Yeah, that's why 8GB is the standard configuration, because it's not enough.
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M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear
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Come on, it hasn't even been a week since the "Chrome uses 10x more RAM!!!" nonsense came out, when the initial statements were totally misleading. This almost always happens when extreme numbers or problems like this are reported. Instead of wasting your time making sarcastic or alarmist comments, just wait for the inevitable retraction or clarification. By the time this article was published, the guy already tweeted again with updated numbers from half a year to two years, and I'd say that's still wrong. He just noticed one of this errors.
Edit: the corrections are already coming out. Some tech news outlets already deleting their original articles. They should stop spreading misinformation for clicks. They're supposed to be pros and know better.
Edit: the corrections are already coming out. Some tech news outlets already deleting their original articles. They should stop spreading misinformation for clicks. They're supposed to be pros and know better.
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SSDs are designed to fail...eventually. So are spinning hard drives.
Even my LG Gram's SSD might fail. But the SSD in the Gram is connected via a slot and may be replaced easily and inexpensively. I can even upgrade it to a larger size.
Here's where you can solder your SSD, Tim.
Even my LG Gram's SSD might fail. But the SSD in the Gram is connected via a slot and may be replaced easily and inexpensively. I can even upgrade it to a larger size.
Here's where you can solder your SSD, Tim.
SSDs are not "designed" to fail any more than your car tires are. They just wear out over time.
with all this talk of an apple car, will it have soldered on tires?
Nonsense. I'm running Catalina on my 2013 MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM. For my work, I don't need 8, 16, 32 or 64GB of RAM. So it's purely subjective.
I have both 8GB and 16GB models of the M1 and they work just fine, in fact they are excellent devices for everything I use them for ... which is every computational task I do these days considering I sold my desktop and other equipment and use the Air as my only workstation. My wife uses the 8GB model, runs zoom/chrome and a number of other things all day long without a single complaint.
I do photo editing, video editing, doing some recording in garage band, zoom meetings, constantly have browsers/multiple email clients open, etc. I do this all without a fan, not a single issue besides the expected little bugs here and there. Affinity Publisher was slow at first, until I rebooted and found it was just some bug that was resolved on reboot, not a single pause with anything I have done in it after that.
So what is it you do that makes these devices "horrible"? Or did you buy these expecting them to do some monumental task they were (very obviously) never designed to do?
While I don't disagree that soldering parts on sucks .....
The last time I replaced a failing SSD was ... never. In the early days they failed due to dumb firmware issues (never experienced that either), but not because the NAND wore out. In fact, I know of a single person (and I know a lot of people running SSDs over the years, I installed most of them) with a failed SSD. One. Out of the hundreds I have installed, one. Oh and that one is actually a failure due to a known issue with the Samsung 840 controller, the NAND didn't fail, the controller was just junk.
It isn't that things are designed to fail, that's simply the reality of everything that exists in the material universe. Given enough time, everything degrades.
Maybe it’s because my company’s big enough, but their contract with Dell doesn’t involve piecemeal-ing systems. As there’s a corporate backup of every system, if a system has a fault, it goes back to Dell and the company images you a new system. AND the latest systems this year which FINALLY puts everyone on SSD’s no longer have swappable parts (not like swappable parts have mattered for years due to the above). Not denying your experience, just adding to it that there are business machines that don’t have swappable parts.
Funny how everyone is blaming the RAM in here. Probably because of the poorly written article that lacks important information:
1st: It's pretty much impossible to generate the TBW values some users are reporting purely by swap within two months let alone a couple weeks.
2nd: All kinds of users are affected by it. Both heavy users as well as light users that have never pushed their machine.
3rd: It doesn't happen to everyone. I use mine rather intense and don't have the issue despite using swap regularly. This points at some specific App(s) causing the high TBW.
In any case, the "low" amount of RAM the M1 Macs have is NOT the cause
1st: It's pretty much impossible to generate the TBW values some users are reporting purely by swap within two months let alone a couple weeks.
2nd: All kinds of users are affected by it. Both heavy users as well as light users that have never pushed their machine.
3rd: It doesn't happen to everyone. I use mine rather intense and don't have the issue despite using swap regularly. This points at some specific App(s) causing the high TBW.
In any case, the "low" amount of RAM the M1 Macs have is NOT the cause
I have a Mac mini M1 and I have my main user account mounted on an external server-grade spinning drive. I've had it since mid December and that thing is constantly doing stuff with the hard drive. When I look to see what it is doing in activity app nothing unusual shows up. I wonder what's happening to my same age MBA M1...?
I'm seeing a 1% reduction in the 2 months I've had my MBA M1 - not looked at the Mac mini. In both machines I have the absolute base/lowest spec versions.
I'm seeing a 1% reduction in the 2 months I've had my MBA M1 - not looked at the Mac mini. In both machines I have the absolute base/lowest spec versions.
I’ve always had this thought in the back of my mind that a lot of the “right to repair” folks want to relive that feeling where they take an old computer off someone’s hands, swap out the RAM and HD and get more use out of it OR sell it to someone for more than the price of the “repair”. In the future, due to the far fewer failure points, that owner won’t be handing off that computer, they’ll just continue using it. That yields far fewer systems that are easily “repaired”.
The only places I have worked at wanted to repair their own machines, and we did, and it was terrible. I worked for a very large company who did this, it was the worst decision when Dell engineers had a problem where the power supply connection was not properly grounded and shorted motherboards on hundreds of thousands of machines (sadly a fact, Dell tried to make us sign an agreement saying we would never talk about it .. that was fun).
That's what we swapped all the time. Motherboards, even on the models that were not junk. We had HDD failures, but that's simply due to platters spinning at thousands of RPMs being in the hands of people who treated their laptop like a frisbee.
I can't remember a single RAM replacement, and on modern systems the guy that still works there doesn't swap the SSD .. its still motherboards.
Edit: Now I am sure I will have some nightmares tonight
Uh-oh. This is not something i wanted to find out just 3 weeks after biting the bullet and buying a new M1 MBA.
Seriously, do not be worried about this. This article is much to do about nothing.
Just for giggles, I tried this. My intel is fine. But i can't get it to run on the M1. Installed Homebrew, ran the command and brew isn't in my paths (it was on the intel). So I cd\ and run ffrom the location and it says smrtctl is not found, So I cd to the bin directory where the file is, and run it and it still says not found (even though the file is right there in the directory I just cd'd to). Weak.
