Louis Rossmann
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2024–2026
33:32 · 589K views · Aug 4, 2023
Louis Rossmann, an independent repair technician, explains why he thinks Apple's soldered-in SSDs are a poor design. He covers failure modes and repair difficulty on MacBook logic boards.
HN mostly cites it in critiques of Apple's hardware choices and base-model storage and memory, as an example of a design flaw.
4 comments from Hacker News
I hope one day they can fix the engineering problems so I can buy a machine and keep it for more than two years without fear of some cheap components exploding. A purchased computer should work for a decade at least. If this sounds over the top, look at what the repair shop guys are saying... Edit: Thanks for the downvotes, its not popular but an unfortunate reality. These issues are related to 2016-present Apple laptops. My 2012 MBA is running just fine, but I cannot trust these soldered systems.. there's other content around about the 13v being dumped into the SSDs when another component fails. There are engineering issues. If you want to understand what I'm talking about: Apple SSDs engineered in the worst way possible: this video Exploding USB-C MacBook Ports Explained: [LINK]
I'm pretty sure part of the reason of integrating everything on the board has some nefarious reasons, at least on Laptop's. Louis Rossman talked about a design flaw in Apple Macbooks where if the SSD fails, in my cases, your system will fail to power up because the mainboard is designed to fail when the SSD fails.(If I am interpreting that correctly)[0]. Remember this flaw is in the Macbooks where the SSD's are soldiered into the board. IMHO there are ways to design integrated hardware in such a way where failures minimize damage and I think many companies decide its not in there best interest to design hardware to prevent that. IMHO this is done in bad faith. [0}: this video
There absolutely are issues, whether you accept it or not, and it is nothing to do with 'not trusting TPM'. Apple SSDs engineered in the worst way possible: this video Exploding USB-C MacBook Ports Explained: [LINK]
Not if you're powerusing it like in the Article and relying heavily on Swap. Also there are countless reports of bricked M1 8GB MacBook Airs that are bricked because the SSD used up it's write cycles this video