Just specced out a Tb 3 NVMe enclosure with Tb cable, and a samsung 970 EVO plus 2Tb on eBay for half the price Apple is charging for an internal 2Tb upgrade (a third the price just for the ssd). On Amazon it works out about 60 per cent of the Apple price for an enclosure and drive.
I suspect the Apple SSD might be marginally quicker, but not much seeing as the logic board is still @ PCI-e 3.0.
I would accept a little bit more expensive, but twice the price?
Another stupid choice from the think different verb preachers.
One should pay thousands for a machine that is supposed to last a lot years without any possibility of later upgrades?
People have a really short-term memory here. Why this "anger" continues is beyond me.
It has been shown, written, along with the dead horse being beaten multiple times that most people will NEVER upgrade their PC/iMac after the initial purchase. FACT. I do in fact miss those days of upgrading my computers innards, but in the end the math works in Apple's favor, and in the favor of other manufacturers that are beginning to follow Apple's lead.
We (because I did it to) are in the ridiculously low - but vocal - minority. If you're an upgrader then either buy something else that you can upgrade, or accept that AIO products like these are toasters. Accept it. There's just not enough of us to make Apple take notice and think twice.
I just bought the 2020 iMac with the 8TB option because I had a feeling that Apple was going to pull a stunt like this with the SSD. This machine will last for a very long time. Apparently, the 4TB & 8TB machines have SSD connectors, but with the T2 chip, replacing those drives may still prove problematic down the road so I upgraded to the most I will ever need - credit card be damned - and moved on.
I suspect what Apple is doing right now on the new 2020 iMacs is just a glimpse of what they're going to do with the new ARM iMacs. It will look like a giant iPad sleek, beautiful, no-bezels, etc... but Apple will provide zero way of upgrading anything on those ARM iMacs. Everything will be soldered on the board, and no user-upgradeable memory. I really hope I'm wrong, but those senses are tingling.
When I'm finally ready to upgrade to another iMac later in the decade, Apple will have fully polished and baked-in whatever ARM Macs they have I can then be in a good position to decide what to buy next, or just continue using my now-obsolete but fast Intel Mac.
I've upgraded the RAM and HD in my 2009 iMac, which is in use still but am unconcerned at the move. Genuine recyclability (as opposed to contributing to clogged rivers in other parts of the world) is important, these beautiful machines must not be left either to collect dust or go to landfill (or dumped in a river somewhere). Apple will take my systems back at local Apple stores.
Another stupid choice from the think different verb preachers.
One should pay thousands for a machine that is supposed to last a lot years without any possibility of later upgrades?
Better get used to it. SSD’s are getting soldered in laptops, even none Apple ones. Apple is doing it for APPLE'S security. .....
Fixed that for you!
Apple wins three ways by this trick:
-- They force the user to buy more storage (at a VERY high premium!) when buying the machine. -- They force the user to buy a new machine when that storage fills up.
-- They protect their proprietary software by locking it into an SSD that can't be removed and reused.
The user doesn't gain a thing. Nothing. We only lose.
Steve was famous for denying user flexibility and expandibility. But his limitations always had a payoff for the user in system reliability or performance. This move has none of those offsets. At least none that I can see.
Order one with a 1TB SSD. That's big enough for the main system drive. Those two USB C 3.1 gen 2 ports will take care of your future SSD storage needs. You can pick up a 2TB Samsung T7 drive for $300 right now. In a few years 4 or 8 TB SSDs should become affordable. 1 GB/sec is plenty fast enough for most needs. Look, I agree about the lack of upgradability but that was true even when the iMac had a removable drive. Very few users were capable of accessing it. Apple could have added an accessible M2 port like the RAM. That would have been a lot more useful than being able to swap out the SSD.
I can see an issue if your SSD fails, you have to replace your whole logic board and vice versa if your logic board fails, you better have had a backup of your data. The repair itself is going to take longer since now you have to remove everything in order to get the logic board out. Plus, if there happens to be a bad batch of SSDs then get ready for a backlog of logic boards.
This is my reaction. Repairs will be far more wasteful. What are the stats on SSD failures?
Look, I agree about the lack of upgradability but that was true even when the iMac had a removable drive. Very few users were capable of accessing it. [...]
It is a MASSIVE PITA to service iMacs, yes, even when it was possible to service them at all. I have a 2011 machine and I hope to never open it again. The guy who sold it to me on eBay refunded me some of the payment because of how BADLY his employee did rebuilding it for sale (missing LCD panel screws, other screws present & not screwed in but stuck to magnets, scratch on LCD, wrong parts for Apple’s original drive being replaced, bottom fan left unplugged, etc). It can’t be good for Apple service people either. It was NEVER a good design for service. Now they’re just eliminating service entirely.
Another stupid choice from the think different verb preachers.
One should pay thousands for a machine that is supposed to last a lot years without any possibility of later upgrades?
One should spec an iMac machine to last. I always do and my non-upgraded Macs always last me at least 6 years. The whole point of an “all in one” is a nicer looking machine while sacrificing upgradeability that most of us don’t need. My 2014 iMac currently runs off a choice of external SSD drives so I can switch from High Sierra to Mojave to Catalina on a simple reboot. This allows me to use 32 bit apps when necessary, old versions of XCode for older enterprise apps built with older SDKs etc. all with one 6 year old iMac.
Please explain why you have to integrate the ssd into the logic board - other than Apple can charge $3000 for a HDD repair because they are the only ones who can fix it.
You are completely out of touch. Completely. Nobody is drinking Apple's Kool aid on this.
Nobody’s forcing you to drink Apple’s Kool Aid but you sure are gulping down the “I hate everything Apple” cyanide laden drinks.
You still haven’t figured out that with all those TB3 ports in the back you could easily get yourself an SSD drive of your choosing plug it in and there’s your extra storage? You can even purchase a little Velcro strip and stick it on the back. You won’t even notice it after that.
I can see an issue if your SSD fails, you have to replace your whole logic board and vice versa if your logic board fails, you better have had a backup of your data. The repair itself is going to take longer since now you have to remove everything in order to get the logic board out. Plus, if there happens to be a bad batch of SSDs then get ready for a backlog of logic boards.
This is my reaction. Repairs will be far more wasteful. What are the stats on SSD failures?
There aren’t any public stats, or anything any manufacturer would give you, but in speaking to friends of mine who are Geniuses, it can happen and since Apple has created the T2 chip, backups are something that need to be mandatory at all times.
One case that was explained to me was a customer who had a brand new MB pro that failed a few days after he got it.
He was setting it up and had new data on it that was important, but hadn’t been able to complete a time machine backup because it failed while it was backing up. Since the logic board had the SSD soldered to it, there was no way to remove it so the customer could try to extract the data like you could with older Macs. The other issue was the T2 chip which would make the data unreadable anyway if you were able to remove the drive. They ended up returning his computer and giving him another new one, but couldn’t do anything about the data.
I agree that it’s not Apple’s responsibility to ensure your data is backed up, but I don’t like the idea of having no options when there is a hardware failure that isn’t related to the SSD.
Consumers are still taking big risks not backing up their data in this day and expect the computer to be like their iPhone and backup automatically to iCloud.
The problem here is the cooling, which continues to soldier on apparently unchanged (and was just barely adequate before).
Shame when they could borrow the superior cooling out of the iMac Pro. Which I'd buy if it got a real upgrade; not spending $5000+ on a three+ year old machine.
Another stupid choice from the think different verb preachers.
One should pay thousands for a machine that is supposed to last a lot years without any possibility of later upgrades?
Better get used to it. SSD’s are getting soldered in laptops, even none Apple ones. Apple is doing it for APPLE'S security. .....
Apple wins three ways by this trick:
-- They force the user to buy more storage (at a VERY high premium!) when buying the machine. -- They force the user to buy a new machine when that storage fills up.
-- They protect their proprietary software by locking it into an SSD that can't be removed and reused.
1) No one’s forcing you to buy anything. Most smart users would spec out their minimum requirements and then look for outside sources for the rest. External SSD’s are quite inexpensive these days.
2) Why would you buy a new machine because the internal storage is almost full? How about offloading that content to external drives/SSD’s?
3) What’s wrong with protecting your software through encryption and other techniques?
An examination of the logic board further proved there wasn't any user-upgradability for storage with the model being examined, as there were no SATA connectors on the board at all.
Since we knew that hard drives were no longer offered in the 2020 27" iMac, it would have been very surprising to find an SATA connector on the new iMac's board.
And because we also knew that the new iMac uses Apple's T2 chip, it was unlikely that the SSD mass storage would be a standalone, much less a standard (e.g. NVMe), drive module of any kind, since Apple integrates the SSD controller function into the T2. That makes Apple's SSD incompatible with commercially available SSDs, which have their own onboard controllers.
It wasn't known whether the SSD's storage would be soldered on, as opposed to plug-in, but now we do. Note that even in the iMac Pro, which also uses the T2 but does have plug-in mass storage modules, those modules are proprietary and not available for sale as upgrades. (They are available as repair parts.)
We just took delivery of a 2020 27" iMac (3.8 GHz, 8C, 8GB, 512GB) last week. With 32GB of OWC RAM installed we got the following benchmark results: Geekbench 5: 1248 (single core); 8554 (multicore). Cinebench R20: 4871 The fan kicked in quickly on the R20 test, but not observably with GB 5.
Another stupid choice from the think different verb preachers.
One should pay thousands for a machine that is supposed to last a lot years without any possibility of later upgrades?
Better get used to it. SSD’s are getting soldered in laptops, even none Apple ones. Apple is doing it for APPLE'S security. .....
Fixed that for you!
Apple wins three ways by this trick:
-- They force the user to buy more storage (at a VERY high premium!) when buying the machine. -- They force the user to buy a new machine when that storage fills up.
-- They protect their proprietary software by locking it into an SSD that can't be removed and reused.
The user doesn't gain a thing. Nothing. We only lose.
Steve was famous for denying user flexibility and expandibility. But his limitations always had a payoff for the user in system reliability or performance. This move has none of those offsets. At least none that I can see.
I guess you haven't yet heard of Thunderbolt. I have, which now allows me to buy less internal storage for my Mac mini because external storage connections are more than sufficient for data transfer. It's also encrypted using Apple's own encryption options.
With the iMacs, the most the average person could do is replace the ram. With the old iMacs, you need suction cups to pull the glass, then carefully remove the display without damaging the cables, by removing the right star screws. Once you did all that, you could replace the hard drive and OWC has a kit to replace the CD drive with another hard drive. Then you had to do all that in reverse, without damaging anything to put it back together. But yes you could do more upgrading and it was a lot of fun. I still have my suction cup kit.
Perhaps you could, but to others point, it was very rare and isn't worth Apple's time and money to engineer/design an AIO Mac for general consumers for the less than 1% of those who will actually do it. Some think its so easy for Apple to engineer the internals with expandable access areas and while it may seem so easy it may in fact not be. How much does it screw with the cooling? The structure of the case itself? The design overall? Etc...
The 2006-2012 Cheese graters were the best selling pro computers Apple ever released in the history of the company.
So I guess that completely blows your entire argument out of the water.
Okay
1. We're not talking about "Pro" computers. We're talking about a consumer iMac.
2. What makes you think people bought the Mac Pro just because you can upgrade it? Never mind they may have purchased it because its the most powerful Mac Apple sold at the time and they needed the power and couldn't care less about upgrading it later on.
3. What stats do you have about Mac sales? Did you forget that the MacBook Pro is also a "Pro" computer? I'm pretty sure the MacBook Pro way outsold the MacPro tower. Feel free to prove me wrong though.
Another stupid choice from the think different verb preachers.
One should pay thousands for a machine that is supposed to last a lot years without any possibility of later upgrades?
One should spec an iMac machine to last. I always do and my non-upgraded Macs always last me at least 6 years. The whole point of an “all in one” is a nicer looking machine while sacrificing upgradeability that most of us don’t need. My 2014 iMac currently runs off a choice of external SSD drives so I can switch from High Sierra to Mojave to Catalina on a simple reboot. This allows me to use 32 bit apps when necessary, old versions of XCode for older enterprise apps built with older SDKs etc. all with one 6 year old iMac.
Please explain why you have to integrate the ssd into the logic board - other than Apple can charge $3000 for a HDD repair because they are the only ones who can fix it.
You are completely out of touch. Completely. Nobody is drinking Apple's Kool aid on this.
Well, the ass-hats at that are busy tanking the stock value of the company... somehow got the idea that internal storage should operate at 3+ Gb/s! Totally idiotic. Further, they wanted to encrypt everything to and from the storage! They are perverts, I tell you. And so it was. Buy one of those ’s and you get blistering fast, encrypted and silent storage which is totally unbreakable—even if you bust open the damn case and connects the storage to your Death Star hacking PC!
I just wish this came out 2 days earlier before I placed my order. This is a deal breaker for me. Tomorrow Apple will get a call to cancel my $4,000 computer, they just lost my money. Is there any one who knows for certain that the 4TB ssd model includes the expansion connector? Or would it be just the 8TB model?
I would really hate to switch to a Dell, but I will and do vote with my money. I know apple doesn't care they have so much money they can't even count it all.
I did switch to Dell because of this (laptop that is). I feel secure as I have a cloned SSD on the ready that can be installed within 10min and a HD with backup files.
Apple making the SSD unreplacable is not because security. That is rubbish - apart from the extremely small user base who cares about and needs this level of security. The average user certainly doesn't this level of security. What another reason? Oh, socket are less reliable. I've been using computers for over 35 years and yet to experience a failed socketed storage - another BS reason. The motive is solely a business decision - either during manufacturing, at point of purchase, costly repair or unit replacement.
Again, most people will never upgrade their machines after purchase. We are in the minority and discussing it on a tech blog makes it sound bigger than it really is.
Apple will not miss you, or your money.
I suspect the new ARM macs will be even worse in terms of upgradability, if even possible... and most will not care.
Another stupid choice from the think different verb preachers.
One should pay thousands for a machine that is supposed to last a lot years without any possibility of later upgrades?
Better get used to it. SSD’s are getting soldered in laptops, even none Apple ones. Apple is doing it for APPLE'S security. .....
Apple wins three ways by this trick:
-- They force the user to buy more storage (at a VERY high premium!) when buying the machine. -- They force the user to buy a new machine when that storage fills up.
-- They protect their proprietary software by locking it into an SSD that can't be removed and reused.
1) No one’s forcing you to buy anything. Most smart users would spec out their minimum requirements and then look for outside sources for the rest. External SSD’s are quite inexpensive these days.
2) Why would you buy a new machine because the internal storage is almost full? How about offloading that content to external drives/SSD’s?
3) What’s wrong with protecting your software through encryption and other techniques?
Those arguments are somewhere between weak and stupid. So, I'll stick with what I said: This only helps Apple and hurts its users because:
-- They force the user to buy more storage (at a VERY high premium!) when buying the machine. -- They force the user to buy a new machine when that storage fills up.
-- They protect their proprietary software by locking it into an SSD that can't be removed and reused.
I just wish this came out 2 days earlier before I placed my order. This is a deal breaker for me. Tomorrow Apple will get a call to cancel my $4,000 computer, they just lost my money. Is there any one who knows for certain that the 4TB ssd model includes the expansion connector? Or would it be just the 8TB model?
I would really hate to switch to a Dell, but I will and do vote with my money. I know apple doesn't care they have so much money they can't even count it all.
I did switch to Dell because of this (laptop that is). I feel secure as I have a cloned SSD on the ready that can be installed within 10min and a HD with backup files.
Apple making the SSD unreplacable is not because security. That is rubbish - apart from the extremely small user base who cares about and needs this level of security. The average user certainly doesn't this level of security. What another reason? Oh, socket are less reliable. I've been using computers for over 35 years and yet to experience a failed socketed storage - another BS reason. The motive is solely a business decision - either during manufacturing, at point of purchase, costly repair or unit replacement.
Again, most people will never upgrade their machines after purchase. We are in the minority and discussing it on a tech blog makes it sound bigger than it really is.
Apple will not miss you, or your money.
I suspect the new ARM macs will be even worse in terms of upgradability, if even possible... and most will not care.
The problem is not that a casual user can't open up the machine and replace or upgrade a full or failed SSD, it's that NOBODY, including Apple can. The alternative is to buy a new machine. That's a win for Apple but not their user -- especially since that user gained zero benefit from it being soldered in the first place!
I just wish this came out 2 days earlier before I placed my order. This is a deal breaker for me. Tomorrow Apple will get a call to cancel my $4,000 computer, they just lost my money. Is there any one who knows for certain that the 4TB ssd model includes the expansion connector? Or would it be just the 8TB model?
I would really hate to switch to a Dell, but I will and do vote with my money. I know apple doesn't care they have so much money they can't even count it all.
I did switch to Dell because of this (laptop that is). I feel secure as I have a cloned SSD on the ready that can be installed within 10min and a HD with backup files.
Apple making the SSD unreplacable is not because security. That is rubbish - apart from the extremely small user base who cares about and needs this level of security. The average user certainly doesn't this level of security. What another reason? Oh, socket are less reliable. I've been using computers for over 35 years and yet to experience a failed socketed storage - another BS reason. The motive is solely a business decision - either during manufacturing, at point of purchase, costly repair or unit replacement.
Again, most people will never upgrade their machines after purchase. We are in the minority and discussing it on a tech blog makes it sound bigger than it really is.
Apple will not miss you, or your money.
I suspect the new ARM macs will be even worse in terms of upgradability, if even possible... and most will not care.
The problem is not that a casual user can't open up the machine and replace or upgrade a full or failed SSD, it's that NOBODY, including Apple can. The alternative is to buy a new machine. That's a win for Apple but not their user -- especially since that user gained zero benefit from it being soldered in the first place!
I'm sure Apple could replace the logicboard if necessary. They aren't gonna make a consumer buy a new iMac just because the logicboard has some sort of issue. Its just that, out of warranty will the end user want to pay for this? And again, how often does flash storage go bad? Especially flash storage directly soldered to the board.
Comments
I suspect the Apple SSD might be marginally quicker, but not much seeing as the logic board is still @ PCI-e 3.0.
I would accept a little bit more expensive, but twice the price?
-- They force the user to buy a new machine when that storage fills up.
Steve was famous for denying user flexibility and expandibility. But his limitations always had a payoff for the user in system reliability or performance. This move has none of those offsets. At least none that I can see.
Look, I agree about the lack of upgradability but that was true even when the iMac had a removable drive. Very few users were capable of accessing it. Apple could have added an accessible M2 port like the RAM. That would have been a lot more useful than being able to swap out the SSD.
3) What’s wrong with protecting your software through encryption and other techniques?
And because we also knew that the new iMac uses Apple's T2 chip, it was unlikely that the SSD mass storage would be a standalone, much less a standard (e.g. NVMe), drive module of any kind, since Apple integrates the SSD controller function into the T2. That makes Apple's SSD incompatible with commercially available SSDs, which have their own onboard controllers.
It wasn't known whether the SSD's storage would be soldered on, as opposed to plug-in, but now we do. Note that even in the iMac Pro, which also uses the T2 but does have plug-in mass storage modules, those modules are proprietary and not available for sale as upgrades. (They are available as repair parts.)
We just took delivery of a 2020 27" iMac (3.8 GHz, 8C, 8GB, 512GB) last week. With 32GB of OWC RAM installed we got the following benchmark results:
Geekbench 5: 1248 (single core); 8554 (multicore).
Cinebench R20: 4871
The fan kicked in quickly on the R20 test, but not observably with GB 5.
Further, they wanted to encrypt everything to and from the storage! They are perverts, I tell you.
And so it was. Buy one of those ’s and you get blistering fast, encrypted and silent storage which is totally unbreakable—even if you bust open the damn case and connects the storage to your Death Star hacking PC!
-- They force the user to buy a new machine when that storage fills up.
The problem is not that a casual user can't open up the machine and replace or upgrade a full or failed SSD, it's that NOBODY, including Apple can. The alternative is to buy a new machine. That's a win for Apple but not their user -- especially since that user gained zero benefit from it being soldered in the first place!
I'm sure Apple could replace the logicboard if necessary. They aren't gonna make a consumer buy a new iMac just because the logicboard has some sort of issue. Its just that, out of warranty will the end user want to pay for this? And again, how often does flash storage go bad? Especially flash storage directly soldered to the board.