In the past, we have always strongly recommended that you create a clone of your Mac to be used in case your internal drive became corrupt and were no longer able to boot up from it. The clone could then be used to boot up from and continue to use your computer until you get around to replacing or reinstalling the operating system on the internal drive.

Well, you can’t do that with any Apple Mac that has the new M1 SOC (System On a Chip). Booting from any external drive is not allowed - for security reasons (it is how a computer can be broken into without a password).

What this means is that the only method available to solve a failing internal drive is to wipe it, reinstall the OS, and then restore your data from a Time Machine backup.

Now for the REAL problem. If it turns out that the internal storage on the M1 is defective, the ONLY solution is to replace the motherboard, and that can only be done at an authorized Apple repair center.

So, good luck with your new M1 computer. May it never die.

And the second part of the bad news is, you can’t hang onto your old system that has a separate internal drive for more than another five years, because the only new systems that Apple will be delivering will contain some version of the SOC, and by then, any new OS upgrade will be locked into only the newer systems.

With any computer running on an Intel chip, I have been able to repurpose the computer by installing Linux on it. This is a simple process of booting up off an external thumb drive with Linux and then installing Linux on the internal drive. But this cannot be done with an Apple SOC machine.

Bottom line: When an Apple SOC machine can no longer be upgraded to the newest OS, it cannot be repurposed - it is junk.
Long live Linux.

John Carter, Sr.