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Thus, they will never encounter a situation where they can’t boot from an external drive due to an internal drive failure. The vast majority of people with Apple silicon Macs will never experience a failure of their internal SSD. (We cognoscenti may love booting from external drives, but it’s not a mainstream thing to do.) A large majority of people don’t possess a bootable external drive compatible with M1-based Macs and would never create a bootable backup.
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However, here are the reasons we’re not too concerned about this change: Maybe the cost of diagnosis and repair for Macs disabled or bricked due to firmware failures was high enough to be a consideration, too.
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Perhaps it was just a simple architecture change, given the reliability of SSDs and the ease of updating them to shift aspects of security from programmable memory chips to SSD storage? You might intuit that Apple could have had high ongoing costs of technical support related to firmware update failures and knew of exploits that compromise data on a Mac’s internal drive by starting up from an external drive. We don’t know to what degree problems with firmware updates or undocumented attack vectors contributed to Apple’s switch. An Apple support document notes: “a Mac with Apple silicon also won’t require (or support) a firmware password-all critical changes are already gated by user authorization.” If you don’t have a valid account and password, you can’t change the startup volume or perform most other recovery features.
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On an Intel-based Mac, you can set a firmware password that prevents booting from anything but a “designated startup disk.” Apple didn’t include that feature with M1-based Macs because the company changed the startup and recovery processes to require knowing a password associated with the selected startup volume. There may also be attack vectors related to firmware-based startup control that Apple hasn’t disclosed. However, firmware updates can sometimes fail, causing temporary problems with a Mac or even “bricking” it. This approach is a shift from Intel-based Macs, which relied instead on firmware (software stored in programmable memory chips that can be updated). Relying on details stored only on the internal SSD to control startup from external drives is a way to make it harder for nefarious parties to hijack a Mac’s data. And, maybe, to reduce its tech support costs. Why would Apple do this? To increase security. If the internal SSD has failed or been entirely erased-it contains several hidden volumes-you can no longer boot from an otherwise valid volume on an external drive.
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The fresh information here is that an M1-based Mac relies on its internal SSD to allow external drives to boot. You’re Unlikely To Have a Dead Internal SSD and a Live Mac Let me first explain why you should be aware of it but not worry, and then explain the more technical details for those interested in the innards of macOS. It’s true, but it’s not as terrible as it sounds. Now Mike Bombich has confirmed with Apple that external bootable drives won’t always work! In “ The Role of Bootable Duplicates in a Modern Backup Strategy” (23 February 2021), Adam Engst presciently explained why bootable clones might be a thing of the past. A core aspect of dealing with system failures on Macs is that you could maintain an external bootable drive, perhaps a bootable duplicate of your startup volume, that lets you use your Mac even if an internal drive was corrupted or failed entirely. One heading may have surprised those who haven’t read all the technical details about M1 changes: “An Apple Silicon Mac won’t boot if the internal storage has failed.”
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