I had an old Intel Mac start occasionally crashing after taking it in for a screen replacement. I fired up memtest86 and sure enough saw errors. I took it back and Apple replaced the entire motherboard for me for free.
Does anyone know if there’s a memtest86 equivalent for M1 macs? I’m not sure how I’d go about testing the ram on my machine now.
When this happened to me, I was told that the memory can't be replaced without replacing the entire motherboard. Which means that after warranty period has passed the machine is either very expensive to repair or unrepairable.
That’s sadly true given the design trade offs: M1 CPU package includes RAM - that makes it fast by lowering latency and removes the category of errors related to physical sockets but means any failure requires the entire part to be replaced.
Basically sockets add size, weight, and mechanical failure points (they can vibrate loose, you need an access panel, etc.). Since most people never use them over the life of the system it’s basically a bet that the RAM will fail less frequently than those other things, which is probably true but frustrating if you’re in the unlucky group.
It's a small sample size but I've seen more failed RAM chips than other components together. And a socket would make upgrades easier. Which of course isn't great if you're trying to sell higher spec up front instead of giving the option to upgrade later if needed. I'm not sure why a separate access panel would be needed, the whole bottom is easy to remove with a pentalobe bit.
Yeah, I’d be curious what the overall numbers look like for a large swath of users. I’ve never had a Mac I support fail do to RAM - hard drives back in the day, fans, GPU, or logic boards - but I did have multiple PC & Mac users who had reliability problems which were fixed by reseating DIMMs which had come slightly loose.
TL;DR - Apple makes a huge profit on selling AppleCare.
Recent estimates [0] shows that in 2021 Apple had revenue of $8.5B on Applecare while claims cost $2.6B. Also, the claim rate has been dropping YoY while revenue from AppleCare has been growing YoY.
Almost always, insurance schemes are profit generators (ie not sold at a loss). The reason to buy into a scheme like AppleCare is because you couldn’t recover from an immediate loss. e.g. The only non-mandated insurance I pay for is House Building insurance.
It hasn’t arisen for me yet but the recovery mode (Command-R at boot, or boot holding down Option and select it) has a hardware diagnostic which does at least basic memory testing.
I had an old Intel Mac start occasionally crashing after taking it in for a screen replacement. I fired up memtest86 and sure enough saw errors. I took it back and Apple replaced the entire motherboard for me for free.
Does anyone know if there’s a memtest86 equivalent for M1 macs? I’m not sure how I’d go about testing the ram on my machine now.