Also, there are some really amazing deals on used/refurb M2 Macs out there. ~$700 for a Macbook Air is a pretty great value, if you can live with 16GB of RAM and a okay but not amazing screen.

$450 for a M4 Mac mini (at Microcenter, but Best Buy will price match) is possibly the best computer hardware deal out there. It is an incredible machine.

Having run a Mac Mini with a 256GB internal drive for 2-3 years I will dispute that anyone should buy base models for that reason. MacOS makes it as painful as possible for you to use external drives. For instance, no software for "cloud" drives (google drive, onedrive, icloud drive) is allowed to locate its local copy on an "External" drive, so you can't keep your files locally and in the cloud, have to pick one. Photos can have its library moved at least.

I like the hardware, hate the absurd greedy storage and RAM prices.

AI FOMO at least made them bump the base RAM to 16GB. 256GB is pitiful but manageable if you don't need to handle large files. And jumping up to $800 just for another 256GB is absolutely not worth it.

I agree on your second point, which is why unless Apple ever moves away from only having 2010-era storage amounts and absurd prices to size up, from now on I'll be buying used only. Just picked up an M3 MacBook Air with 16GB and 1TB SSD, mint condition, for under a grand.

The M4 Mini ships with 16 Gigs of RAM minimum and accepts third party SSD replacements.

Not SSDs. Weird little proprietary NAND modules that someone reverse-engineered and that Apple will hopefully not issue a software update to brick. The controller part of the SSD is in the CPU. For “reasons” I guess

> The controller part of the SSD is in the CPU. For “reasons” I guess

Probably because Apple spent half a billion dollars for the patent portfolio of a company building enterprise SSD controllers a decade ago. People seem to like data storage integrity.

> Anobit appears to be applying a lot of signal processing techniques in addition to ECC to address the issue of NAND reliability and data retention. In its patents there are mentions of periodically refreshing cells whose voltages may have drifted, exploiting some of the behaviors of adjacent cells and generally trying to deal with the things that happen to NAND once it's been worn considerably.

Through all of these efforts, Anobit is promising significant improvements in NAND longevity and reliability.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/5258/apple-acquires-anobit-br...

Is the implication here that non-Apple computers have SSDs that just constantly erase themselves or something? I don’t buy that this is a problem and I don’t buy that Apple has solved it. Even if they did solve it, having the fancy SSD controllers on the actual “SSDs” by using NVME is so obviously the only consumer friendly choice that it’s laughable to think Apple went to all this trouble for altruistic reasons. If Apple cared about keeping people’s data safe, instead of charging 300% margins on SSDs, they could charge much smaller margins annd give double the storage, and configure Macs by default with RAID.

If I had to place a bet on why the patents were purchased, it would be to protect them against someone else purchasing them and alleging that literally any SSD controller Apple put into their silicon was infringing.

> Is the implication here that non-Apple computers have SSDs that just constantly erase themselves or something?

Watch the talk "Zebras all the way down" by Bryan Cantril; TLDR most storage devices lie to you and are constantly corrupting your data, and you only find out if you run paranoid filesystems like ZFS + run your own burn-in and integrity tests.

> For instance, no software for "cloud" drives (google drive, onedrive, icloud drive) is allowed to locate its local copy on an "External" drive

Source? Is this self-imposed, or what does “allowed” mean?

Even if true, technical people can work around this by either spoofing a non-external drive or using `ln`, no?

> Even if true, technical people can work around this by either spoofing a non-external drive or using `ln`, no?

IIRC Google Drive for Desktop won't sync the target of a symbolic link. It will sync the target of a hard link, but hard links can only target the same filesystem that the link is on, so you can't target an external drive on macOS AFAIK.

I can't speak for the other software you mentioned.

That… sucks. I’m going to play with this.

Try it yourself and see. Something about macOS cloud file provider system that they all use now has a built-in requirement that you must locate that “OneDrive” or “Google Drive” folder on an “internal” drive. Assuming you have a $6000 Mac Pro you can have as many internals as you want, but for the rest of us “internal drive” means the one single drive soldered directly to your motherboard.

Of course, predictably, iCloud Drive gives you no configuration of where you store the local copy, so it’s stored in some weird path specifically on your boot volume.

Indeed. I just grabbed a mint M3 MBA on ebay for about $950 with a 1TB ssd (which tbh was my main need to upgrade this family member in the first place, as they weren't CPU-bound on the old M1). Wild deals to be had!

a 30% discount for a 3 yr old machine is good? A new one is $999.

When the 3yo machine does 100% of what you need without missing a beat and has 8h screen-on battery life, yes, yes, it is

Even better deals on M1s which aren't much slower than M2s

Any linux or bsd that has goodhardwawe support for intel mac?

For the older ones with Broadcom WiFi I was able to get stock Ubuntu working great by following this:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/55868/installing-broadcom-wi...

Not sure about the newer ones.

Gathering this information and putting together a distro to rescue old Macbooks from the e-waste bin would be a worthwhile project. As far as I can tell they're great hardware.

I imagine things get harder once you get into the USB-C era.

This site is very useful for getting Linux on more recent Intel Macs - I was able to get Ubuntu running on a 2018 MBA

https://t2linux.org/

That was officially communicated at the state of the union session.