The problem here was that Apple is the only one who knows what's wrong with this new laptop and they don't have time to try to recover the data. Had the rights-to-repair law passed, the author would have had the option to try with a third party that could have saved his work (or to see whether it is an option). For many, $1000 for not losing two weeks of work is a small price to pay compared to redoing all the work.
The issue with having only first-party repair is that you have no choice other than to lose data.
> is that you have no choice other than to lose data.
Right-to-repair is great and all, but trusting the storage on a laptop is crazy. I've had basically the same thing happen with Dells, etc.
Forget just laptops, though they are more failure prone. Trusting the storage on any single machine for critical work data for any longer than necessary is unprofessional.
It's not about trusting the storage, it's that failures in components not storage end up junking the storage in the repair. In all likelihood this board suffered some other sort of component failure (because if it was the flash, something would still boot and display). That 1TB flash device was perfectly good, and with only an ever so slightly compromised design could have been dropped right into a new board and the user would have left happy with "their laptop" still intact.
But now the poor guy needs to recover a huge partition from partial backups, and that sucks. And it was totally avoidable..
(FWIW: I don't understand your point about not trusting storage on laptops. Modern SSDs are extremely reliable. Sure they can fail, and you should always have a plan for what happens if they do. But in practice you should absolutely trust your laptop storage.)
Really sad to see that almost all comments here immediately turn to "victim blaming" and mention that this is a story about the need for backups, and not the story of hardware manufacturers removing the rights of consumers.
And while the RTR laws would have helped here, let's remember there's only one thing we can do in the meantime to put pressure on these companies: don't buy hostile hardware in the first place.
Nobody's perfect. I use an iPhone and I just bought a watch from them. But I think it's equally true that you should be able to keep two thoughts in your head at once: even when buying Apple hardware because you're more or less forced to (or really want to), keep talking about how this is unacceptable and lobby every lawmaker you can. It's not cool.
This is one of the reasons the cloud storage services became so popular. Properly backing up data, with multiple backups, not all piled in the flood prone corner of a closet, is not fun.
This isn't specific to the M1. I had my MBP 2016 13" die in the same exact way about two years ago. Same failure mode where it just refused to boot no matter what I did, though it was possible to sort of turn it on if you left it alone for a couple of days. Was able to use that to pull the data off the machine and create a Time Machine backup, but it turns out that Time Machine can lie to you about having completed a backup so I would have lost all of my data were it not for the manual backup I performed.
What was frustrating to me was that I knew my model had a diagnostics port that allowed direct access to the SSD (see https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/24/apple-special-cdm-tool-macboo...) to pull the data off of it, but the service wasn't offered when I went to get my machine repaired. I was forced to accept the data loss from having the logic board replaced.
I later had bluetooth issues on the same laptop, and that required another logic board replacement. Which, surprise, came with data loss once again. Also had a lot of fun learning with that repair that Apple changed the extension backups are stored as, and Time Machine can't recognize the new one as a restore source for some reason unless you rename the folder to use the old one. Wasted quite a few hours on that, and Apple's phone support had no idea about why Time Machine wasn't seeing it.
Anyway, moral of the story is, backup often, and have more than one backup method, unless you like losing your data.
> Anyway, moral of the story is, backup often, and have more than one backup method, unless you like losing your data.
And I would recommend that no one use Time Machine for backups. I have several anecdotes of my own where TM backups became silently corrupted or a seemingly good backup refused to restore, and you can find many more examples in the Apple forums. An unreliable backup isn’t a backup at all.
This especially drives me nuts because I use text selection to help with reading on ultra-wide pages when I scroll so I don't lose my place. I hate when I can't select text.
Medium won't even render on my old iPad. Just crashes the browser tab on load. I seriously don't know how bad your tech must be if you can't reliably deliver a page of text.
Writing on a piece of paper and throwing it to the wind?
Seriously, though, if you have an inch of computing skills, any of the static site generators combined with a free tier CDN like Netlify. The most popular generators are pretty easy to use.
But perhaps I'm underestimating how hard that actually is.
>3. I wasn’t the ONLY ONE who encountered this.
You should check out the posts in MacRumors and this long thread in Reddit.
This issue is quite well known for those who followed the Apple M1 rollout closely. My suspicious is that
1. It is the same USB / Thunderbolt Charging issue again as with previous Intel Mac. Where basically the USB-C somehow fried the CPU. ( Louis Rossmann has tons of video on it )
2. The CPU / System is simply not designed for these type of usage. Especially with zero cooling. ( Sometimes, I would even leave the machine switched on for overnight rendering )
And it could also be other component that overheat.
Apple needs to sell an official Time Capsule and Make Encrypted Backup to iCloud as option for Offline Backup.
> The CPU / System is simply not designed for these type of usage. Especially with zero cooling.
While I agree that consumer hardware in general and laptops in particular aren't designed for this usage, internal overheating should never be the cause for catastrophic failure.
A system should be designed to throttle down or shut down before risking permanent damage. Should this be a heat related problem, I'd consider it a design flaw.
Degraded performance is acceptable, permanent damage to non-replaceable internal hardware isn't.
> Apple needs to sell an official Time Capsule and Make Encrypted Backup to iCloud as option for Offline Backup.
Not going to happen. Since they disbanded the router team 3 years ago, there's zero chance of a Time Capsule product coming back anytime soon.
They want customers to use iCloud and I think that's the better option for most users. People like the person in this blog are professionals and should use professional backup solutions (whether offline or online).
You have to understand the Apple fanboy mindset. If it breaks, it's your fault. Soldered SSD? Do backups you dummy! Over heating? Just use it for email and browsing. Dead pixels? Get better glasses. No ESC key? Buy an external keyboard. Keys not working? Don't push them so hard, they're butterflies!
I really dont think they did. It should be MacBook Pro with proper cooling. And personally I dont think overnight rendering, that is 100% CPU usage for 8+ hours should even be done on a laptop with no cooling fans.
The $2400 price tag was because of Apple's ridiculous memory and Storage upgrade cost.
> this laptop suddenly died when I was using Adobe Photoshop for a project. Yes, dead. It wasn’t taking its time to “shut down”. It just blacked out and showed no signs of life at all. [...] and it just wouldn’t turn on.
I was in a similar situation once. My laptop suddenly died, and it just wouldn't turn on; plugging in the charger would instantly extinguish the charger light, and that light would only come back if I unplugged the charger from the wall and plugged it again to the wall (but not to the laptop). The solution was also similar: the entire motherboard had to be replaced under warranty. The cause was probably a short somewhere on the motherboard's power delivery subsystem.
The main difference: my laptop's storage wasn't soldered onto the motherboard. I lost nothing other than the time it took before the technician came to do the repair.
> and prefer hardware with replaceable storage like M.2 slots.
I'm not sure how that would have accomplished anything (except a smaller repair bill, but that was footed by the warranty) in this story: either the logic board died and since the storage is encrypted at rest with the key stored in the Secure Enclave, the data is not recoverable; and if the storage is dead, well, the data is gone. Either way the data is as good as gone.
So either way, one lesson. Backup. Twice.
(Also, a brand new laptop has just as much chance of being stolen or suffering water damage or mistaken file erasure or a thousand other things that would destroy the data. Two months without backup is lunacy)
Yes very much this. A soldered SSD is absolutely putting a real limit to the lifespan of your pc. Not to mention making it unreasonably expensive to try to recover data in event of system board failure.
Given his use case which involves massive video and photo editing, and the reports of excessive writes on the SSD in the M1s is it possible his SSD just reached EOL?
I don’t know what the symptoms of an SSD reaching EOL are, would it just stop responding at all?
I don’t think we still have heard anything from Apple about the massive SSD writes and that for me is the biggest concern before making an M1 based purchase.
I’d be incredibly surprised if that was the case, even cheap budget SSDs have 500+ TBW ratings.
I’m amazed this person had 800GB of important data on a laptop and yet zero backups. Especially when a backup service like backblaze is $5 a month and you just set it up in 2 minutes and it runs on its own.
If there was 800GB of static data, it was almost full, so the wear-leveling process wouldn’t be optimal and it would write over a small part of the flash cells over and over. In that case you could exceed the program-erase lifetime, but not necessarily the TBW. We know the total TBW was high, though, so it was even more excessive.
From what I’ve read, Apple has fixed this problem in a recent Mac OS version. Apparently, it was a swapping bug.
Maybe it did. But it was the boot drive and soldered to the motherboard. So the OS would need to write to it and there’s no way to get the data off in a third-party manner. That’s kind of the big issue.
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The issue with having only first-party repair is that you have no choice other than to lose data.
Right-to-repair is great and all, but trusting the storage on a laptop is crazy. I've had basically the same thing happen with Dells, etc.
Forget just laptops, though they are more failure prone. Trusting the storage on any single machine for critical work data for any longer than necessary is unprofessional.
But now the poor guy needs to recover a huge partition from partial backups, and that sucks. And it was totally avoidable..
(FWIW: I don't understand your point about not trusting storage on laptops. Modern SSDs are extremely reliable. Sure they can fail, and you should always have a plan for what happens if they do. But in practice you should absolutely trust your laptop storage.)
Deleted Comment
And while the RTR laws would have helped here, let's remember there's only one thing we can do in the meantime to put pressure on these companies: don't buy hostile hardware in the first place.
Nobody's perfect. I use an iPhone and I just bought a watch from them. But I think it's equally true that you should be able to keep two thoughts in your head at once: even when buying Apple hardware because you're more or less forced to (or really want to), keep talking about how this is unacceptable and lobby every lawmaker you can. It's not cool.
We need right-to-repair (the sane version), but that’s really not the issue here.
This is one of the reasons the cloud storage services became so popular. Properly backing up data, with multiple backups, not all piled in the flood prone corner of a closet, is not fun.
What was frustrating to me was that I knew my model had a diagnostics port that allowed direct access to the SSD (see https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/24/apple-special-cdm-tool-macboo...) to pull the data off of it, but the service wasn't offered when I went to get my machine repaired. I was forced to accept the data loss from having the logic board replaced.
I later had bluetooth issues on the same laptop, and that required another logic board replacement. Which, surprise, came with data loss once again. Also had a lot of fun learning with that repair that Apple changed the extension backups are stored as, and Time Machine can't recognize the new one as a restore source for some reason unless you rename the folder to use the old one. Wasted quite a few hours on that, and Apple's phone support had no idea about why Time Machine wasn't seeing it.
Anyway, moral of the story is, backup often, and have more than one backup method, unless you like losing your data.
And I would recommend that no one use Time Machine for backups. I have several anecdotes of my own where TM backups became silently corrupted or a seemingly good backup refused to restore, and you can find many more examples in the Apple forums. An unreliable backup isn’t a backup at all.
Maybe because of no internet?
Not for me (I host me own), but for the next time it comes up. I don’t want to tell people “don’t use Medium” without an alternative to suggest.
Seriously, though, if you have an inch of computing skills, any of the static site generators combined with a free tier CDN like Netlify. The most popular generators are pretty easy to use.
But perhaps I'm underestimating how hard that actually is.
But yeah, fucke medium
This issue is quite well known for those who followed the Apple M1 rollout closely. My suspicious is that
1. It is the same USB / Thunderbolt Charging issue again as with previous Intel Mac. Where basically the USB-C somehow fried the CPU. ( Louis Rossmann has tons of video on it )
2. The CPU / System is simply not designed for these type of usage. Especially with zero cooling. ( Sometimes, I would even leave the machine switched on for overnight rendering ) And it could also be other component that overheat.
Apple needs to sell an official Time Capsule and Make Encrypted Backup to iCloud as option for Offline Backup.
While I agree that consumer hardware in general and laptops in particular aren't designed for this usage, internal overheating should never be the cause for catastrophic failure.
A system should be designed to throttle down or shut down before risking permanent damage. Should this be a heat related problem, I'd consider it a design flaw.
Degraded performance is acceptable, permanent damage to non-replaceable internal hardware isn't.
> Apple needs to sell an official Time Capsule and Make Encrypted Backup to iCloud as option for Offline Backup.
Not going to happen. Since they disbanded the router team 3 years ago, there's zero chance of a Time Capsule product coming back anytime soon.
They want customers to use iCloud and I think that's the better option for most users. People like the person in this blog are professionals and should use professional backup solutions (whether offline or online).
Agree, except Apple dont think like that anymore.
Maybe they shouldn’t advertise it as such then?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a $2400 machine to be left on overnight without worrying about it being fried in the morning.
I really dont think they did. It should be MacBook Pro with proper cooling. And personally I dont think overnight rendering, that is 100% CPU usage for 8+ hours should even be done on a laptop with no cooling fans.
The $2400 price tag was because of Apple's ridiculous memory and Storage upgrade cost.
I was in a similar situation once. My laptop suddenly died, and it just wouldn't turn on; plugging in the charger would instantly extinguish the charger light, and that light would only come back if I unplugged the charger from the wall and plugged it again to the wall (but not to the laptop). The solution was also similar: the entire motherboard had to be replaced under warranty. The cause was probably a short somewhere on the motherboard's power delivery subsystem.
The main difference: my laptop's storage wasn't soldered onto the motherboard. I lost nothing other than the time it took before the technician came to do the repair.
I'm not sure how that would have accomplished anything (except a smaller repair bill, but that was footed by the warranty) in this story: either the logic board died and since the storage is encrypted at rest with the key stored in the Secure Enclave, the data is not recoverable; and if the storage is dead, well, the data is gone. Either way the data is as good as gone.
So either way, one lesson. Backup. Twice.
(Also, a brand new laptop has just as much chance of being stolen or suffering water damage or mistaken file erasure or a thousand other things that would destroy the data. Two months without backup is lunacy)
Heed this advice folks. Even the new Surface Laptop SSDs are replaceable.
I don’t know what the symptoms of an SSD reaching EOL are, would it just stop responding at all?
I don’t think we still have heard anything from Apple about the massive SSD writes and that for me is the biggest concern before making an M1 based purchase.
I’m amazed this person had 800GB of important data on a laptop and yet zero backups. Especially when a backup service like backblaze is $5 a month and you just set it up in 2 minutes and it runs on its own.
From what I’ve read, Apple has fixed this problem in a recent Mac OS version. Apparently, it was a swapping bug.
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone reaches for someone else's computer to look after their important things.
Sad though it is that they learned their lesson the hard way, they can't really be faulted for it.
See this: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=m1+writes
I guess one problem is that cross-system data synchronisation is still a non-trivial task.