Personally? I've never lost a laptop or had it stolen. However, I've had several laptops stop accepting power, including one of the three Apple laptops I used in a business setting. Lack of simple removable storage on the apple laptop made handling the power issue a lot more exciting; because I noticed it when I had a full battery, I was able to do a full backup in time.

Maybe not logic board failure specifically, but I see the possibility of my laptop dying as much more likely than it getting lost or stolen. And it's usually possible to extract a working SSD out of a dead laptop.

I suppose you could also repair the computer if the full logic board hasn't died, but that may not be worth it if the laptop was purchased a while ago, especially given how unrepairable these devices are. And depending on how Apple decides to go about the repair, they may end up not retaining your anyway, even if they could have.

Theft is a worthwhile risk profile to consider. People should do backups. Perhaps they should use encrypted volumes for sensitive information, too.

This does not change the fact that removable storage (or even storage that's accessible post board-failure) provides an additional margin of risk mitigation against hardware failure. AND a convenient way of making bootable backups you can swap in the event of storage failure rather than taking the entire machine out. AND upgradability.

What's the advantage of soldering the SSD to the board?

(And personally, I've experienced boot failure hardware issues on two laptops, theft zero times.)

> This does not change the fact that removable storage (or even storage that's accessible post board-failure) provides an additional margin of risk mitigation against hardware failure.

How much additional margin? If you have backups, you're covered against both failure modes; the only marginal benefit would be to recover the x hours of data since your last backup.

> How much additional margin? If you have backups, you're covered against both failure modes; the only marginal benefit would be to recover the x hours of data since your last backup.

I would wager that for 90% of people, that would be all of the data since initial power on.

100% of the laptops will eventually break and stop working. A much smaller fraction will be stolen or lost.

A significant portion (majority?) of laptops will never “break and stop working”, but rather be retired and recycled when they become obsolete.

Or just spend years sitting unused in a box in an attic somewhere!

Have owned laptops for about 20 years. Their internals take a beating inside of bags and such. Most of them I have owned had the power connector fail. One had a GPU become de-soldered in 2006. Zero of them have been lost or stolen.

I’ve had 3 logic board failures I can recall, 0 losses/thefts.