[Tuna-Fish]

> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years

I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.

The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.

[cromka]

Absolutely not.

SSD can be resoldered and that service is actually becoming popular and inexpensive. It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered. This will become a totally normal thing in a few years from now.

[wtallis]

Soldered storage is extremely uncommon for laptops not from Apple. You pretty much only find it in very low-end Chromebook type hardware that's using eMMC for cost reasons, and a small fraction of more expensive Qualcomm-based laptops that use UFS for no good reason. All mainstream PC laptops use M.2 NVMe storage.

[tredre3]

> It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered

That's simply a lie. No other laptop have soldered SSD. An increasing number do have soldered RAM.

[EatFlamingDeath]

SSDs can be resoldered, but it's a PITA and I haven't seen it becoming popular or inexpensive.

[nanliu]

It's on chip for the m series and not soldered to the motherboard.

[netule]

Exactly, the entire appeal of Thinkpads is their ability to be repaired and upgraded by the end user. MacBooks are designed to be disposable.

[jonhohle]

It’s really a shame. May last “favorite” MacBook was from 2013 where everything was upgradable. I bought the fastest Core processor with the lowest everything else and upgraded to 16GB of RAM, SSD (granted at SATA speeds) and a second data drive in the optical drive bay. What luxury!

[kalleboo]

I've yet to see a desktop SSD wear out from writes. The only dead desktop SSDs I've seen have been due to buggy firmware (early drives or that recent batch of Samsungs) or well before their wear level is down (cheap noname drives off amazon).

[adrian_b]

That is because you do not write much.

My first SSDs were from Intel and I have completely worn them out by writing their specified maximum writable amount of data, in a couple of years or so.

After that, I have been careful to always buy only SSDs with the maximum amount of writable data that exist on the market. I have not worn out others yet, but those that have been used for many years show in their SMART counters that a large fraction of the permissible amount of written data has been reached and not much has remained until their end of life.

I typically write many tens of GB per day.

[thenthenthen]

My macbook air 2013 ssd died after 10 years, it is not soldered luckily

[gr4vityWall]

I have a 120GB SSD from 2013 that saw typical gaming/workstation usage since it was bought, and it still works fine.

I think repairability is important, but I don't think it will stop those laptops from being popular.

[agildehaus]

The keyboard has a much shorter lifespan than the SSD, and it's incredibly difficult/expensive to replace.

A single bad key or trace and any Apple laptop is basically toast. $800+ to have Apple replace the top cover.

Maybe an independent shop can do it cheaper, I don't know.

[FireBeyond]

Hah. Yes. Couple of drops of water on an an MBA... laptop worked fine. Battery, fine. Healthy. Charging circuit would not work. Perfectly functioning laptop on AC, but unable to be on battery because 0% charge.

Me, at Genius Bar, expecting you know, maybe $300 with parts and labor?

"Here's a quote, sir, we're looking at $850+tax, perhaps we should talk about getting you into a new Mac today?"

No. The laptop was primarily connected to AC anyway and only 18 months old, if that. Sorry, Apple.

[mikae1]

And how easy is it to replace an aging battery?