its smarter than the CPU and OS.
if we're talking about Intel era Macs then that proprietary connector predates M.2 entirely and is actually even thinner and smaller (which is pretty important when the primary use-cases is thin-and-lights); though I suppose that the adapter fits is a sign that it would have been possible to use a larger connector...
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