For a while now, the fruity cargo cult Apple has made it difficult for its customers to upgrade their expensive hardware going with third party updates.
However, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the company has taken another step down the path towards total vendor lock-in and effectively disabled support for third-party SSDs.
While third-party SSDs will still work, they will no longer perform the TRIM garbage collection command which means that an SSD’s real world performance will steadily degrade.
Hothardware said that tests from 2010-2011 show that performance could degrade up to 50% between a tortured SSD without TRIM and a drive where TRIM had run.
Apple had long had a history of only enabling TRIM for Apple drives by default. If you installed a third-party SSD, you had to use a third-party tool to enable TRIM functionality. This was not exactly rocket science but Apple did seem rather petty in forcing users to do it.
In OS X 10.10 Apple introduced kext (Kernel EXTension) driver signing, which means that at boot the machine checks that all drivers are approved and enabled by Apple. If a third-party SSD is detected, the OS will detect that a non-approved SSD is in use, and Yosemite will refuse to load the appropriate driver.
The Tame Apple Press claimst that Jobs’ Mob made this change to improve device security under OS X, but it is more likely that Apple made this change to sting its customers for more cash.
Apple charges $800 to upgrade a $1999 MacBook Pro from 256GB to 1TB of PCIe storage which is a fair bit more than a third party drive.
There is a way to disable the driver signing that causes this problem, but it means shutting off your entire security system.
It forces Apple power users to make full use of their hardware, the only problem with this is that Apple security is based on faith and praying a lot to the ghost of Steve Jobs. There is now a rise of attacks which use OS X as a vector. This means corporate users are locked into something that is more expensive, but even less secure. Chances are, many of them are not going to buy it.
