Just get a time machine, put on your wifi and you don't have to think about it anymore, it will just backup every day in the background. You can easily restore into another macbook using the builtin restore functionality. Apples solution to this is really good (still struggling to do it with the same ease with Windows without 3rd party software and Linux).
Just preheat the board, get your hot air station, heat and remove those bad modules, clean the pads, add your solder and remount some new ones before cleaning up all that flux you were using. Then reinstall macOS and restore your backups.
It might take a few tries before the solder balls up correctly under each pad. Use plenty of flux. Maybe give it a ultrasonic bath.
Ah yes, Apple is known for making things obvious, intuitive, easy, and user-friendly! /s
Having an actual mini-sata or m.2 connector won't be too taxing. But it will increase tech support costs, and lower profits from sales of new replacement machines at least.
Sad. (That's why my choice is Thinkpad T series, which is built like a tank: heavy, bulky, easy to replace any part, and hard to actually break; also, enough room for a good keyboard.)
Even the XPS 13s are more serviceable than their rival MBP 13"s. The RAM may be soldered on both but the XPS uses a standard NVMe SSD. It's saved me a few times already.
If you have AppleCare you won’t have to pay for that replacement. After 3 years, you would, however buying a laptop with an inferior OS just in case one day a machine catastrophically fails is like riding a horse because you are afraid your car might fly off a bridge at some point in the future.
I know I am anecdote-land, but I have never in 20 years of using Macs, had one catastrophically fail. Or fail at all for that matter.
Apple discontinued Time Capsule and their entire Airport line. The Time Machine software is still in MacOS, but de-emphasized and who knows if they'll retain it going forward.
With how hard they're pushing their cloud and integrating it into pretty much everything I'm surprised there's still no official cloud backup solution for Mac.
