> Serviceable, repairable, upgradable Macs are officially a thing of the past.
Well, not exactly. Apple’s desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage, and third parties sell upgrade kits. And it’s not like Thunderbolt is a slouch as far as expandability.
I can see why the Mac Pro is gone. Yeah, it has PCIe slots…that I don’t really think anyone is using. It’s not like you can drop an RTX 5090 in there.
The latest Mac Pro didn’t have upgradable memory so it wasn’t much different than a Mac Studio with a bunch of empty space inside.
The Mac Studio is very obviously a better buy for someone looking for a system like that. It’s just hard to imagine who the Mac Pro is for at its pricing and size.
I think what happened is that the Studio totally cannibalized Mac Pro sales.
Thunderbolt absolutely is a slouch.
Every PCIe card I have requires it's own $150+ PCIe to Thunderbolt Dock and its own picoPSU plus 12V power supply.
External PCIe is convenient for portables. Not for desktops. It's a piss-poor replacement for a proper PCIe slot.
Why don’t you just get a multi-slot PCIe box?
Apparently the Neo is surprisingly repairable - in that parts can be replaced, not that you can buy stuff at Microcenter or Fry's (RIP) and shove them in.
> 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...
That is an absolutely awful argument against what I just said. I can tell that you don't care.
Tens of thousands of mini PC and laptop boards ship with multiple M.2 slots. Apple can use both connectors, with the exact same caveats that normal M.2 SSDs have on ordinary filesystems. Apple does not have to enable swap, zram, or other high-wear settings on macOS if they are uncomfortable with the inconsistency of M.2 drives. Now, I'd make the argument that people don't complain about APFS wear on external SSDs, but maybe I'm wrong and macOS does have some fancy bypass saving thousands of TBW/year.
Whatever the case is, "the annoying thing is competitive" was not a justification for the Lightning cable when it reached the gallows. It did not compete, it specifically protected Apple from the competitive pressure of higher-capacity connectors. The same is true of Apple's SSD racket and the decade-old meme of $400 1tb NVMe drives.
I don't buy that argument, "a PC by any other name" is what made intel mac's somewhat uncompetitive when compared to the M-series laptops: which are currently dominating with total vertical integration of the OS and hardware.
Also: All things being equal, the lightening connector was technically superior to USB-C and arrived much earlier.. so it's somewhat on the same path.
USB-C succeeded due to a confluence of;
A) Being a standard people can get behind. (lightning was, of course, much more awkwardly licensed)
B) Lightning never got a sufficient uplift from USB-2.0 performance.
C) The EU eventually killed lightening through regulation.
It was, however, smaller, more durable and (as mentioned) earlier.
I'm totally not against our new USB-C everywhere situation w.r.t. phones, but if anything it reinforces the point: The technically superior thing being too proprietary caused its death (despite being early).
It's sad that "you can replace the SSD" is in some people's eyes "serviceable, repairable, and upgradeable".
We should demand better of our computer-manufacturing overlords.
> It’s not like you can drop an RTX 5090 in there.
Why not? Oh, right, because Apple won't let you. Sad.
I didn’t phrase myself very well. What I’m saying is that the loss of the Mac Pro didn’t reduce the repairability or modularity at all in the product lineup.
It was exactly as modular as the Mac mini and Mac Studio.
The only difference is that it had some PCIe slots that basically had no use since you couldn’t throw a GPU in there, and because thunderbolt 5 exists.
Yeah, sure, there were some niche PCIe things that two people probably used. Hence the discontinuation.
I am an ex-Mac user, I own a Framework. Don’t worry, you’re preaching to the choir.