Again I have expressed myself poorly. Apologies.
Do you understand what Thunderbolt is?
It doesn’t matter that it’s so far out of warranty that it can’t stop here, this is bat country, or that Apple forbids internal repair, it will still boot and be useful.
So the question is: does this security enclave really render the rest of the hardware useless in the case of an SSD failure?
I hadn’t considered that detail. You’re correct, that there are workarounds when it’s an SSD.
Oddly enough, CUPS is also what OSX uses. I’ve poked around in vendors’ mac drivers to pull usable Linux printer drivers before.
I know, that just makes it more infuriating…
Looking at the speed benchmarks of a Samsung NVMe SSD which uses m2 as its interface, we get a speed of almost 2400MB/s.
http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-970-Pro-NVMe-PCIe-M2-512GB-vs-Intel-905P-Optane-NVMe-PCIe-960GB/m498971vsm498903
Laptop mag benchmarked the macbook pro after Apple released a system patch which upped performance, they got about 2500MB/s when transferring files
Which suggests soldering it onto the board gives about 150MB/s over using an m2 socket for that NVMe SSD, interestingly Tom’s Hardware speculated some of that performance may be due to the file system Apple uses
I would speculate the soldering on of the SSD wasn’t a decision taken for primarily performance reasons as it doesn’t give significantly higher results over an m2 port considering the amount of bandwidth additional PCIe lanes would provide, but more dictated by their formfactor engineering.
However, the performance quirk of flash in that the more capacity an SSD has, the faster it can perform would suggest that models of macbook pro with larger drives would steadily see greater boosts in speed for no additional engineering.
Bullshit. They could allow the device to function in a diminshed functionality state instead of bricking. If security of the device’s contents is a concern, surely there are better solutions than functionally incapacitating the device.
I simply answered the question from another user, who wanted an alternative for a non programmer. I use OSx myself for particular needs and I know why I do. Only if one wants a notebook for browsing, simple word processing, maybe images, video, sound edits, is free software an alternative. For some scientific work, it actually may be the best choice. Other particular needs may require a software only available under Windows or OSx and then that is it.
Samsung’s NVMe SSD are some of the very best you can get, I highly recommend them.
HOW the speed is achieved in this race by Apple in this case is via the extra PCIe lanes they get through direct connecting. They wouldn’t NOT be at the exact same speed as the second fastest without the extra direct PCIe lanes, that is a faulty assumption. These engineering tradeoffs have been discussed in great detail in many of the online communities. I’m not bring any new information to the table, people here just seem to not really follow this stuff.
I only know why they say why they do this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and it makes technical sense.
There are lots of choices and options, they certainly didn’t have to go this direction, and they certainly could have added a second M.2 / NVMe slot for expansion, but this is how they are staying lead horse in a very intense race. Of course this choice means that in a year when a new faster horse option becomes available there is no option to replace. Again, not defending the choice, just explaining that WHY they did it is very different then some folks here are assuming.
most the pro benchmarkers are using filesystems that bypass APFS to eliminate it from the equation obviously, or a special benchmark that uses files that don’t allow APFS to trigger its block deduplicating tech which is one of the main things that gives it is speed boost, a copy isn’t a second copy.
this is true, which is why the larger the drive the more the difference in number of PCIe lanes comes into play.
They DO. 
There is a really in depth analysis of the code that lead to the original screen brick, and the patch they released to fix the issue. It was supposed to lock and alet the factory line because, the piece of code that led to it bricking instead assumed that the phone was still in factory testing mode.
And the article in discussion above got the facts WRONG on the new stuff as well, turns out they DO still on the new stuff as well.
They jumped the gun before the facts were in and got it wrong, no need to shout bullshit about something that has already been tested.
I have one in my main rig, they are nice. 
The Apple SSD, from a cursory glance at google shows to be a PCIe3.0 4x jobbie. This would give it a theoretical max of 4GB/s, and yet can only manage ~150MB/s more than a 970 pro even though they share the same pcie 3.0 4x set up when plugged into an m.2 port. That extra speed is likely to be due to bigger nand flash chips making up that storage than anything else due to the aforementioned performance boost you get the bigger the storage.
Apple Proprietary SSDs: Ultimate Guide to Specs & Upgrades | BeetsBlog - This only goes up to 2017, but I doubt there’s much difference and it gives you a lot of info about Apple SSDs.
I don’t actually see any reference to the SSD being able to address more than four lanes, which would be super wasteful considering it isn’t even touching 4 as it is. Don’t forget, all the other devices packed into the laptop need to share lanes going into the CPU too.
Where do you get the info that it is soldered to the board so it can get “extra lanes” from?
A quick look on ifixit shows what the innards of the macbook pro looks like
and that definitely suggests to me that it was for engineering sakes that they soldered the SSD onto the board, since the chips are spread out on either side with much of the space being there for cooling and battery.
Doesn’t look like they’d be able to pull off their design with a bulky m2 port in the mix and you’d end up having to push it aside and use a ribbon - which can easily break and takes those heat emitting chips away from the cooling.
I don’t see any maliciousness with going for a soldered on board stopping you from upgrading it and forcing you to buy the latest and greatest, just an engineering choice to let them fit the innards into their sleek case.
I don’t see how this is legally ok. Once you’ve paid for a product it becomes your property. Apple stops being its owner the moment it’s sold and as the owner it’s at your discretion to choose what’s done with it. Making your phone unusable is a huge leap from going to an independent repair person or even doing it yourself and nulling your warranty. The only way that would work is if the buyer is made aware of this BEFORE they’ve purchased it and them still choosing to buy it knowing that’s what will happen. That would be like buying a car and then the dealership doing something to make it immobile because they didn’t like the way you drove it or you had it fixed by a mechanic that wasn’t an employee of the place you bought it.
You can do whatever you want with your computer. But certain things may make it inoperable. It’s not just done for them to have yet another way to be raging bags of dicks, it’s to keep your data secure by making it really really hard to tamper with certain aspects of the hardware. In the world of computing can have something that’s easy, secure, and/or cheap but you can only pick two of those things.
There’s plenty of other computers out there with more open platforms that you can use if you don’t like what Apple is doing.
The car analogy doesn’t really work because the dealer or manufacturer can deny any warranty claims if an unauthorized third party tampered with the vehicle. They wouldn’t refuse a repair job, though - they will happily charge you whatever it takes to repair your vehicle for anything they are capable of fixing. Service centers are where the profits are made at dealerships.
You’re saying the same thing I am but for some reason you think you’re saying something different 
The car analogy does work. It’s just seems to have gone over your head lol
Big fail for my segment of the market, then. My first exposure to Apple was a prototype of the Apple I before it hit the market (neighbor was an apple employee who would ask me to play games with it ), similar for the Mac. Pretty sure my 2011 machine is the last Apple computer I will buy; having done research on many laptop DTR specs, reviews, and tear-downs, Apple hardware feels frickin’ quaint.
did the apple I have bitmapped graphics? I know it didn’t have color.
As I recall we hooked it up to our TV (B&W) at the time… memory’s a bit fuzzy, but I think that was the display. A friend of my mom’s worked at Atari at around that time, and brought a prototype of missile command over for me to play with and hooked it up the same way.
No bitmapped graphics, claim the annotations.
Are you inferring that “games”=bitmapped graphics? Because let me tell you games in the 70s in Silicon Valley included iterative equations for ‘landing’ on the moon: just numbers. I don’t recall what we did with the prototype Apple I, but it was pretty limited. I wasn’t interested in code or engineering, so play and games are the frame I had.
Huh… but now that I think of it the overflow counter program in Basic was hella everywhere (Apple, TRS-80, etc.)… so maybe he did show me some code.
here’s lena in black and white ascii
and here’s lena in greyscale and dithered black and white
It’s possible to do interesting things with ascii graphics. But it’s a limitation.
Linux Mint … get a friend to install it and the software you want.
Pointy-clicky interface, tons of open source work and game software,
I bailed on Microsoft after Win95, never liked the training wheels of Apple from the first one I worked on. Which left me with Linux.
