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.