Apple Seemingly Unable To Recover Data From 2018 MacBook Pro With Touch Bar When Logic Board Fails (macrumors.com) 341
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2016, when Apple introduced the first MacBook Pro with Touch Bar models, the repair experts at iFixit discovered the notebooks have non-removable SSDs, soldered to the logic board, prompting concerns that data recovery would not be possible if the logic board failed. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. Apple has a special tool for 2016 and 2017 models of the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar that allows Genius Bars and Apple Authorized Service Providers to recover user data when the logic board fails, but the SSD is still intact. [...] But, unfortunately, it appears the tool will not work with the latest models.
Last week, iFixit completed a teardown of the 2018 MacBook Pro, discovering that Apple has removed the data recovery connector from the logic board on both 13-inch and 15-inch models with the Touch Bar, suggesting that the Customer Data Migration Tool can no longer be connected. MacRumors contacted multiple reliable sources at Apple Authorized Service Providers to learn more, and based on the information we obtained, it does appear that the tool is incompatible with 2018 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar models. Multiple sources claim that data cannot be recovered if the logic board has failed on a 2018 MacBook Pro. If the notebook is still functioning, data can be transferred to another Mac by booting the system in Target Disk Mode, and using Migration Assistant, which is the standard process that relies on Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Last week, iFixit completed a teardown of the 2018 MacBook Pro, discovering that Apple has removed the data recovery connector from the logic board on both 13-inch and 15-inch models with the Touch Bar, suggesting that the Customer Data Migration Tool can no longer be connected. MacRumors contacted multiple reliable sources at Apple Authorized Service Providers to learn more, and based on the information we obtained, it does appear that the tool is incompatible with 2018 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar models. Multiple sources claim that data cannot be recovered if the logic board has failed on a 2018 MacBook Pro. If the notebook is still functioning, data can be transferred to another Mac by booting the system in Target Disk Mode, and using Migration Assistant, which is the standard process that relies on Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Take away lesson: Back your computer up regularly! (Score:5, Insightful)
Back up frequently, and always.
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:4, Insightful)
...or just buy a "computer" that works for you, and not to the manufactors agenda of complete and total vendor locking...
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...or just buy a "computer" that works for you, and not to the manufactors agenda of complete and total vendor locking...
Because lots of other "vendors" have "stores" all over the place where you can take your "computer" to have the data restored.
Oh, and for God's sake, turn on backups people.
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:5, Insightful)
If the computer has a removable HDD and only the motherboard failed, one can take the computer to a third-party repair shop which will stick the drive in a "sled" and recover the data. (Even if encrypted, as long as the user knows the appropriate passphrases.)
The ideal is NOT to need a specially blessed authorized dealer to work on the damn things.
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:5, Interesting)
(Even if encrypted, as long as the user knows the appropriate passphrases.)
Unless the passphrase is made more secure by having it only gain access to the key through a secure enclave chip (so that you can't brute force the password). That chip is on the touch bar in these models.
I agree that sacrificing repairability to make a computer slimmer is a terrible idea, but it's 2018. If you're not encrypting a portable device then you shouldn't leave the house with it.
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This can be solved by requiring a passphrase of a certain length and complexity to allow boot. Design it so it decrypts a key that in turn decrypts another key that gives access to the drive. Make the entire initial process take a second or five to drastically slow down attempts at forcing encryption.
It might be able to be brute-forced in a few years...
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The ideal is to avoid using passphrases at all, other than recovery phrases which can be extremely long (longer than the cipher's bit size), like BitLocker's or FileVault's personal recovery key. That way, an attacker has to guess from a 256 bit keyspace minimum.
There is nothing wrong with a TPM or Secure Enclave chip, provided it doesn't communicate with anything else, so the chance of it getting remotely backdoored is slim. From there, the machine can be configured to boot quietly to the OS login screen
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that for the security conscious this is a feature, not a bug. Think about that.
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Maybe we need an open source TPM. The functionality for one of these chips is not exactly complicated. Take some values, hash them against previous values, then if the has matches a stored hash, pass the key, otherwise, pass a middle finger. A small ASIC likely could do this functionality, although economies of scale do come into play.
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Or having the TPM/Enclave protected key with reasonably usable or no passphrase required to boot if present, and a recovery password, which is much slower to access absent of the TPM (e.g. an ungodly number of ronuds of KDF).
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>You don't have to buy it. There are lots of alternatives.
These phrases have never been a shield against criticism. Identification is a precursor to improvement. Fixing bad things is progress; ignoring them is stagnation, decay, rot.
You'll need better if you want immunity to accusations of inferiority or backwards decisions.
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How is that common?
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Yes, and to be clear my last laptop purchase was not an Apple - I'm not a fanboy, exactly - I just find that they get criticized for things that no other manufacturer even tries to do.
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Dell Inspiron. Microsoft Surface. I'm not exactly an expert on this, but those are two with which I have recent experience as someone was asking me to help upgrade and they cannot be upgraded.
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ThinkPads are not always the most repairable systems either. In the quest for smaller/lighter/thinner those bulky connectors for rather reliable parts will just get in the way.
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As a matter of fact, they do. For that matter, the job is well within the reach of a teen who's good with computers. If you don't know one, ask google for computer repair shop near you.
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And there are no third-party shops that do Apple data recovery?
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If you're prepared to pay the much higher cost of having someone attack the problem with a desoldering station, there are probably places that can do it even when Apple says they can't (due to the lack of the debugging port), but they will charge a hell of a lot more for that than a corner shop swapping drives on a PC and especially more than the above mentioned teen that's good with computers.
But if the failed logic board was under warranty, you may have to choose between paying through the nose for data r
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It's never come up for me since I neither have a Mac with a soldered on SSD, nor rely on data recovery for my backup needs, but a cursory Google search seems to show data recovery options for Macs at Geek Squad-like prices. You raise a good point about potentially voiding the warranty - yet another reason to backup. Have have some empathy for people who lose work while on the road. Hell, the reason I'm preaching is that I've lost data even though it was backed up, because it was backed up on the same machin
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If you have your data on a removable drive, sure, take it wherever you want.
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I don't know enough about the engineering tradeoffs to make the determination that it is a "horrid design". I do know that it makes a backup scheme even more important if you decide to buy such hardware (to be honest, I have no idea whether my HP Envy has soldered-on storage or not, I backup).
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The only positive here is that Time Machine "just works."
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:4, Interesting)
Until it doesn't. It seems common for it to pop up and say that a backup is corrupted, and prompts you to erase the stored backup and start fresh.
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That will not stop it from having problems, where if you backed up your data you can save a lot of money and time.
An open system, that happens to solder a component in place, will still have that problem, especially if that component may be a bit more rare to handle.
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:5, Insightful)
You have obviously never owned an Apple laptop — or, for that matter, any laptop containing a standalone GPU soldered onto the logic board. Now that we don't have spinning rust for storage, logic boards are likely the most common non-power-related failure mode by a large margin.
No professional in his or her right might should seriously consider a laptop in which a logic board failure results in the loss of access to storage. Even if you just lose the storage since the last backup, that could be a considerable loss, and this assumes that Time Machine is actually backing things up correctly and that no files on your backup drive have exhibited bit rot. In the worst case, you might lose considerably more, like your entire photo library or some other "why the hell did Apple mark this as a bundle" folder.
No, if true, this qualifies as a showstopper-level flaw, sufficient to get upper management fired. I can't imagine that even the "thin über alles" folks at Apple would be THAT stupid. It seems far more likely that somebody changed a connector, and that they don't have the right tools at the various Apple stores yet, which while qualifying as seriously incompetent, is probably a failure of the Apple Store and/or AppleCare management chain, rather than engineering.
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:4, Informative)
Apple laptops have had optional full-disk encryption for seven years, and optional home directory encryption for fifteen years. Moreover, full-disk encryption has been automatic for four years. In no way should you interpret my comments to in any way imply that full-disk encryption itself is inherently risky. It is only the new implementation of FDE that is poorly designed.
In previous hardware iterations, you could copy the underlying encrypted data to an external hard drive using a specially designed cable attached to another computer. When the user attaches that external hard drive to a new machine, the computer's built-in firmware would ask the user for the password to unencrypt the disk. If he or she knows that password and types it in, the new computer would then be able to retrieve data from that copy just as easily as the original computer could retrieve it from the original flash drive.
Similarly, historically, if you didn't know the password, but printed out a copy of the recovery key, you could use that to decrypt your data.
What changed (reportedly) is that instead of using a pure software-based encryption scheme, they moved to a hardware-accelerated scheme, and instead of having the user be in complete control over the crypto key used, they began using a key that is burned into ROM on a chip on the motherboard for part (hopefully not all?) of the encryption. The result is that even if you copy the contents of the flash silicon to a new machine, that unchangeable hardware key cannot be retrieved (without uncapping the chip and using an electron microscope). Thus, even if you have the password or a recovery key, it is still not possible to decrypt the data without the chip from the original machine.
That is the flaw. Ostensibly, this reduces the risk of someone copying the encrypted data to another machine and then trying to brute-force your password, but in practice, this is a level of sophistication beyond all but the most targeted attacks. The overwhelming majority of people outside the corporate world would rather have the ability to recover their data in the event of a non-storage failure of their computer, rather than have that small bit of additional protection against attacks by CIA-level operatives. That's why that extra level of protection should be an extra checkbox that the user has to check when turning on the machine. Otherwise, it should use normal (but hardware-accelerated) FDE using a key that is entirely under the user's control, with the option of a recovery key, the ability to decrypt a copy of the disk, etc.
Enabling FDE does, of course, present a slightly greater risk of data loss, but that risk is largely mitigated by the fact that unless it gets struck by lightning and the hardware melts down, you can always copy the encrypted data to a new disk and then decrypt the data if you have the password or the (optional) recovery key. Enabling FDE with a fixed hardware key presents an unmitigated risk of data loss, which is what makes it almost always a bad idea unless you have reasonable cause to be afraid of men in black stealing your laptop, cloning it, and returning it without you noticing, then using billions of dollars worth of hardware to try to crack its encryption. And if you're really worried about that, you're either very, very important or very, very nuts.
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:5, Insightful)
That's nice when you're traveling and don't want to carry an external storage device, and either choose not to trust the "cloud" with your data, or don't have the mobile bandwidth for it to work well. Why not give users a CHOICE of removing the internal storage device to recover their data?
Because Apple, that's why? Instead of a $100 SSD upgrade, they want to foist an entire new laptop on their users. Plus they can upsell iCloud space based on the risk of data loss.
Marketeers are arseholes, and Apple are the worst of the worst.
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the issue has nothing to do with the fact that you can't remove the drive. The article spells out the actual cause of the issue: hardware encryption.
The data recovery port was likely removed because 2018 MacBook Pro models feature Apple's custom T2 chip, which provides hardware encryption for the SSD storage, like the iMac Pro, our sources said.
I.e. They removed the port because the port was useless in light of their change to using hardware encrypted drives. Even if the drive wasn't soldered in, even if you could remove the drive and plug it in elsewhere, it wouldn't help. This falls into the category of "it's a feature, not a bug" sort of issues, since this was an intentional change on their part to increase the security of the devices—something it does rather well—but it comes at the cost of data recovery in situations where the hardware fails.
Hopefully, the pros buying these models are aware of the importance of regular, frequent backups and already have a backup plan in place and tested, especially since this sort of feature is becoming the norm across more and more Apple (and non-Apple) products these days (e.g. all iPhones and iPads have been hardware encrypted for years, two of the most popular Macs now have it enabled by default, numerous Android phones have it enabled out of the box, and the list goes on and on). There are, of course, stories about people losing access to their data after their devices get mangled, but for the most part, hardware encryption is widely hailed as being a good thing, particularly among the technically literate crowd, so it's a bit disappointing to see a /. summary focus on the downside without explaining the "why?" behind it.
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:5, Informative)
. No. Stop right there. This is not the norm in any laptop from any manufacturer. I challenge you to name me a single laptop vendor who is soldering the NVMe drive to the motherboard rather than using the industry-standard m.2 slot. You can't because there's aren't any
I have experienced multiple NVMe disk failures on laptops I manage, I have also experience board failures of systems using NVMe disks. In the first case, it is a negligible repair taking minutes, in the second case, equally easy to pop out the drive, mount it in a PCIe bridge card, and grab the data off.
Stop trying to normalize this latest instance of apple's short-sided thinking, which appears to be driven by only one "long term" goal, that is to say replacement of hardware with new garbage the second it dies even a minute out of warranty.
The fact that you try to reduce this down to a "huhr duhr poer users need backups" argument is preposterous.
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I've seen one that solders on the motherboard, but that's an exceptional case - the GPD Pocket. If it's not the smallest laptop on the market, it's got to be close to it. I imagine the same is true for most of those ultra-slim laptop/tablet convertibles.
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not the norm in any laptop from any manufacturer. I challenge you to name me a single laptop vendor who is soldering [...]
The feature I was rather clearly talking about in the quote you pulled was the addition of hardware encryption in these new models. That quote had nothing to do with whether or not Apple solders their drives, and I'm not even sure how you could come away thinking that it did.
Let me be clear: soldering a drive in is a horrible practice that needs to stop. I find it reprehensible. It is NOT a feature. It's an anti-feature.
That said, the issue being discussed here is that users with the new models can't recover their data. Whether Apple solders the drives or not has no bearing on that issue. As I already said, the actual reason people can't recover their data is due to the addition of hardware encryption as a security feature in the new models. I don't like that they solder the drives in either, but our complaints about their soldering drives in have as much to do with the issue at hand as our complaints about their ridiculous laptop keyboards do, which is to say, nothing at all.
With all of that in mind, when I gave my "huhr duhr poer users need backups" argument, I wasn't offering a defense of soldering drives in. I was offering a defense of hardware encryption. I was saying that hardware encryption is worth it, and was lamenting that Slashdot did such a poor job of laying out the facts of the situation.
(As a quick aside, Apple has been soldering these drives in for years, which the article makes clear. I suspect that the poor summarizing is why you and others have been misled into thinking that this is the "latest instance of apple's short-sided [sic] thinking", even though it's neither a new practice nor relevant to the actual news: that stronger security features are rendering previous data recovery techniques impossible to use. Apple should stop soldering the drives, to be sure (that way we could upgrade or replace them), but even if they stopped, you still wouldn't be able to recover that data.)
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Hardware-accelerated crypto is great. Such a design does not necessitate storing keys in some special chip on the logic board, however, and in fact, designs that do so are quite commonly insecure by design, such as those "secure" USB sticks that you can crack by skipping the front end chip and talking directly to the storage controller. So the suggestion that the crypto could somehow be tied
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That's nice when you're traveling and don't want to carry an external storage device, and either choose not to trust the "cloud" with your data, or don't have the mobile bandwidth for it to work well. Why not give users a CHOICE of removing the internal storage device to recover their data?
They have a choice, buy an Apple or don't buy an Apple.
Because Apple, that's why? Instead of a $100 SSD upgrade, they want to foist an entire new laptop on their users. Plus they can upsell iCloud space based on the risk of data loss.
Apple does market research like most every company does. I suspect that Apple does far more research on this than other companies. There's a trade off here that had to be made, either make a laptop that's small and thin for the majority or make one with a removable drive for the minority that wants the ability to upgrade the drive and/or have the ability to remove the drive in case of a failure.
Marketeers are arseholes, and Apple are the worst of the worst.
"Marketeers" are aiming for the biggest market. What you
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Doesn't that depend on the OS? If you were me, you'd have the power to use new software on old computers. Why are your technical capabilities so weak? Is installing an OS hard? Isn't that beginner stuff? You're a slave to your own ignorance. And like you say, you're not paying attention.
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Think about this:
McDonald's is a multi-billion dollar corporation which made its billions selling food that isn't fit to be pig slop. Volume of sales doesn't imply goodness -- it often just speaks to the stupidity and vapidity of their target market.
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I think this is the case with SSDs in general. Worst case, a hard disk can be shipped to a clean room, and sectors that are not physically scraped off can be recovered. However, once the electrons bail the gates, that data is gone for good.
These days, backups are mandatory. Not just Time Machine, but something like Crashplan, Backblaze, or something that can do file backups offsite, so one had 3-2-1 protection.
Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular (Score:4, Insightful)
Both lessons apply:
(1) Don't buy non-repairable junk.
(2) Back up frequently. Even a removable SSD or HDD can fail in a catastrophic manner.
Not a problem (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Safe =/= private.
"Cloud" = someone else's computer. Bugger the "Cloud" and the marketing droids who push it.
Re:Not a problem (Score:4, Funny)
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If you have stuff that you don't trust to the prying eyes of the cloud, you can encrypt it before shipping it off there. Any other objections?
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Yes. I'd rather buy a drive once every few years than pay some corepiration a monthly nut indefinitely. HDD and even SSD storage are cheap these days.
Plus, I feel more secure with the device in my hand, not in some data warehouse 3000 miles away. Yadda, yadda, my house could burn down tomorrow. True, but if that happens, I'd likely be dead, so I wouldn't care about my data...
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If you aren't worried about your house burning down, then simply set up a small server and backup to that. Not backing up is super-stupid and will get you eventually.
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I get it, I travel abroad. If you are abroad and bandwidth-limited, invest in a cheap USB stick or SD card. Get one of the low profile ones that stay almost flush and just leave it in there - backup to that. When you get back to decent WiFi, your regular backup will resume but in the meantime you aren't completely exposed. Shitholes without bandwidth tend to be shitholes without data recovery services in any event.
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Well that escalated quickly.
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Not backing up is super-stupid and will get you eventually.
You're saying, all data is extremely important and if any data doesn't get stored permanently, it will "get you." "Eventually."
But no. Most data doesn't need to be backed up. Only important data needs to be backed up. Are you a photographer? Back up all your photos. Are you an internet celebrity? Back up all your selfies. Are you a food journalist? Back up all your snapshots of lunch. But if you're not any of those things, it isn't going to "get you" if you don't have backups of your lunch pictures.
Before y
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It's sad that we need such clarification, but yes, my advice is mostly for people who associate some value with their data. If you weren't going to consider paying someone to recover your lost data, it's probably not super-important that you back it up in the first place.
But even a total data consumer should do at least one backup of their (Windows/Mac) system when they first get it. It will save a lot of time down the road.
iCloud sales... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bet that Apple's solution will be "make better backups, we'll sell you 1TB of iCloud for a low, low price." (push, push, nudge, nudge)
Ah well, one more reason not to buy "computers" with everything soldered in and no ports to speak of.
Re:iCloud sales... (Score:5, Interesting)
And coincidently they have discontinued the Time Capsule router/NAS, so you can't do wireless backups to a local device you paid a one-time purchase price on. Gotta be getting everybody on a perpetual payment plan.
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If anything in High Sierra, Apple made Time Machine more local. If you have Time Machine on but the external drive is not connected TM will use local storage for additional "daily" backup of deleted data. So even if you remove the data from the Trash, it's still in the local TM for about a day.
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--Doubtful, but if that turns out to be the case: Pay the $40 or so for a Carbon Copy Cloner license or shell out a little less for SuperDuper. Both are good Mac-based backup programs and can restore after reinstalling the basic Mac OS/X. (Wish I could find a good 1-step bare-metal restore for Mac that boots from USB or DVD, but those are the best I've found so far.)
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Time machine over AFP/SMB is fairly unreliable and prone to corruption, even when the hardware works perfectly. I tell all my Mac users to use a USB drive for their backups, even with the risk of backups not happening due to forgetting to plug in.
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The latest Time Capsules were terrible designs anyway -- it was basically impossible to upgrade the HDD.
Being able to easily upgrade your products yourself? That hasn't been the Apple way in years.
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Allow me to fix that for you...
Being able to easily upgrade your products yourself? That hasn't been the industry standard in years.
I've been doing computer support and repair for longer than I care to admit. People just don't upgrade computers any more, at least not like they used to.
What I see happening now is computers getting smaller and being reduced from a series of parts into a single appliance. People used to replace parts in their TV sets. People used to have their VCR repaired. (Well, people used to have a VCR.) No one does that now. Same for a computer. The change happened very quickly,
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MOST non-Apple laptops (with the possible exception of Surface crap) use either M.2 or SATA connectors for their SSDs. Business-grade laptops typically mount the SSD under a cover, where it requires (at most) a few screws to remove.
If anything, this has improved -- I remember certain old HP laptops being virtually built around their hard drives. Come to think of it, same with old Apple iBooks.
Re:iCloud sales... (Score:4, Informative)
Several years ago, this would have been a problem. But now Apple lets you backup to an SMB share and many other manufacturers sell routers that will happily share an attached USB drive.
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Mild thread-jack here - I understand exactly what you're saying, but I'm going to throw something else out there.
I've been using Free File Sync [freefilesync.org] as a backup/migration tool for quite a while and there's a lot of automating that can be done with it. In fact I mostly used it while sitting at an iMac at my last job and I used it to migrate and backup accounts on both Mac and Windows machines. Believe it or not the file structure was so much the same you could migrate between Mac and Windows using it rather pai
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I believe High Sierra lets you use any Mac as a Time Machine target through the Settings->Sharing configuration. One of the new features included to offset elimination of Time Capsule products?
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That's not new, I've been doing Time Machine backups between Macs running OSX 10.6.
Maybe the configuration interface has changed a bit (you used to have to mount the backup disk before you could choose it in the Time Machine interface).
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Time Machine allows for use of a wide variety of means for a backup. The Airport Extreme and Time Capsule made sense when cable modems were fairly dumb devices, and people still used dial-up internet. Now it's rare for a cable modem to not have a built-in wireless router. Even low end routers and cable modems have a USB port to share a hard drive and/or printer. Printers have wireless communications built-in them now too.
I didn't hear of the discontinuation of Apple's wireless routers until today, but i
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The problem is that the "WiFi routers" that come built in to cable modems are often terrible. Slow configuration interfaces, often backdoors to allow the cable company to change WiFi settings remotely, random routing glitches like wired devices not talking to wireless.
The best way to deal with a WiFi-enabled cable modem is either to disconnect it and replace with your own "dumb" modem plus router, or to put it into "bridge" mode, turning off all WiFi and routing capabilities.
Interestingly, the trend here i
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Or you could just purchase an external drive of your own and connect it your laptop and turn on Time Machine.
no cash = fees and bullying small shops (Score:2)
no cash = fees and bullying small shops.
I'm sorry jay but your shop can't have an minimum on our card system.
Apple keeps lowering their position in my book. (Score:2)
I really hated them before OS X came out.
Then I gained an admiration for their hardware and software.
Then I became a little disenfranchised over their attempts at lock-in, but still liked their hardware.
I adopted a policy of using non-Apple software on Macs (mostly cross-platform stuff) and using their hardware when available.
The price of their hardware ensured I didn't actually buy it, just used it when given to me or at work. I found PC to be a lot better bang for the buck.
Now I've got plenty of dated Ap
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Better yet, run MacOS on commodity hardware. You get the best of both worlds -- Unix with a nice user interface, and hardware that isn't designed to fail unpleasantly. And you're using Apple's software while not giving them a dime, so it's a small f.u. to them.
Thinkpad X-series will run MacOS/OS X for now...
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Each version of OSX is becoming less pleasant in my book.
I really liked it at first, because I could hit the command line and do whatever I could on a *NIX system. Each version of OSX gets a little further from the BSD it's running on - I have to learn new ways of doing routine things like mount file systems, run programs, etc.... None of it is out of reach, but it's something new each release. I'm getting to where I'm not sure it's worth messing with. I've been using KDE since 1.x, and I'll admit it w
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It is not and never was "running on" BSD.
The BSD parts were the cli tools, and it isn't like most *nix where the gui tools are just wrappers around the cli.
The part that the userspace is "running on" was never BSD, it was NextSTEP/OpenSTEP. When Apple pushed Jobs out, he went to NeXTSTEP and started working on what became OS-X. *NIX roots, yes, BSD, no.
I find it funny, because when I'm running *BSD my only complaint is that the GNU tools are usually better in certain ways.
Worst MacBook yet (Score:5, Informative)
Between having only USB Type-C ports, not being able to interface with most displays (even after you purchase the expensive adapter), that user unfriendly "touch bar", a kludgy keyboard and what I consider to be a rather slow boot-up and shutdown process, this latest MacBook is the worst I've ever owned
.
Considering the price premium you pay for that Apple symbol on the cover, this computer should cook you breakfast in the morning, including brewing the espresso and bringing it to your bedside.
I was shocked by how badly this system missed the mark
T2 chip will suck in mac pro 2019? (Score:2)
As the X4 link will limit high end flash storage + forced raid 0 is bad.
People may want choice of raid 1 / raid 5 / raid 6 / raid 10. Say with 4 flash cards that all can be done. But 4 flash cards one X4 link shared with other io and hopefully not stacked on the dmi bus. Also M.2 cards not the apple only cards.
Apple also needs to offer an build in cheaper sata ssd or even say at least one 1 spinner disk as an choice as well In there desktops. Maybe not the mini as it may be to big to fit.
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Apple also needs to offer an build in cheaper sata ssd or even say at least one 1 spinner disk as an choice as well In there desktops.
Just the act of offering such a thing for sale would cause them to lose money.
You don't get the premium profit margin by addressing the needs of the poor.
Maximizing the number of units sold is not in their business values.
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Well look at pricing.
3.84TB SSD sata $1,229.99
3.84TB pci-e $3,440.02
4TB pci-e (intel) $6,699.99
4TB HDD $90-$160
Let's say I want an build in archive drive for data I don't need day to day and do not want to have an ext box for it? I also do want to pay $$$ more just to boost base storage to an very high level.
bitlocker has recovery keys that can be set (Score:2)
Why is that not an choice?
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That's the first time I've ever heard choice pronounced with a silent ch-.
I'm totally going to steal that next time I'm making fun of snobs.
Another problem with an irremovable hard drive/SSD (Score:4, Informative)
With a removable hard drive/SSD, you can swap it for a "clean" one while traveling abroad to avoid border guards abusing their authority and (say) stealing sensitive corporate or medical data. Takes five minutes on an older MacBook or (better yet) a Thinkpad.
If the thing is soldered in, your only choice is full backup, zero, reformat, reinstall or carry two computers.
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keep your files in a encrypted volume image file on external disk. Give that file a misleading name.
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Not everyone needs or wants another damn dongle. Especially on Macbooks where some of them only have one USB port, which is also used for charging.
Instead of kludging via an external drive, why not have a swappable internal drive, like most real computers have? Use the computer at home or at work, keep the "normal" drive. Travel to Russia or China, swap it for a "clean" drive. Easy, peasy.
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Nope, raises cost and is pointless on 99.99% of the macbooks sold. Engineering for the outliers and rare cases is wrong.
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Being able to upgrade a computer's RAM or SSD for $150 instead of being reamed for a new computer every few years to the tune of $1500 isn't an edge case. Upgradability and repairability are important for the environment -- changing an SSD or RAM card generates much less e-waste than throwing an entire laptop away.
The engineers and marketeers who create this kind of junk should be forced to drink water that has percolated through an e-waste dump for the rest of their lives!
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it IS an edge case for the majority of their customers. The DO refresh that often, my employer buys me a new macbook every 3 years. That's the norm!
Don't bring irrelevant "greenie" concerns into this, the servers of the internet are 95% the hit on the environment, not laptops.
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My point is that it shouldn't NEED to be the norm. Also, it really depends on the employer -- if your company is a large company or a startup flush with hot Wall Streeter VC money, then maybe. If it's a public university or a small business, not so much.
As far as "greenie" concerns, we're not talking about energy use here -- we're talking about physical devices being thrown out and polluting the Earth. Yes, even recycling pollutes -- the best model for the environment is long-term use.
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However, this is clea
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Nope, raises cost and is pointless on 99.99% of the macbooks sold.
Nope, 99.99% of MacBook users replace hard disks themselves.
Engineering for the outliers and rare cases is wrong.
This is what engineering is all about.
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That's why I stick with my Air Mid 2015 (Score:2)
A mac with BOTH removable SSD & non-glued batteries
And magsafe and USB A ports, to boot
What's not to like?
This is what most people want (Score:2)
This is why I just bought a 2015 refurb. (Score:2)
The second Adobe releases CS for Ubuntu (Score:2)
There will be a mass exodus.
Drive failure. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Just out of curiosity, how much did you charge for reinventing rsync?
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There are a lot of things Apple doesn't get right, but Time Machine is better than your backup script. Each hourly backup creates a new folder and creates hard links to previously backed up files and puts new files under that folder. If you manually delete older backups, nothing breaks. If you can't use the Time Machine software, it's still human-readable and you still have multiple, incremental copies of all your files.
I've actually replicated this setup for another backup script that does nearly the sa