| Whatever you said doesn't at all change my assertion that the M1 is now just one step away from becoming a closed system - With the M1, Apple can now easily lock the bootloaders of M1 Macs any time and make it a completely closed platform like the iPhones / iPads. And it is evident that Apple has been planning this for years: 1. The first few Intel Mac Minis allowed you some level of customisation of both the hardware (change RAM or HDD / SSD) and software (install other full featured OS). 2. Then came the Mac Minis with soldered RAM and SSD. You could no longer customise the hardware. Software was still customisable and you could still install other OSes. (Recall that Apple even offered free drivers for another OS, i.e. Windows). 3. The current generation of M1 Mini now doesn't allow you to customise both the hardware (everything is soldered) and the software. Technically you can install other OSes, but the reality is that currently only crippled versions of Linux and xBSD is available and practically the only full-featured OS available for it is macOS. These are clear indicators of how Apple has been working slowly to lockdown the Mac platform like their ios platforms. (The strategy to keep you in denial - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog - has been working great for them). The reason for this is simple - BigTech are increasingly moving towards selling everything as a service. Services are more profitable because it means they create recurring income (even after the device is sold) which means more profits. and Apple's successful business model for this, that earns them billions of dollars, is the closed-platform model that is evident on iPhones / iPads. > Modular RAM is no longer viable for low-power, high-performance laptops. That is deliberately misleading and ignorant. Low Power DDR chips (that are soldered) were invented for mobile phones where every watt drawn matters. On laptops they offer only negligible power savings that doesn't really matter - yes, the power saving is negligible on a laptop as the difference in power used in modular RAM vs LPDDR is between 1 to 0.5 volt. That matters on phones because they have small batteries (5 - 15 Watt-hour), but that power saving is negligible on a laptop as it has bigger batteries (40 - 95 Watt-hour). It's as good as meaningless when you consider what you lose - soldered ram can't be upgraded and is hard to repair. The loss of this big benefit - repairability - hugely trumps the minor power savings. Apple, and others, know this very well - for them, the real attraction to using soldered RAM is that it allows for planned obsolescence. In fact, reasonable alternative ram chips like DDR3L (low voltage) and DDR3U (ultra low voltage) that offer lower power on modular RAM that were specifically created for servers and laptops, have been deliberately ignored by computer manufacturers, in favour of soldered LPDDR, and that is why the memory industry too is forced to do more R&D on them. |
Just like almost every other computer. Any manufacturer can do this at will with new systems or a firmware update. You are making a strawman argument. The question is whether they will, and the answer is they seem to have no intention to do so given how much time they spent not doing it. Soldering things down has nothing to do with locking down firmware.
> install other full featured OS
All current M1 machines allow you to install any full featured OS. Apple just isn't writing the drivers for us. There is nothing locked down when you run your own OS. I know because I also run macOS kernels under my hypervisor that way and everything works exactly as it does when booting in Apple-signed mode.
Your claim seems to boil down to "Apple changed their hardware in a way that Linux doesn't support". Well, duh. That's what we're fixing. Nothing about that means they're locking anything down.
> That is deliberately misleading and ignorant.
You didn't even bother to read my comment. The M1 Max has a 512-bit RAM bus. That is equal to 8 RAM sticks (DIMMs are 64 bits). Do you want a laptop with 8 RAM sticks?
Each one of those 4 RAM chips on the M1 Max has 8 RAM dies internally, each handling 16 bits as independent channels, for a total of 128 bits per chip. Typical DDR RAM chips as used in DIMMs are 8 bits each (which is why you get 8 per DIMM to make 64 bits). You would need 64 such chips to reach the same bus width (and thus similar bandwidth).
You just can't make that modular short of putting your RAM on a thousand-pin LGA package like CPUs themselves, and that'd still increase power consumption (and significantly increase physical size, which again makes the power consumption problem worse as it makes your interconnect longer). It just can't work with DIMMs and with standard non-LP DDR technology.
> On laptops they offer only negligible power savings that doesn't really matter.
Yeah, until you make a laptop that is actually power efficient like this one, and then suddenly it does. These things draw milliwatts when idle and have aggressive RAM power saving that puts channels into low power modes after mere microseconds (I know because I've been investigating the memory controller power management config and benchmarking memory accesses). That's part of how they get amazing battery life. You can't do that with regular DDR RAM. These things will run for a week with light usage, and they can do that because they are based on extremely efficient mobile architectures. Your phone lasts a day; make the battery larger without increasing idle power usage and that's how you get a week.
> the difference power used in modular RAM vs LPDDR is between 1 to 0.5 volt.
It is evident you have little hardware engineering experience if you think power is measured in volts. That's not how it works.
I would advise you to spend some time reading up on high-speed digital interfaces and learn about concepts such as ohm's law, IR loss, capacitance, impedance, eye diagrams, and insertion loss. LPDDR RAM is much lower power than regular RAM precisely because it can optimize for very short interconnects, which is why you won't find DIMMs of it. It's not just about the voltage.