Why Apple Soldering MacBook Air SSDs To The Motherboard Is A Really Bad Idea

ZNet’s Jason D. O’Grady says there are two things that disturb him about the upcoming third-generation MacBook Air: it could ship still without a backlit keyboard, and it’s rumored that the Air’s SSD may be soldered onto the motherboard along with its processor and system RAM.

On the SSD issue, Jason is referencing a report from the Japanese Apple-centric blogsite Macotakara that says according to an unnamed Asian electronics component company source, Apple appears to be fixing to adopt the 400-Mbps interface “Toggle DDR2.0,” a 19-nanometer process for NAND flash memory for new MacBook Air to replace the Blade X-gale, SATA 2.6 SSD used in the current MacBook Air models, packaged in a smaller chip and soldered on, which would eliminate end-user upgrades.

O’Grady acknowledges that the new Toggle DDR NAND Flash woujld be faster than the current crop of SSDs, but he’s not a fan of planned obsolescence and doesn’t like buying a computer that has a fixed amount of RAM or storage since it seriously limits upgrade options later on. He notes that Larry O’Connor, Founder & CEO, Other World Computing has also called the rumored move “disappointing,” but observes that change like this would be right in line with Apple’s evident ongoing trend to promote buy and replace cycles with non-expandable/serviceable (at the enduser level) products, getting users to buy computers that are only useful for a year or two.

I agree. The soldered-on, non-upgradable RAM was already the biggest inhibiting factor inclining me away from a MacBook Air for my next system upgrade and toward the 13″ MacBook Pro , and soldered-in storage would be the deal-breaker. I still have two 11-year-old Apple laptops in active service, and I’m little interested in machines that will be obsoleted in a couple of years.