How easy is it to upgrade hardware on M1 computers?

Hardware Reviews
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Our people in sales and customer service actually needed less computer power in 2018 than they did in 2010. When I left the only thing running local on most Macs was Mail and Safari. Everything else was processed on local servers, an IBM midrange computer, or our web servers. From what I’ve read that is increasing common these days.

The accounting department and our senior management were happy with base model 27” iMacs with 16gb ram. They divided their time between an Excel spreadsheet, email, and their phone. (I think their job will never change. In 1982 accountants used Lotus 123 and a phone. It would be years before most learned about email.)

I asked @snelly the question because I was curious how many people actually need ever increasing processing power.

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It’s not about processing power for me. It’s about the speed and reliability of the RAM. I’m a freelance designer and front-end web developer. I shoot and edit photos using Lightroom, Photoshop, and occasionally Capture One. Docker is always running. I spend a lot of time in Figma, panning and zooming through dozens of large art boards at a time with hundreds and hundreds of layers as I navigate the design systems of large web applications.

I am frequently using almost all 64gb of RAM that I have in active memory. But beyond that: the RAM now is crazy, crazy fast. I notice a huge difference in speed between even my iMac Pro and this machine under moderate workloads. No judder, no lag, it just works.

Similarly, with photography, I don’t wait on the machine anymore. That’s a nice feature. I click a button to do some background isolation, or ask Photoshop to replace the sign in the background of an image, and I get a nearly instant response. I used to click that, then sit back and wait.

The only thing I wait on now is my internet. It drives me nuts, because I can’t yet get fibre in the house, and used to get it back when I lived in a condo. Fast internet makes everything faster. If I could get 10gb in the house, I would.

I would not have asked for this much power when I bought my iMac Pro, but this much power was not available for me then.

Edit to add: the shared pool of RAM is a huge selling point for me these days. Also, I fundamentally disagree with the idea that computers don’t need to get faster. Faster computers enable applications we haven’t even thought of yet. It’s necessary to move forward.

A second edit to add: speed aside, that’s not the only benefit you get from a machine where you don’t get to replace each part. The whole machine becomes more reliable.

Again, I’m not trying to say that the ability to swap out parts like we could eons past isn’t useful. I just think that, in 2022, that ship has sailed, and being mad about it is like Christian fundamentalists who are mad about Black Sabbath in the 1990s. We’ve all moved on.

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I know that you weren’t asking me, but these days running Javascript code as fast as possible is pretty much what 95% of the non-server CPU/GPU cycles in the world are devoted to (that statistic is made up, but a reasonably good estimate).

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Thanks. Like I mentioned to @karlnyhus I was curious about the need for faster processors.

Personally the inability to upgrade/repair isn’t a problem for me. I’m usually the last owner of a computer. Right now my M1 MBA has 5TB of external storage hanging off of it.

But I always tried to get the most “bang for the buck” for my employer. I preferred replacing a drive for $200 to spending $1200 on a new computer. It was my way of helping with the raises and bonuses for everyone :grinning:

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That’s a good point - I hadn’t considered iPhones / iPads. I still have the feeling that Mac SSDs get ground harder than iOS devices, but it’s a fair point. I would expect Apple to be using the same process they’d used on iPhone storage.

Now I wonder if there’s even any way to measure the “health” of an iPhone’s storage. :slight_smile:

And even those who can don’t always want to.

My dad was having a problem with his 2012 Mac Mini. He’s a furnace repair tech, and is perfectly competent swapping out circuit boards, and even soldering if necessary. I told him that if I were him, I’d swap out the spinning disk for an SSD. I also let him know that it’s not a hard process at all - just a few Torx screws, and you have to be gentle when sliding the logic board back.

Pretty much no hesitation. “Why don’t I just get a new one?”

And again, this is somebody that’s perfectly-competent to do the repair, and who doesn’t just throw money around like it’s going out of style.

Same here. My use cases aren’t nearly as intense as yours, but the bottlenecks for me are things like lots of browser tabs open, handling large amounts of image data on the clipboard (10,000x8,000px images shuffling back and forth), etc.

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66

I hear you on that. I don’t particularly care to repair my computer either anymore.

As another dumb example: I am fortunate enough to have an Xbox series X and a PS5. If I want to upgrade the PS5 SSD, you buy another one and a heat sink and go to town. It’s officially sanctioned. But if I want to buy one for the Xbox, it’s as easy as buying a tiny SD-card thing that you just plug into it. It’s something like twice the cost, but roughly no hassle. I could easily handle the PS5 drive swap, but between all the work I do on the house all the time and all the work I do on my business, I really don’t want to spend time working on my PlayStation. I want the plug and play option.

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I don’t get the “climate” angle on Apple’s “unrepairable” computers. Every single time they launch a new one, they put up a slide of all the environmental factors that have been considered and a lot of the content of the products is recyclable and, increasingly, is already made from recycled materials.

Are computers in general bad for the climate? Maybe? Does the ability to use one for more years than another make it better for the climate? If you can recycle much of the two Apple computers but then junk the one non-Apple computer, I would say no. Given you can turn in any Apple product to Apple and they will recycle what’s possible and (I believe) sensibly dispose of anything left, I’m really not seeing “Apple is bad for the climate” as a great argument.

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With Apple you have the “plug and play option”.
You order it, plug it in, and work with it.
Without any need for considerations later on about upgrading or things like that…

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The manufacturing process, from my understanding, is historically considered Not Good with reference to the climate.

I think the answer to this is “yes”, but I don’t see that Apple’s computers are the losers in this comparison.

The average “repairable” PC laptop is bigger, heavier, and much slower than any of the M1 units. Due to the fact that they’re setting the baseline for performance much lower (i3, anyone?), I don’t think the average “budget” PC laptop is in service for much more than a few years, despite being (theoretically) “repairable”. It’s “slow” out of the box, and it slows down faster over time due to software demands in an environment with less headroom to begin with. And the fact that they’re super-cheap (comparatively) leads many people to consider them “throwaway” items.

Apple sets the bar much higher to begin with, and because of that I think that the average M1 laptop will likely have a useful service life of at least half a dozen years, if not perhaps all to one owner. This is, of course, barring some catastrophic hardware failure - but MOST computers, even the PC ones, don’t tend to experience those.

And when you’re comparing Apple’s laptops to their more direct competition (Surface products come to mind), there’s not that much difference as far as upgradeability / repairability.

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Have you seen what the dark side has been up to?

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That’s a slick-looking product. From the looks of it basically they’ve handled expansion ports by installing 4 USB-C ports, and offering dongles that slot into the unit. Creative. :slight_smile:

They’re definitely not inexpensive. Speccing one of their laptops in a consumer-grade configuration is at least as expensive as the Apple M1 MacBooks. Savings would be realized pretty quickly though if you were trying to configure a more “pro” machine (64 GB RAM, etc.).

I’m curious as to how they’ll play out in the long term. This is obviously one of those situations where your upgradeability / repairability of anything other than HDD/RAM is largely dependent on the company staying in business and continuing to produce the custom modules necessary to upgrade.

It’ll be interesting to see if they get enough traction to be viable long-term. :slight_smile:

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That’s what I was thought when I first saw this. They were founded January 2020.

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And actual computers started rolling out about a year ago, from what I can tell. So it’s still pretty early.

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There are already third party parts for Framework. There’ll eventually be an official marketplace for sellers, but you don’t need to wait for it. I think they’ve succeeded in starting a viable ecosystem that would survive the company imploding (which it hopefully won’t, because they’ve sold a lot of laptops.)

If buying a Windows or Linux laptop, I’d definitely get a Framework over something like an X1 or XPS right now unless I knew I’d be in situations where I really needed the extra few hours of battery life from the more mature, less modular boards. Any shortfall is more than made up for by the fun factor and the bet on long-term extendability seems to have reasonable expected value.

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Not sure I follow your line of argument.

You have a computer that can be upgraded, but when offered the option to do so, you seem to be lamenting the inability to upgrade new devices.

I skimmed some of the thread. Maybe I missed something.

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Yes you did, the first post.