That Nagging Feeling: One Thing Still Bothers Me About My Macbook Pro

But I live with it anyway.

Once upon a time, Macs - even MacBooks - were upgradable, repairable, and relatively easy to fix should anything go wrong. Since that time, Apple has gone a completely different direction with its laptop line.

Today, every Mac’s RAM is soldered to the board and cannot be upgraded, and on most models, even the solid state drive is soldered.

Soldered to the board.

Permanently.

Yikes.

Why is that a problem?

In an ideal world, nothing goes wrong with a computer. It turns on and works just fine with no component failures or data loss.

But, as your friendly neighborhood IT guy, I can assure you this: It’s not an ideal world.

Every day I work on computers, I’m reminded just how fragile they can be. Parts fail - sometimes at random. Accidents happen. Liquid gets spilled. Humidity damages parts.

And when that happens, a repair is needed.

For most parts, all that’s needed - outside of warranty service where available - is to order the appropriate part, get it installed, and move on with our lives. But where parts are soldered to the board, there’s not much to do.

Not much that can be done, that is.

I’ve seen solid state drives fail - sometimes suddenly and sometimes gradually. In most systems, when one fails, it’s stupidly simple to take out the old drive, put in a new drive, reinstall the OS and be back up and running before lunchtime.

But on a Mac with a soldered drive, if that thing fails… the machine is toast.

Game over.

“Ok, sure. But that’s rare, right?”

In ideal circumstances? Sure. But circumstances are often not ideal. Working in the industry long enough, I’ve seen all types of accidents and damage to machines. Electrical overloads, sprinklers soaking an office, a wayward coffee cup… It happens.

I’ve seen enough to be extra careful anytime I have my own laptop near food or a drink or anything else that could damage it.

Rare means impossible until it happens to you.

I’ve had the unfortunate job of telling clients there’s no way for me to recover their priceless data after a logic board failure. It sucks.

They didn’t think it would happen either. Until it did.

And the sucky thing is even with backups, it’s still possible to lose data. Unless that backup has everything you were working on up until the time the drive failed… some data will be lost.

Apple likes to claim this design makes their machines more reliable. But that doesn’t mean much to someone whose data is permanently lost because something on the logic board is fried and we can’t pull the drive.

Why do I accept it?

Apple’s OS - macOS - is frustrating in a long list of ways, but in others it’s far superior to Windows. And in fact, if I could dump Windows entirely, I probably would.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t make a laptop that has upgradable storage anymore. Those days are gone, and that ship has sailed.

Arguably, they could do it if they wanted to - as evidenced by the Mac Studio’s non-soldered storage - but I don’t think they want to. Apple knows that soldered storage means forcing users to pay more up front for storage they don’t need at the time. And that means more money for Apple.

At the end of the day, I think the only reason I accept it is simple: In order to get macOS in a laptop - which I do want - I don’t have a choice.

Will this change in the future? Will the EU put pressure on Apple to bring back non-soldered storage across the board?

I doubt it.

But I sure do hope so.

What can I do?

If the SSD fails, not much - without AppleCare, that is. Knowing that the SSD of the Mac is soldered to the board does impact my usage habits a bit, honestly. I don’t watch it like a hawk, but I do keep an eye on the wear level of the drive and try to avoid doing anything that would cause extreme levels of wear - like needlessly writing lots and lots of data to the drive.

Realistically, I know the drive should last for a good long time - should - but in practice, I know that components can fail with or without warning at any time. So for me, the name of the game is backups and off-site storage.

All of my data - that is, all of my important data - is stored in a location where I can get to it easily in the event of a catastrophic failure - whether that’s caused by a hardware fault or my own clumsiness with a snack.

In practice, most people don’t need to worry about this of course. And perhaps I worry about it too much.

But I do sure hope for it to change one day.

Not that it will.

But I can hope, right?