I have a M1 iMac a bit over a year old, now. I bought it at a time when the HDD in my previous iMac (2013 27") had gone belly-up very suddenly. It wasn't an option to wait several weeks for the 'perfect' computer, so it had to be a base-ish model. (512GB drive, when I'd have preferred 1TB; 8GB RAM, not 16). On my research at the time, plus past experience, I concluded I'd be safe with 8GB RAM for my usage. I don't have high powered multimedia apps, for instance.
I'm now wondering if I may have unknowingly saddled myself with a memory-poor system (which of course isn't upgradeable). From stuff I've read more recently I'm getting the impression that picking the right RAM config in a Silicon mac may be even less of an exact science than it was with Intel. And/or that these M- chips don't spare the horses when it comes to RAM usage. Can anyone more knowledgable confirm on these impressions?
Well anyway I've been getting a plethora of weird workflow-killing distractions over several months. I'm sure I'll forget some of them, but here are those I can remember:
Hoping there might be some informed expertise on this forum, for diagnosis and solutions. Please ... 🙏🙏
I'm now wondering if I may have unknowingly saddled myself with a memory-poor system (which of course isn't upgradeable). From stuff I've read more recently I'm getting the impression that picking the right RAM config in a Silicon mac may be even less of an exact science than it was with Intel. And/or that these M- chips don't spare the horses when it comes to RAM usage. Can anyone more knowledgable confirm on these impressions?
Well anyway I've been getting a plethora of weird workflow-killing distractions over several months. I'm sure I'll forget some of them, but here are those I can remember:
- frequent crashes / hangs / beachballs with normally very stable core apps, most notably:
- web browsers (various; and I don't generally keep a lot of tabs or windows open either)
- Hazel (when running complex file management automation actions)
- whole system crashes (possibly kernel panics, but hard to be sure ... I saw the word "kernel" in an incomprehensible screen message one time)
- memory pressure nearly always in the yellow zone in Activity Monitor
- weird disk permissions dramas on restart
- described in a separate forum post
- failed attempts at running First Aid on my data volume
- 'failed' as in 'couldn't be repaired' and warnings suggesting impending disk failure
- but then the next time I try (days or weeks later) First Aid runs like a dream
- twice in the process of a system crash, the TM backup data on my brand new 2TB APFS-formatted ext SSD has been fried
- as in unmountable (never mind unreadable), unrevivable, data unrecoverable, "this is an ex-parrot"
- only solution being erase and start again, losing 30+ TM snapshots
- problems continue after erase - reinstall - restore data
- and yet with all this going on, CleanMyMac X, Etrecheck Pro and DriveDx say it's all good 🤯🤔🤷
Hoping there might be some informed expertise on this forum, for diagnosis and solutions. Please ... 🙏🙏