Edit: This was during the times when even a layman could do it because drives were in a slot secured by a single screw. These days it might be more complex.
Sadly this is not possible with a modern MacBook. When I have had to send a MacBook to Apple (or a service partner) for repair I was instructed to wipe the machine (along with ensuring I log out of iCloud to disable Activation Lock and disable Find My). While it is good to ensure my personal data is not compromised it isn't user friendly at all to have to wipe my whole machine for a battery replacement :(
For the ThinkPad, it's a 5 minute task which many people can do themselves -- certainly anyone who works in IT.
We've had less strict restrictions than France, but a couple of my colleagues replaced the batteries on their HP laptops. I sent videos, and they saw how easy it was -- less painful than a Covid test.
Which is still a step backwards. On my ThinkPad I can remove the battery in seconds without looking. Mainly because sometimes I had to disconnect it to reset it completely. If that would take 5 minutes or any kind of tool that's already hard to justify imho. What do we gain from integrated batteries? Nothing that makes up for easy replacement or, in the case of ThinkPads, the option to upgrade the capacity before the purchase.
Battery replacement is a once-in-a-few-years operation and it's OK for it to take 5 minutes.
Weight difference is minimal, size difference is minimal. Yes, there is a difference, but I don't notice it really. And I'm someone who actually lugs the laptop around, on buses and trains and while riding a bike. Most people don't even really carry their laptops, maybe from car to office and that's it.
As a person who actually carries their laptop around, I appreciate the swappable battery. Train rides are much less anxious, no need to find a seat with a plug nearby, because I know I have an extra battery.
The T14 is definitely less portable. There's less ports as well, which is quite annoying. The only downside of the T470 is the screen - I like to work outside and a higher brightness screen is crucial. If I could have the T470 with a better screen and AMD CPU, I wouldn't bother buying a new Thinkpad.
I don't know why they call ultraportables ultraportables. Are they marketed for people who sometimes lift their laptop off the table and who are bothered by the "extra weight"?
The newest T14 is more expensive than my Thinkpad from the same series was - as extra thin, hard to repair notebooks usually are. It is a bit slimmer, but in the display part, not the base with the battery. It is a bit lighter, I'm guessing because of a plastic case? I'm not sure, but the case material is noticeably absent from marketing material and the datasheet, while in the case of mine both mentioned the magnesium case and internal metal cage.
Of course that's just a surface-level comparison. But after my really bad time with the Surface Pro I am absolutely not going to buy a laptop with integrated battery as long as I can avoid it. It's just not worth the pain if something goes wrong.
Unfortunately it's becoming more and more difficult to find removable battery equipped laptops, what current model lines do have that still?
Personally, having backup batteries is a requirement for the places I work.
Laptop being thinner is a trade off you're willing to make, I am not.
Charging a battery with another battery is extremely inefficient.
Lugging around laptop batteries is exactly the same thing as lugging around power banks, except laptop batteries don't require a dongle and a cable to tether you to a table.
Laptop batteries mean you laptop can continue to in fact work from your lap.
A powerbank for the same price will probably have a higher capacity, and be able to charge any USB-C device.
All this is not a reason for integrated batteries, but Powerbanks using a universal interface are clearly more practical.
as to "What do we gain", they claim they can make them thinner and lighter, but the T14 seems to be the same Thinkness and a T450/T460 so.......
"Keep Your Drive" is now a non-free (but not that expensive) "service upgrade". Disks are still removable on most models and it's not hard, but you still have to open the bottom of the laptop. (For ThinkPads, through ultra thin models like the X1 or "unusual" models like the ThinkPad Yoga might be more problematic.)
EDIT: Through it also depends on you service/guarantee contract. If you normally have a service contract where a technician will come to you but for some reasons that currently don't work you probably can keep your drive anyway etc. Also KYD extends to some other cases.
It's almost more of a donation in my experience. Don't pay it, remove the disk, no consequence. It's also a good idea to put the OEM ram back in the machine if youve upgraded. One of the few things they may balk at and return it unfixed.
I am not sure how it easy to damage something when removing a NVMe drive, it is trivial to remove the drive and should not even come close to damaging anything
YES. THIS. I am in vehement disagreement with Apple soldering SSDs to motherboards for partially this reason (among others, including making data recovery much harder, and lack of user upgradeability).
Apple fanboys all over the world will hate on me every single time saying "What if I told you that Apple just makes the best PC". Fuck that. I want a removeable SSD so repair technicians don't need the SSD to repair other parts of the PC.
Apologies for the confusion. I should have said "Macbook" in my original comment.
And as someone who has recently had a MacBook Pro repaired, they swapped virtually everything. Keyboard, Mboard, Touch Bar, etc. the only original thing now is the screen. I would have had to restore from backup anyway. As a plus, my SSD is now brand new so any wear on it after 2.9 years of service is gone :)
How is a customer suppose to backup and wipe their devices?
Yes, it was fine. If you are in a hurry you can even boot from a Time Machine backup.
> Apple customers would have a hard time
I took it to be implicit to the wish that hard drives be owner-serviceable.
And now my 2019 work MacBook requires taking out non-standard pentalobe screws, then using a suction cup to pry the lid open slightly in order to cram a wedge tool in-between to pop it open and then you need to slide it out in order to actually get it out.
It really makes me sad Apple gave up this environment-friendly policy and started to aggressively glue everything preventing upgrades.
The best way to prevent such practices is not to buy their products.
Sure, you can send in a wiped device or a device without hard drive - and if you can do so yourself, this is probably fine. But for the "average" user it's quite likely a better experience, assuming you can trust the repair shop - but then again, they have full access to your hardware plus the knowledge and time to permanently bug your device. If you really don't trust them, you probably should not give them your device at all.
I can see the issue here and I'd probably err on the side of privacy given the choice, but the other side has a point.
Do you leave all your valuables in the car when you drop it off at the shop? Or do you take them out first?
Another possibility -- maybe the computer is so borked that you can't even log on to remove your important documents. This seems more like calling somebody because your key broke in the lock... which... I guess most people would stick around? It is a little bit of a mismatch, because it is a quick fix and it isn't like you can go anywhere anyway.
It should be standard procedure in the repair world to hand the hard drive to the user to take home and keep only the PC for servicing.
Also when wiping SSDs get something like Parted Magic (since at least 2018 likely earlier) that can properly erase SSDs. DBAN is NOT appropriate for SSDs in any way - extra wear from the writes, and wear leveling means you have zero idea where they're actually going.
So, in keeping with my points above, I would probably move the really valuable stuff out, but for some customers taking everything out will prevent the technician from removing the issue (and they will probably be blamed for it) and if I feel the need to completely get everything saved out of the car beforehand, I would not trust that shop with my car, either.
I doubt anyone would leave an album with their nude pictures in the car hoping that the mechanic wouldn't do anything with it. Like...posting it all over the block where the customer lives.
Full disk encryption will protect your data.
Sure, it's a bit more sophisticated than Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. But if you're running a computer repair shop, it is quite likely that you have a good amount of technical knowledge. If someone has hardware access, you can usually see your device as compromised - especially if they have a lot of time and are expected to open up the device.
That's exactly what I said in my first comment:
>> If you really don't trust them, you probably should not give them your device at all.
> And the attacks you describe are not just "a bit more sophisticated than Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V", they're most likely far beyond the abilities of most repair technicians.
The RAM one, yes. ROM chip swaps, on the other hand, are rather common. You will need to be able to solder quite well, but given the current state of macs, this is basically a given for anyone doing repairs on them. You'd of course need to get a malicious ROM chip, which might not be so easy, but probably doable - the technician only needs to be able to swap it, not to manufacture one.
And if you can't get your hands on one - your can order a keylogger right now, for just a few bucks! [0] This was just the first result; if you invest a bit more time, you can surely find a smaller one or more fitting one. The keyboard is probably connected with USB [1], so no trouble there. As a bonus, you get all the passwords of accounts that were not saved at the time.
Sure, simply unlocking is a bit easier. But it's not like this stuff is beyond anyone who is able to debug and solder on a Mac.
[0] https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005001988834597.html?
[1] It's in my laptops; I don't know the specifics for macs, but I doubt is something more sophisticated than a strange plug.
"Trust not to source and install malicious hardware in order to potentially steal unknown to them data" is a magnitude apart from "Trust not to go snooping around through unprotected photo albums."
I sympathise with the young woman who was the victim here, but apart from "send your device unlocked" Apple do also recommend wiping the device before sending it.
When PINs started to become more common here, I had supermarket and continence store workers asking me to tell them the pin to my card, when paying for stuff. It didn't help that they'd ask me in Thai, I'd not understand, my wife would translate, and I'd immediately respond - in English - to the staff "Are you fucking crazy?".
Thankfully that idea didn't last long. I guess enough other people had similar reactions in their native tongue that they realised that's a really stupid way to do business.
At the Apple Store, they also asked for the password, but when I said no way, the support person was just "ok, no problem".
Can we take a moment to realize how crazy this is? I'm glad they didn't fight you, but the fact that they didn't means that they know in an instant that _they never needed the password in the first place to do what you asked them to_. This means that them asking for the password is them asking you for the private key to your entire personal life for no other reason than "most people will give it to them".
Which might also be a perfectly reasonable tradeoff, but there's nothing inherently nefarious about it. And people can make different choices depending on the amount of private information on their laptop.
Most want all their problems fixed with as little action required on their part as possible, with as much certainty as possible, and do not care about security in the least.
People are hard to reach once they are out of your sight, and get very unpleasant when things take a while....even when they take a while largely because they didn't get back to you in a timely manner (because you turn out to actually need their password to troubleshoot their configuration).
"Wipe the device and start fresh" is understandably not a valid solution to most users (especially as anything other than last-resort), even though it'll rule out a large portion of potential software problems.
---------
To note on some other elements I see in this thread:
- Hardware diagnostics exist in some form on most devices. They do not catch every problem that exists, and are often especially bad with more intermittent issues. If the complaint is that Facetime drops out after 10 minutes, the most certain you can be that the issue is resolved is by running those diagnostics AND booting to their actual user account and having Facetime work for 15 minutes. No one cares that "it passed the Camera diagnostic" when they've still got a problem when they get home with their "fixed" device. Many people actively want you to be signed into their account and do exactly what they did to confirm the issue no longer happens.
- IIRC you can't actually boot a modern (T2) Mac to an external drive without an Admin password being entered at least once to change the Startup Security Utility settings.
- Whether being run as a business or as internal support in an organization (more so a college or the like with personally owned devices), time matters. Getting credentials from everyone who's willing regardless of if they turn out to be necessary is absolutely terrible security practice, but great for turning around repairs more quickly and with fewer repeats of devices coming back because the issue isn't fixed.
--------
tl;dr - Sensible security practices are at odds with everything else the average person wants from their computer repairs.
ADDED: And, indeed for a sufficient threat model, the correct answer if a laptop or phone breaks is to throw it out and get a new one. It would be rather paranoid, but it would be the safest thing.
Personally, I have backups usually so my general attitude would be no password, fine to wipe the device.
I went through a battery replacement (out of warranty, but still covered by Apple), and I was never asked for the password. But maybe they didn't even bother to run tests, since it was literally pushing the keyboard up ever so slightly, the touch pad wouldn't click anymore (haptic feedback very weak) and the bottom plate was bulging out. It was pretty obvious what is up. The nice thing tho, I ended up with a new battery, new keyboard, new touchpad and new bottom plate. I guess every (most?) cloud has a silver lining? :)
You can't start with "It just works" and then add "As long as you spend hours backing up and restoring your data before you can send it in for repairs, just - you know - in case."
Maybe the millions that were paid out will make Apple think about a more user-oriented solution.
It's on the government have strong regulations that separate the sewage from the drinking water; strong regulations about who can connect what to the electrical power system; etc etc; require doctors to not pick their noses immediately before they perform surgery (gloves, masks, washing hands etc); encourage people to wash their hands after they poop.............
And inform people of good security practices, through public policy and school education.
I can't really see another way of educating the whole population on something they're otherwise fairly disinterested in.
Them: "what's your password"
Me: "I'm not giving that to you"
Them: "We'll have to wipe your phone then"
Me: "Fine by me"
Me: pickup phone next day, screen fixed all data still there
Lots of people try to scam repair shops bringing broken phones in.
On top of that repairs can often break fingerprint scanner connections and depending on the screen type its good to check camera functionality after screen replacement.
They could have the user unlock the phone in front of them without revealing the code to confirm this.
It’s all a balance of convenience vs privacy. Best solution is to wipe the device before repair, which is what I have done every time but it’s a hassle even when I have a backup to restore.
I think these are concepts that before would have seemed liked sci-fi, but after 2020, I think most regular people seem to have an intuitive appreciation for how damaging this can be. It's a shame that it's taken such a tragic schism to allow, but here we are and it's better late than never.
Another example would be people probably have a better intuitive understanding for motivations behind decentralized architecture, after seeing people being removed from certain platforms. Note: I'm not saying I'm for or against this in any way, but I am saying that the technological architecture is sort of the lay of the land, in a way that I think people understand better than they used to.
And no, I would never in a million years give my password to a repair technician in the past either. Hopefully others now are starting to get a sense for why.
I refused and they eventually relented while still providing the warranty but it ended up delaying the repair by 5 days (for a 2h repair).
My daughter's MacBook Pro, with lovely soldered down solid state memory died, and had to go in for repair. There was simply no way to wipe it, and no physical drive to pull.
Same thing with most phones. Soldered storage, glued shut case. If it dies under warranty, what do you do? You have to trust the repair chain, or just chuck it in the garbage.
I told them in no uncertain terms they cannot have my password, full disk encryption was enabled, and then pointed out if they can get the machine to the password prompt I'll be satisfied it's repaired.
I'm convinced these people are either intentionally being nefarious, or they were dropped on their fucking heads at birth.
If it's a software issue then maybe they do legitimately need a password but i would never hand one over without very careful consideration. And, strange hands on the keyboard of my laptop or phone would be watched very very closely at all times.
I good app would be one that disables the network stack, bluetooth, and cell modem with a separate secure pin.
In my case, many years ago, I got asked by a phone repair shop to backup the phone and wipe it before handing it over unlocked. My understanding was, they had no good way of doing proper diagnosis and after-repair testing without full access to the system.
Phones however...
https://www.ifixit.com/News/33593/heres-the-secret-repair-to...
In principle, it should be possible to have a diagnostic mode the same way recovery is implemented. But there are no device I know of that have this.
Not entirely https://www.macrumors.com/2018/09/17/iphone-calibration-proc...
I'm just glad they have an excellent example here of how it's fundamentally BS
When you go to the doctor and they prescribe you pills, most people don't question it and just take them. And that leads to a lot of people taking antibiotics that they don't need. Or when you move and need to sign up for internet, phone service, power, water, electricity, gas, etc.... almost all of them will ask for your social security number. Even I don't know when it's mandatory and when it's optional, so usually I ask them first, but sometimes I don't.
The last time I witnessed this was some malware that infected an ex-roommate's laptop. The malware pretended to be an anti-virus and said she had a virus on her computer that it would fix. But first she needed to pay for the software - by putting in her credit card info & social security number. She complied because the files on her laptop were very sensitive and she didn't want lose them, and she had no idea that there was no reason to ask for a social to pay for this software.
We could probably do more as a community to educate people on keeping sensitive information secure. Part of it involves media outreach, as most people seem to get their news from the TV or Facebook.
Who the on earth gives their passwords, also all laptops should be encrypted by default. I find it absurd to give away the keys to your bank, search history, personal notes, images, whatever - it's beyond private and personal besides being economically dangerous and very bad job security wise for most jobs.
Not blaming regular people though, but it's weird that people are so lax about giving the keys to absolutely everything.