It’s probably for warranty repair. Means you can walk into an Apple Store with a faulty SSD and walk out 30 mins later with a fixed one.

You can still get an 1TB Optane drive for ~$200? In theory much faster and same price as 256GB from Apple.

As an apple hardware enjoyer: you're so high on copium.

Apple's was actually super late to the nvme storage party, and they're not even remotely at the top wrt maximum write/read bandwidth compared to pcie Gen 5 m.2 ssds you can buy for ~$200-300/TB.

So yeah, Apple's ssds cost at least 3x (and perform measurably worse). And I might add: gen 5 is already what, 1 1/2 yrs old now?

It has a different pinout in my experience. The exact spec changes between models, I think one or two models of macbook have a standard M2, some (most?) have what looks like an M2 but has extra pins when not actually soldered on.

My experience is only around trying to help a friend get the data off a fried board in a macbook, the desktops might be more standard.

Yup. Looks like a 2230.

Edit: not a 2230. Different pins.

I don't believe so.

I don't think the "U" notch and pins are the same.

But happy to be wrong :)

Nope, I'll try to find the source, but it's a very custom thing since the controller is actually on the chip, so the thing you connect via M.2-ish is just the storage module. Therefore no non-Apple specific SSD will work on it, even if you can physically connect it because the connector is the same.

Apple's invested heavily in component security though, especially for e.g. the iPhone. For good reason of course, a stolen iphone in itself has little value as it can be bricked by the owner, but there is / was a huge market in parts, so Apple built in security in the parts or the main board/OS to make that a problem as well.

I don’t remember that. I upgraded several SCSI drives back then.

I maxed the RAM and HDD on my 2010 Intel MacBook Pro -- using standard parts! Really kept that machine going for a long time.

> […] with custom firmware so you couldn't just use any old drive.

Commercial storage systems (appliances, SANs) also have approved firmware versions (though not necessarily custom) as there are things like firmware bugs.

Supposedly some of the things that ZFS has found is SANs that should 'know better' doing dumb stuff like retrieving the wrong LBAs: the checksum according to the SAN is correct, because it is data+cksum in one sector, but it was the wrong sector that was read. ZFS caught this because its checksums are in the parent directory structure and not tied to the data blocks themselves. This also catches things like the two sides of a mirror being out of sync.

Hahaha, this is too obvious. $1000!

they're so logistics driven, this is an insane comment.

Apple literally has a logistics guy as their CEO.

> Whether that's affordable is another matter of course,

They are the same course, imo. That it's been done in this way is typical behaviour we see from them, but expected/unsurprising behaviour does not necessarily make it a justification.

Assuming that the SSD module doesn't have any sort of DRM that prevents anyone but Apple from making them.

Correct, it's not a 2230. Standard NVMe drives combine the NAND and controller onto a single module, but Apple Silicon machines have the SSD controller built into the main SOC, and the SSD module is just the raw NAND chips.

I'm surprised it doesn't overheat already. My 4TB on an M.2 2280 form factor runs at 60+ C. Compressing that down would make it much harder to dissipate the heat.

I don't think you can get a mass market SSD that does what this thing does. Not unless you change some parameters. The speeds and bandwidth you get is always with full encryption for all blocks. That might not be special to you, but doing this mass market in a way that doesn't make exploits and bypasses appear faster than the manufacturers can patch it (looking at TCG, BitLocker etc) is definitely special to me.

As for that other methods may work (making the chain longer by introducing a separate bus, two transceivers, an additional controller from another vendor, extra firmware, extra power buses), they have done that in the past. In practically every shape:

  - SCSI
  - ATA/IDE
  - SATA
  - NVMe over custom physical port before M.2 was broadly available with the same specs, but probably also cheaper for them

They also have had drives in all sizes as well, both internal and external. That includes most forms of modularity (external: entire drive + enclosure, just the drive or just the enclosure, internal: 5.25, 3.5, 2.5, CF-sized) and controller wise they also have done all variants: add-in card, on-board, on-chip, third party controller, first party controller, combinations where they did only the firmware or only the hardware, ones where the fabric and the controller were combined etc.

So technology wise, it's not like they haven't gone back and forth with many, many combinations.

Business-wise:

> I'm not convinced there's any purpose for the way Apple does their storage aside from vendor lock-in.

First of all, I highly doubt Apple gives a shit. Their model of lock-in is making a better combined experience than the competition. If they could do that with some random western digital black SSD while making the same amount of money, they would do it. But more importantly: if Apple would do that, they would still charge you $1000 for that SSD, even if it's only 1TB. The concept of lock-in is making it so that people don't want to pay the cost of leaving. You can't lock people in with just the stick (an SSD-shaped stick with a $1000 price tag) if you don't have a carrot.

Secondly: I don't want or need to convince you, but trying to shoehorn a business in such a one-dimensional take is not exactly a good way to spend your energy.

You don't become a $3tn company by respecting and liberating users.

I can't tell from your reply if you are getting the point or not so here is an expanded version for you:

If they could save themselves the huge mountains of money to takes to create their own flash controllers, firmware, fabric and hardware design, and just buy a Micron 7450 Max and put that inside the computer, and still charge you $1000, they would do it. Because it means more profit for them, which is what they exist for.

But they didn't.

The same concept applies to say, the Red Mags, which are essentially mSATA SSDs in a metal box. Red takes on all the responsibility, claims, (reputational) damage for their product, but if they feel like they can make it happen with an mSATA SSD and still make lots of money, they will do it. They could use an SLC enterprise SSD, make a little less money and take a little less risk.

But they didn't.

The price is what the market is willing to pay. Not the actual cost of the physical components. Pricing has always been like that. The market just isn't always willing to pay huge margins. With Apple they do.

> give you the best experience

Hardly. For practically every normal user, the best experience is when they don't have to think about hardware or specs at all, forever. Doesn't just apply to computers either. If anything, people doing the things they want with the hardware not existing at all, that would be even better since they didn't want to deal with it in the first place. Reality is of course that the things they want to do are implemented in software, and software runs on hardware. And they still would rather have it not exist, and not think about it. And anything you do that forces them to think about it is a detractor, even if it was "The Right Thing".

It's why Android beats Windows, and mobile devices like phones and tablets beat PCs; there is a whole lot less dealing with the details of the hardware and the software, and more "doing what you intended to do", whatever that might be. Even if the hardware and software is almost universally worse (at the very least somewhere until desktop-class ARM came around).

As far as all your other concepts, reality says the thing Apple does in the Apple way makes them more money than everyone else. So either they are already doing the things you want them to do and they work, or they are not doing the things you want them to do because they don't work to generate the same concentration of money (which is what they exist for, as I already wrote).