I have a MacBook Air with a truly dead SSD drive. Whilst considering some workarounds, I wondered if it was usable for anything when there was no drive to boot from.
I discovered, if you boot into internet recovery mode (hold cmd + option + R when booting) you can then bring up a terminal. From there you can SSH into another machine and, actually, do work. Kind of.
There is however a major drawback to this, which is power consumption becomes highly inefficient. Presumably, whatever functionality exists during normal usage to maximise battery life, it all goes down the toilet in recovery mode. So, you’ll want to keep it plugged in, or you know, actually replace the SSD drive (but that’s a whole other story).
