Don't feel bad! I've had my MI Air for just 1 month. After I got it, I started out (my usual) by using Safari with 50+ tabs. I was accumulating upwards of 1TBW/DAY!. So, I am the poster child for TBW. In one month, I've accumulated 14TBW, but most of that was before I became informed. Now, I'm down to around 50GB/day with intense use. Most of the improvement is due to my changing to Firefox and using the Tab Suspender add-on. However, (for the benefit of those just "jumping in" on this potst), it is generally NOT necessary to make these adjustments if you are not an intense user and/or are not a tab "abuser" (like me). All that being said, I would buy this wonderful computer again, even knowing these "issues".
I'm also part of the 'fixed my M1 SSD writes' camp - me and leons have taken essentially the same steps. I've specifically not turned off my macbook now for an extended period of time to test that,
no matter what I do on it, the writes stay nice and low.
As of writing this I am on 17 days, 5 hours of uptime. Activity monitor shows 1.4TB read, 580.90 GB written. That works out to 1.4GB / hour, or 12TBW
per year. Say this SSD lasts for a completely reasonable (minimum?) 600 TB of writes, that works out to
50+ years of use before failure (if anything, the age of it will likely kill it before the writes do).
And in these 17 days I've truly done a very wide range things on my mbp. This includes java development in intelliJ, development in NetBeans (rosetta 2 app), MS Word/Powerpoint/Goodnotes/emails, music production in Logic Pro X, 78 brave browser tabs 'open' as of writing this, exporting 4k videos in imovie, keeping a full dock of various apps open at various times, imessaging, zooming, media consuming, playing Samurai Jack on Apple Arcade - just using it in every way without paying attention to how much it might be writing to the ssd at all. The first time I checked activity monitor since 13 days ago was today to write this
Really the most major 'fix' - and the only one I notice making any sort of difference to my use of this mac - was switching from safari to any other browser. Edge, firefox, vivaldi - these are all great options. Currently I'm using the m1 brave browser, so far it's my favourite after more or less trying them all. The most important part is to
get a tab discarding extension, such as 'Auto Tab Discard' to not unnecessarily keep every browser tab open at all times. Realistically you're not constantly switching back and forward between more than 10 tabs - are you?
iOS devices do this by default - i.e. the iOS Safari discards background tabs after you open a certain number of them, and only keeps a limited number actively open. We all know that iOS devices have less RAM than any M1 MBP, but essentially this is probably done to not have excessive swapping on the iOS device flash memory (and swapping definitely
does occur on iOS because if you fill the storage of an iOS device completely you will notice how it behaves slowly and stuttery being unable to swap).
It's a shame the macOS Safari doesn't have this feature built in, at least to be able to toggle it. It's also a shame that Safari's extension store is a barren wasteland, and the 1 tab suspending extension I found doesn't even seem to function properly.
I have done additional things other than switching browser, which I've documented in this thread in the past, but I'm not going to bother mentioning them again as
I believe just switching browser and using tab discarding is enough by itself to fix the writing issues completely - if someone happens to have switched browsers, and still experiences high writes even when using tab discarding, then I'll happily recap every other step I took to reduce writes.
Apple
does have some software fixing to do - but the M1 hardware itself is
not flawed. I promise. And if you can live with using any other browser as mentioned other than Safari (I was a 9+ year long user of Safari and I honestly don't want to go back.. at all.), then I seriously doubt you will have any SSD issues for the life of the MBP or for as long as you own it.
And the countless benefits of the M1 chip are seriously worth it... like seriously. This laptop is just such a joy to use, and I wouldn't trade it for anything, even if I still had the writing issues.