However, Apple’s base model is frankly silly. A solid 2TB NVME drive is only 150$, slapping the equivalent of 20$ worth of storage on a 1,500$ laptop is crazy.
The point of the parent comment was not about saving data from the drive, but that the devices are landfill material once they hit tbw limits on their drives, even if they were otherwise in good condition.
> So if the internal drive on your M1 Mac fails completely, even an external bootable drive won't boot. Yep, your Mac is bricked.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-bad-is-the-m1-macs-ssd-fai...
Constant backups are a necessity even if your computer has RAID-6 storage built on enterprise-grade storage.
Your office can catch fire. You can be hit by ransomware. Multiple devices in the array can fail in rapid sequence (happened to me once). Your computer can get stolen (happened to me, twice).
Have an offsite backup always on hand.
Baking on the memory? It's frustrating and gimps the device lifespan, but arguably unavoidable with the bandwidth Apple is targeting. Without replaceable storage though, every Apple Silicon device is effectively a ticking time-bomb. These devices will all hit their TBW limit long before they're unusable, and Apple refused to anticipate this because... it side-steps their pricing scheme?
The current Macbook lineup is a step in the right direction, but far from perfect. Even ignoring my hundred gripes with MacOS, I think there are clear hardware improvements they can make with future iterations. None of these improvements seem particularly profitable though, so I'm not counting on Apple adding them.