Most likely trivial. The SSD wear from years ago is really not applicable today. Certainly SSD do wear out with blocks of cells being replaced with spares. The type of wear to make a SSD worthless takes years unless the use use is really heavy. Five years of using an SSD and the health is down to 92%. Meaning 8% of the cells have had to remapped to the spare cells.
The drive controller knows exactly how many cell blocks have been remapped. That is what provides the numbers. Even at 0% the drive will still work but the loss of data becomes very real. Parts of the drive are still working, parts are not.
What it will come down to is how happy you’ll be with slowdown when the 8GB is breached. It won’t be catastrophic but you may have to learn to live with either kicking things out of active memory or living with the beach ball
This is what is confusing, that with a lack of memory there will be increased wear of the disk. If there was a simple disk replacement like in old MacBooks, then the question would not arise, but that is how it is necessary to think. But judging from the situation it is unlikely to find more than 8 GB here, I will take what I can find.
With current SSD technology the wear will be a minor issue. 1TB a day would take years to completely wear out a SSD.
Something to remember about RAM is it's not only normal, but beneficial, for the system to occupy close to max memory, even for non-demanding tasks. Unused RAM is basically wasted. If running one app shows as using a bunch of RAM, it's actually desirable. The problems start when you're paging or using virtual memory. If the computer isn't noticeably slower at full RAM usage, or topping at 100% constantly, the memory is probably doing great.
People keep saying this, but is there any evidence that applications actually use more RAM to run faster just because more RAM is available? The buffer cache, which obviously benefits from more RAM being available and can use everything that is not used otherwise, is managed by the operating system. It'd be quite a hassle for an application to monitor system-wide RAM availability and adapt to how much is free. Do any apps do that?
No that's a very BAD deal since the MacBook Air will be dropped for the lasted OS support next year probably... by the way the M series chip is MUCH MORE POWERFUL, M series chip also has a better battery life and compatible with many other things such as more apps or Apple Intelligence...
Apple Intelligence doesn't interest me at all, especially if there will be only 8GB of RAM. But in general, of course, you are right, I have just read a comparison on different resources and everyone is inclined to think that the M1 with 8GB of memory will work better than the i7 with 16GB.
