The first two in here[1] are reporting 3% of a 2TB drive in a couple months. And speculating what that would look like for a 256GB drive. So, not definitive, but if it does mean 24% in two months for a smaller drive, that's not great.

[1] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1306757-m1-mac-owners-are-ex...

Edit: I suppose it makes sense that the people seeing lots of wear are the 2TB drive buyers. People that are willing to pay for that much NVME probably use it a lot.

I've had my 256GB SSD + 16GB RAM M1 MBA for a little over 2 months now. There was one time that I noticed a strangely large amount of swap usage for no discernible reason, and rebooted immediately. Otherwise, swap doesn't seem to be used that often.

I really don't understand why Apple is apparently incapable of making these laptops use standard, replaceable m.2 NVMe SSDs.

Seeing this thread made me concerned, but it looks like my SSD isn't something to be worried about yet:

    SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
    Critical Warning:           0x00
    Temperature:                34 Celsius
    Available Spare:            100%
    Available Spare Threshold:  99%
    Percentage Used:            0%
    Data Units Read:            6,963,442 [3.56 TB]
    Data Units Written:         3,626,988 [1.85 TB]
    Host Read Commands:         110,283,456
    Host Write Commands:        59,878,323

> I really don't understand why Apple is apparently incapable of making these laptops use standard, replaceable m.2 NVMe SSDs.

Coz there's no standard M.2 form factor NVMe SSDs without a controller chip, and even if you can find one, there's no standard protocol to talk to it.

Recall that 3rd-party drive manufacturers are really bad at properly making Self-Encrypting Drives (lots of HN stories previously, just search for SED). It's very likely a factor for Apple to decide to implement its own SSD controller inside the T1/T2 chip on recent Intel Macs, and directly on die on Apple Silicon, so that Apple can fully control the data written to raw flash and be confident in its own implementation of encryption.

Charging a premium for more capacity is a standard Apple practice anyway, and the fact that such security-focused approach makes it unavoidable is a side-effect.

Aside from encryption, commodity NVMe SSDs are also really bad at correctly implementing idle power management. The Linux kernel is constantly adding to its list of drives that cannot safely use the deepest idle state because on many systems the drive won't wake back up after being put to sleep. Apple might be able to have a bit of an easier time since they control the host system so tightly, but they would still end up having to accommodate plenty of SSD bugs/quirks.

Apple could have made their own replaceable SSD boards.

It looks like they want their devices to become obsolete sooner which seems to be a good business idea but there is a risk of upsetting many customers. Time will tell.

It seems I have it worse than almost anyone.

2.5 month old, 1 TB, M1 MBA:

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        46 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          99%
  Percentage Used:                    5%
  Data Units Read:                    315,158,527 [161 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 303,071,863 [155 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 1,331,719,025
  Host Write Commands:                1,036,195,203
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       167
  Power On Hours:                     762
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   7

I have almost 3 months old 1TB KINGSTON SA2000M81000G as linux root and data written includes transfering 400GB of old stuff to this drive.

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        44 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          10%
  Percentage Used:                    0%
  Data Units Read:                    627,718 [321 GB]
  Data Units Written:                 1,845,489 [944 GB]
  Host Read Commands:                 5,302,076
  Host Write Commands:                204,065,596
  Controller Busy Time:               107
  Power Cycles:                       117
  Power On Hours:                     765
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   0

That's an impressive amount of rip and tear for a drive in a laptop.

I put my stats here for the sake of reporting.

3.5 years old Samsung 970 evo 500GB

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 28 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 9,208,241 [4.71 TB] Data Units Written: 21,345,634 [10.9 TB] Host Read Commands: 132,245,782 Host Write Commands: 346,141,507 Controller Busy Time: 924 Power Cycles: 312 Power On Hours: 2,453 Unsafe Shutdowns: 114

Ouch, that's my only 2TB drive in a laptop running a rolling-release GNU/Linux distro with heavy swap usage, encryption and plenty of over-night compilations for a bit more than a year:

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        36 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          10%
  Percentage Used:                    1%
  Data Units Read:                    56 263 143 [28,8 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 36 077 380 [18,4 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 1 252 403 456
  Host Write Commands:                1 018 672 820
  Controller Busy Time:               15 360
  Power Cycles:                       234
  Power On Hours:                     10 255
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   47
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0
  Warning  Comp. Temperature Time:    0
  Critical Comp. Temperature Time:    0

Your values are indeed insane.

That's... close to 2TB / day?

> Data Units Written: 303,071,863 [155 TB]

That's insane, I don't trust it though:

  155 TB / (75 days *24*60*60) * 2**20 = ~25 MB / s

If we are more reasonable and say it's running for 12 hours out of the day then that works out at a continuous 50MB/s of writes.

For comparison, My daily Linux laptop (XPS 13, 512GB Samsung NVMe SSD) has a total of 3.7 TB of writes over 3 years, this is my work dev and home laptop, it's in constant use (although no video editing):

  3.7 TB / (1095 days *24*60*60) * 2**20 = 0.041 MB / s

There are three orders of magnitude difference there. I can only think of three explanations: 1. the SMART reporting is wrong, 2. MacOS or M1 SSD controllers have serious write amplification issues, or 3. you are actually doing something that does need serious write throughput like lots of video editing (your stat's aren't impossible after all).

There's an option 4: you are running out of RAM and macOS is doing a lot of swapping.

These SSDs can probably write on the order of 3000MB/s = 0.003TB/s, so you could end up with 155 TB total writes after just 155/0.003/3600 = 14 hours of RAM heavy workload.

It would have to be a legitimately RAM heavy workload though... running out of RAM due to leaving applications open (or browser tabs open), might result in swapping out those to disk until they are used again. But the level of swapping required to generate this much write usage would essentially be using the disk as RAM, as in the running program doesn't have enough RAM, either due to needing more than physically available or due to buggy memory management.

Right, I was thinking of things like large simulations where you need to keep a large dataset in RAM and update every datapoint at every iteration.

Or maybe multiple VMs running simultaneously doing CI jobs could also do it.

I don't think simple memory errors like leaks would cause it, since that would just end up filling the disk once, but wouldn't go through writes quite as fast.

The symmetry between reads and writes precludes a lot of options (like logging gone mad). I'm not even sure most SWAP ends up read back in...

That reminds me, when SSDs first came out we'd have to set noatime on nix stuff including macs, to prevents the OS from writing file access times every time a file is read, otherwise it would cause significant write amplification. Modern SSD controllers are clever enough to make this unnecessary these days, but it could be something similar... either with the SSD controllers themselves or a file system behavior spaced just right in time to turn 1 byte into 4096 bytes of effective NAND writes - That's only 24GB of requested writes turning into 100TB in the worst case.

Yeah, that's a lot. I've got a 5-year old 512 GB Samsung PM951 that's been a system drive in 3 Windows systems with 16-64 gigs of RAM, and over the course of 6200 power cycles and 16500 hours on it has only 35 TB written and 24 TB read

How do you even get an unsafe shutdown in a notebook with a battery, unless you yank it out, or a buggy OS that will not shutdown properly/preemptively on low power?

I've got a number of unsafe shutdowns listed on my M1 MBP, too. Most likely due to the kernel panics I get when rebooting and connected to my dock in clamshell mode.

Not a joke - are you running Chrome?

I am.

Just try to run the Activity Monitor.app, click on Disk tab and look for disk-hungry process.

"kernel_task" ... wrote 142GB in 80 minutes

looks like swap... can u show

  # vm_stat
  # top -o faults

just 1.5Tb for my 2m old m1 mini.. xcode/firefox

Not OP, but I'll post what I've found:

  > vm_stat
  Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 16384 bytes) 
  Pages free:                               28209.
  Pages active:                            114788.
  Pages inactive:                          111624.
  Pages speculative:                         1301.
  Pages throttled:                              0.
  Pages wired down:                         99067.
  Pages purgeable:                          11340.
  "Translation faults":                 340573628.
  Pages copy-on-write:                    8586888.
  Pages zero filled:                    184635739.
  Pages reactivated:                     62859723.
  Pages purged:                          12373577.
  File-backed pages:                        88759.
  Anonymous pages:                         138954.
  Pages stored in compressor:              645107.
  Pages occupied by compressor:            127459.
  Decompressions:                        62433647.
  Compressions:                          82841473.
  Pageins:                               10295559.
  Pageouts:                                177162.
  Swapins:                               16692043.
  Swapouts:                              17670838.

  > top -o faults
  PID    COMMAND      %CPU TIME     #TH    #WQ  #PORT MEM    PURG   CMPRS  PGRP  PPID  STATE    BOOSTS           %CPU_ME %CPU_OTHRS UID  FAULTS    COW     MSGSENT    MSGRECV    SYSBSD     SYSMACH
  533    WindowServer 10.5 06:21:59 21     5    2792- 876M-  209M+  298M   533   1     sleeping *0[1]            0.17876 1.03550    88   24771383+ 131690  354813610+ 136121938+ 237020876+ 554000668+
  2862   Safari       0.0  62:48.95 10     3    7051  480M   6400K  316M   2862  1     sleeping *0[37332]        0.00000 0.00000    501  13919243  76306   67003396   20901240   54405367+  167230473
  2883   com.apple.We 0.0  16:36.04 92     3    926   393M   384K   301M   2883  1     sleeping *19137[3734]     0.00000 0.00000    501  4032470   132     7204377    3215767    45641766+  32182159
  491    mds          0.0  11:00.86 5      2    422   66M    0B     52M    491   1     sleeping *0[1]            0.00000 0.00000    0    3296694   154     6396987    1450677    27494382   5594171
  792    mds_stores   0.0  14:00.57 4      2    93-   72M-   16K    61M    792   1     sleeping *0[1]            0.00000 0.00000    0    2786911   1956    4619344+   1304164+   15524959+  4296749+
  2694   Terminal     7.6  03:17.73 8      2    311   303M-  37M+   104M-  2694  1     sleeping *0[6352]         0.85412 0.15218    501  2034254+  338     1151091+   265791+    1517195+   269400

I'm at 1.32TB on my almost 1 month old MBA (8GB RAM/512GB DISK).

my info:

  Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 16384 bytes)
  Pages free:                               14959.
  Pages active:                            405692.
  Pages inactive:                          374907.
  Pages speculative:                        28768.
  Pages throttled:                              0.
  Pages wired down:                         91521.
  Pages purgeable:                           3805.
  "Translation faults":                  24292564.
  Pages copy-on-write:                     729689.
  Pages zero filled:                     14619003.
  Pages reactivated:                       712889.
  Pages purged:                            265424.
  File-backed pages:                       361509.
  Anonymous pages:                         447858.
  Pages stored in compressor:              270669.
  Pages occupied by compressor:             93710.
  Decompressions:                          405581.
  Compressions:                            790223.
  Pageins:                                1093581.
  Pageouts:                                  3406.
  Swapins:                                      0.
  Swapouts:                                     0.

> top -o faults

  PID   COMMAND      %CPU TIME     #TH   #WQ  #PORT MEM    PURG   CMPRS PGRP PPID STATE    BOOSTS          %CPU_ME %CPU_OTHRS UID  FAULTS   COW   MSGSENT   MSGRECV   SYSBSD    SYSMACH    CSW        PAGEIN
  596   firefox      1.8  25:24.36 101   3    4607  1050M- 24M    197M  596  1    sleeping *0[2679]        0.61835 0.00000    501  1801083+ 15982 30520748+ 10145476+ 37431119+ 74055473+  25506295+  10499
  136   WindowServer 3.8  34:09.24 17    5    2570- 1069M- 3008K+ 84M   136  1    sleeping *0[1]           0.04109 0.69237    88   1554555+ 29134 88175354+ 30598736+ 69071968+ 130099954+ 19109478+  1791
  734   Textual      0.0  01:16.23 9     1    858   144M   16K    25M   734  1    sleeping  0[2051]        0.00000 0.00000    501  833293   1717  745088    111931    478143    1563730    470159     2023
  2195  Xcode        0.0  01:43.32 14    1    856   278M   144K   114M  2195 1    sleeping  0[1168]        0.00000 0.00000    501  701255   3278  1626845   546420    1139890+  1959450    732276+    148341
  2650  Simulator    0.0  01:05.27 4     2    267   27M    0B     8976K 2650 1    sleeping *0[1402]        0.00000 0.00769    501  695662+  211   755586+   680393+   1078007+  2178634+   1065718+   134
  539   Terminal     0.6  01:01.28 8     2    304   107M   25M    16M   539  1    sleeping *0[1375+]       0.06887 0.02264    501  582200+  463   520635+   71597+    365523+   1208051+   360370+    1522
  2209  SourceKitSer 0.0  00:25.22 2     1    21    714M   0B     468M  2209 1    sleeping  0[672]         0.00000 0.00000    501  473966   51040 3676      1103      1047453   5748       17114      12740
  653   Microsoft Re 1.6  13:51.17 33    7    462   536M   12M    148M  653  1    sleeping *0[845]         0.00000 0.00000    501  454751   21517 9976456+  1770226+  11942684+ 47364219+  15135688+  82
  602   plugin-conta 0.0  01:01.70 39    1    278   362M   0B     87M   596  596  sleeping *1[3]           0.00000 0.00000    501  407089   2481  32035     12156     2744155   110109     996847     155
  3576  GarageBand   2.7  09:19.30 23    2    822   1088M  16K    664M  3576 1    sleeping *0[288]         0.01295 0.00000    501  266176   2365  7887976+  76435     9436303+  19319436+  18860820+  930
  292   mds_stores   0.2  01:18.32 5     3    95    24M+   16K    9056K 292  1    sleeping *0[1]           0.00000 0.17381    0    252741+  93    158368+   58900+    1418145+  178062+    301682+    42331
  2305  lldb-rpc-ser 0.0  00:18.56 4     1    62    1049M  0B     201M  2305 2195 sleeping \*0[3]           0.00000 0.00000    501  213604   1380  575628    287827    710177    307114     244010     32467

no swap at all.. but i don't use sleep mode for my system, uptime ~10h. and no rosetta apps too. 16Gb/500Gb M1 Mac Mini.

looks like Safari and WindowsServer use swap all the time. try to shutdown at least 1 per day - maybe it will help.

I'm curious is there any correlation with having chosen the 8GB ram version?

There must be a lot of swapping happening to make that work.

It's not that they are incapable. They are unwilling.

Nobody should be surprised that one of the most successful proprietary technology companies on the planet sells highly proprietary technology. The 2011 Macbook Air had a 1.8" PATA ZIF hard drive.

> The 2011 Macbook Air had a 1.8" PATA ZIF hard drive.

I.e. standard, high volume drive used in iPods and other small devices

It doesn't help your argument that the only device you mention by name is also built by Apple.

A quick search shows PATA ZIF drives were also used in Thinkpads, Dell / HP / Acer / Asus laptops, and other portables like the iRiver. Replacement drives for that model of Macbook Air are available, doesn't seem like it is proprietary tech at all.

   > I really don't understand why Apple is apparently incapable of making these laptops use standard, replaceable m.2 NVMe SSDs.

Are you even serious? Because then they wouldn't be able to charge $250 premium for 250GB of SSD.

Apple still charges that kind of premium on RAM even on the Intel Mac mini where you can replace the RAM.

People still pay it, because most people probably don't know the RAM is replaceable, don't want to be bothered with doing it themselves, don't want to accidentally damage their new computer, don't realize the upgrade prices are high, or other reasons.

Apple has always charged high premiums for upgrades... premium upgrades aren't a strategy they suddenly invented when they started soldering components down.

Apple has reasons for soldering down components, reasons which I don't really agree with, but I don't think they're all that worried about a small percentage of people avoiding their upgrade prices.

> premium upgrades aren't a strategy they suddenly invented when they started soldering components down.

What you wrote is only a part of the story. Another one happens after using the computer for couple of years. RAM and SSD prices are declining over time, while software developers are finding exciting new ways to use more of them.

It’s more profitable for Apple when users replacing entire computers than just RAM + SSD. Unlike the initial premium upgrades, users have more motivation. Warranty’s expired, and the price difference is way larger.

I just upgraded my 2015 Macbook Pro with a 2TB SSD and a new battery. I'm planning to keep using it for a few years.

The 2015 MBPs were the last ones that had replaceable drives (it's a proprietary slot, but adaptors to M2 are available).

I still think that the 2015 models are the last laptops Apple actually targeted at pro users. They even added support for PCI NVMe drives in a recent macOS version, so these MBPs got MORE EXPANDABLE after release. It's crazy! (It does have soldered-on RAM though)

The only comparable recent Mac was the 2018 Mac mini -- with user upgradable RAM! It does have soldered on flash, unfortunately. But it has so many ports, and with external thunderbolt enclosures you can add GPUs, SSD Raids, ... It's pretty amazing for a small desktop and surprisingly usable as a developer workstation.

(I'm not counting the current Mac Pro because it is so outrageously expensive that I can't imagine that it makes sense for anyone except the most highest paid professsionals)

My 2012 MacBook Pro is still going strong! Use it daily. Upgraded to a 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM and I sincerely hope it'll last a few more years - still on Mojave though. I boot into Crapolina to do App Store work from a USB SSD, but will probably upgrade to Big Sour at some point with the horrendous menubar spacing.

I type this on my work MacBook where I've had to press backspace so many times due to the shift key not working and the i key repeating itself, with the touchbar flashing constantly next to the power button.... the battery has a worse rating too even though it's a 2016 versus my 2012. I hate this keyboard.

> It’s more profitable for Apple when users replacing entire computers than just RAM + SSD.

Are there any hard cold data on how often a mac user gets a new laptop vs a pc user? It would also be interesting to see how common it is for pc users to add ram/disk during their pc:s lifetime.

I've only just got a new Mac after having my last one for nearly a decade. I've had to replace two windows machines in that same time period. Not exactly cold hard data, but a sample size of 1.

There are also windows machines that make it hard to replace things mind you.

Same with me and a lot of people I Know. Macs are so reliable (in general, don’t want to get into a debate as a lot of viruses don’t target them as Windows is larger) that upgrading is not required for a long time.

It may change in the future if Apple introduces planned obsolescence, but so far no issues

Having done over a decade of desktop support for several companies, both apple and windows shops. This notion that Macs are more reliable doesn't hold water for me. If we compare devices on the same price scale (premium category) as macbooks, amongst thousands of devices, we actually found them to last the same length without any upgrades (6-10years average)

What a lot of people neglect to consider is that non-Apple brands have an entire "budget" category that Apple does not participate in. It's wrong to compare this category with devices of another category, no matter the make and model.

Fair point

Counterpoint: it's a lot more wasteful, especially for desktops, to own Apple. Look at all the iMacs with recent, high quality 5K monitors that'll be scrapped, as they can't be used with another video source.

Such a waste.

Unless you need a monster dedicated GPU, you could get a Mac Mini. Or if you need GPU power and you have money to burn, you could get a Mac Pro. No screens attached.

Yet they stopped packaging accessories with the iPhone to help save the environment lol.

I love my Macs but Apple definitely are not environment focused, for the reasons you state

I agree with you but I also think that part of it is:

- If you make the SSD replaceable, many more people will replace theirs.

- Apple doesn't want to put an SSD access port into their laptops for design/strength/reliability reasons.

- Replacing the SSD would therefore entail people disassembling the computer.

- Apple doesn't want people disassembling the computer

* solution = solder it onto the motherboard.

2015 and earlier MacBook Pros had replaceable SSD drives. Remove 10 pentalobe screws, take off bottom panel, remove 1 torx screw, pull out SSD, put new SSD in, reassemble, done.

The soldered on stuff is a recent change, and it's stupid for things like RAM, but even more stupid for things that wear like SSDs.

- If you make the SSD replaceable, many more people will replace theirs.

Very few non technical consumers, which is the vast majority, ever upgrade their computer.

Which means designing in an affordance for it adds a cost for a feature used by a few.

They have the "pro" line for a reason. It's meant for professionals. It's okay to solder RAM and SSD in lower-end models I suppose, but not in those people actually use to get their job done.

I must agree with this. About a year ago, our company's iOS development team was replaced. The managers bought the new developers company MBPs. However, after about six months they started complaining that they could not make progress on one feature because Xcode kept crashing when they opened an existing Storyboard file. Turns out the managers had of course cheaped out and bought the developers Macs with the lowest 8GB memory option. Meanwhile, the consultants who originally created those files had had much more sensible 32GB.

Now the MBPs for the whole team need to be replaced at great cost and double the environmental resource use. Without Apple soldering the memory our IT department would have certainly just upgraded the memory. In fact, when I ran into similar issue with needing 32GB to my 16GB Dell laptop, that's exactly what we did.

Or they could have just bought the max version the first go around. If it's for production the +$1k/dev is less than a few days of pay.

> double the environmental resource use

I mean, they're not defective, they can be refurbished.

Theoretically yes, if they were for example managed by a leasing company.

In this case, the company actually only officially supports (leases) Windows laptops. Macs should not officially exist to start with, but are nevertheless required for iOS app development. So MBPs are handled as "extra" IT equipment. If there is no use for such a piece of IT equipment (e.g. it is underpowered or otherwise not fit for purpose) AND it contains sensitive business data (like a developer computer almost certainly does), it is actually a security issue for the company.

So for security reasons the company would actually prefer that such computer be DESTROYED when there is no use for it anymore. Sadly you can not even remove the hard drive from a MBP and sell/give it to a employee for personal use, so Apple soldering the components on the mainboard is a double whammy.

Don't recent Apple computers have hardware encryption by default through the T2 chip? Just throw away the key and all data on disk should be irretrievable. Replacing the disk in this case would add no security, so it would be the wasteful course of action.

Company policies don't care about crypo used I guess.

I guess more like they don't have a contract with Apple that says Apple guarantees the data security is protected by their tech.

Ah, fair enough.

Apple can decrease environmental cost of early replacing MBP by not providing chargers, like they did with iPhones.

I'm not the kind of person who throws electronics away, but, you know, there's a proven and reliable way to decrease the environmental cost: don't make your damn devices disposable. Design them to be taken apart and make consumable components easily replaceable by the end user. But I guess non-disposable devices don't make charts go up as much as disposable ones do.

Case in point: the M1 Mac Mini internals are half electronics, half air. They could've easily fit all kinds of slots and modular components in there, yet they deliberately decided not to.

Oh, great, yes, that is certainly going to have a huge impact.

Because the chargers are known to have a huge impact because of all the rare earth in them.

> People still pay it

Not everyone does. There is even a thriving market for such kinds of user replaceable upgrade proving that more and more people were opting to do the upgrades from reliable third-parties than Apple.

As I said:

> Apple has reasons for soldering down components, reasons which I don't really agree with, but I don't think they're all that worried about a small percentage of people avoiding their upgrade prices.

while i don’t think many of us are used to thinking at scale, any percentage of apple’s customers making literally any choice about something that purchase from apple, is a f-ton of money.

I'm guessing supply chain and repair and troubleshooting and a lot more things. the Macbook Air now comes with a single board and a daughter board for the headphone jack. when it breaks the service replaces the board reducing any time (money) wasted on troubleshooting like ssds etc. also it allows apple to make their manufacturing a lot more streamlined. the more complicated the assembly (yes even an ssd means additional assembly and tests then you gotta provide support for third party ssds etc and troubleshoot that etc.). Adding more parts means the more complications and more chance of failures not less.

What that really means is less opportunity to fix individual components, more opportunity for $1499 upsells when warranty runs out. Cutting off third party repair and secondary used markets. Win win win in Apple eyes.

>What that really means is less opportunity to fix individual components

That has been the trend in the PC and electronics industry for a century though. Notice how people don't fix their TVs/Radios/etc. anymore? Heck, even in the car industry.

>Cutting off third party repair and secondary used markets.

Well, and somehow these machines get high "consumer satisfaction" ratings, and have high use periods, and retain a lot of resale value.

Something seems contradictory here...

I think this sort of criticism of Apple usually lacks much substance. Everybody know what Apple products are, if you want something that’s highly customizable and easy to upgrade then why not just buy one of the countless different products that offer those features? Apple’s products tend to work very well, are typically well made, and reliably last a rather long time. I personally enjoy working on them more than any Linux system, so I buy them for that purpose. If I wanted a computer to tinker with, I wouldn’t buy a Mac.

Yet these highly integrated Macs have very long average service lives, high customer satisfaction and maintain high second hand resale values. So clearly that isn’t true.

clearly these machines are a few months old at most. we clearly have a lot to learn about how they work and what’s likely to break. If they’re anything like the last time apple made a big new hardware change, if you want a functional computer, you’ll have to watch out for dust.

That also means repair and troubleshooting for custom configurations really sucks. Either they have to keep a bunch of configurations on hand or the user is SOL waiting for basically a new computer.

Is there something different about the drives on non-M1 Macs? My MBP 16 is showing way more read/write than that and still zero percent used.

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        36 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          99%
  Percentage Used:                    0%
  Data Units Read:                    108,058,416 [55.3 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 95,524,343 [48.9 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 1,004,502,098
  Host Write Commands:                558,965,971
  Power Cycles:                       155
  Power On Hours:                     644
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   36

My 2016 MPB is also at around those R/W numbers but a bit higher in the used area. I am however not sure what those Power On Hours are refering to, since I have been using this machine daily for many hours.

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        37 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    87%
  Available Spare Threshold:          2%
  Percentage Used:                    5%
  Data Units Read:                    98,665,764 [50.5 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 84,525,474 [43.2 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 980,835,796
  Host Write Commands:                811,309,011
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       14,955
  Power On Hours:                     359
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   21
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0

It's been ~1700 days since mid 2016, I would guess the power cycles value there is swapped with the power on hours.

Or you power cycle 10 times almost every day.

The SSD will experience a power cycle every time you close the lid and the laptop goes to sleep.

Mine, also 256, 8GB RAM, bought on 12/26/2020. Primarily a browsing machine (Chrome).

    SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
    Critical Warning:                   0x00
    Temperature:                        35 Celsius
    Available Spare:                    100%
    Available Spare Threshold:          99%
    Percentage Used:                    3%
    Data Units Read:                    117,454,110 [60.1 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 108,475,036 [55.5 TB]
    Host Read Commands:                 471,949,425
    Host Write Commands:                309,499,261

Might want to consider browsing using something else (a large tablet e.g.?) until this issue is resolved. My machine is almost identical to yours. My reported writes are about 1.31TB or less than 1/40th your number. I do some native compiling and some browsing. Chrome is a well known memory hog.

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        25 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          99%
  Percentage Used:                    0%
  Data Units Read:                    5,849,123 [2.99 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 2,568,550 [1.31 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 75,126,642
  Host Write Commands:                32,909,838
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       160
  Power On Hours:                     42
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   3
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0

I haven't even installed Chrome on this laptop. I switch between Safari and Firefox.

I wonder if Chrome's memory usage pattern is a contributing factor.

wtf, 55TB+ read/write in 2month? what the heck are you doing with your laptop?

This is my 11y/o SSD ( OCZ Vertex2 64GB ) on my laptop:

241 Lifetime_Writes_GiB 0x0032 000 000 000 Old_age Always - 3904

242 Lifetime_Reads_GiB 0x0032 000 000 000 Old_age Always - 5120

> what the heck are you doing with your laptop?

Did you even read the headline? I mean, it's kinda what this is all about.

I had a ridiculously high failure rate with the Vertex 2. I also still an OCZ drive of that era somewhere, which would work... But if you didn't use it for a while, it would be completely blank when you next used it.

Using socketed M.2 SSDs introduces a class of problems ("the SSD isn't seated correctly") and also makes the device thicker. There are probably other reasons but I'll bet those are the two big ones.

Plain and simple, they don't want you to take their devices apart. They use hardware and techniques that are extremely anti-consumer. From non-standard form factors, to non-serviceable components, to literally fighting against Right-To-Repair in 20 states [1]. And then when you hold out on them they push you updates to sandbag your performance.

Why so many tech professionals and hackers still swear by this company and feign surprise everytime they get shafted by proprietary design choices is baffling and frustrating.

If they wanted you to play inside, they wouldn't use torque screws. If they wanted you to replace that, they wouldn't have glued it together. If you were supposed to take the keyboard off there wouldn't be 60+ screws (literally) holding it on.

You're supposed to be a good consumer and consume this one so you can buy a new one.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348240/apple-right-to-r...

While I agree with your argument, I want to call out a specific point:

> If they wanted you to play inside, they wouldn't use torque screws

Torque screws are superior to Phillips heads because they are far more resistant to cam-out; which is a bigger problem than needing to buy a screwdriver kit for $10 off eBay once in your life.

> Torque screws are superior to Phillips heads because they are far more resistant to cam-out[.]

I work at a repair shop currently, and can confirm this. Give me a Torq or a hex screw any day over a Phillips head.

You do have to be careful with them though, because once they do cam out, you're pretty much dead in the water, while with Phillips you can often hack your way around it.

Edit: I also agree with the rest of the argument. If you've got the budget (and I assume that if Apple is an option, you do), please consider buying something with Linux officially supported. Between Dell, Lenovo, and smaller scale setups like System76, there are plenty of options.

> please consider buying something with Linux officially supported. Between Dell, Lenovo, and smaller scale setups like System76, there are plenty of options.

My biggest complaint about them is heat and performance: my MBP seems to be almost always ready to take off. Apple really did hit the sweet spot with the M1 and I don't see x86 laptops catching up anytime soon. If they release 32+GB machines, I'll be seriously tempted to get my Macs refreshed even though I know they are essentially discardable machines now.

Also, Apple is the only manufacturer I can count on offering US keyboards without any hassle. Lenovo does that with Thinkpads and with Dell you need to work to find the models that are available with that option.

Those are all valid points. None of them are deal-breakers for me personally, but I understand how they can be.

I wish I could like the M1. I'm honestly really looking forward to ARM and RISC machines becoming more common, as long as there are manufacturers who make them at least somewhat reparable.

>ARM and RISC machines

What OS would they run? Linux?

I wonder if Windows will ever run on ARM/RISC?

Windows already runs on ARM.

Oh wow, I didn't know that.

The groundwork was done for embedded systems, but they added the desktop features and even make a few laptops with it now. But those are generally not very well-regarded, since the x86 emulation is slow and there is basically no native software.

Windows has run on non-x86 processors from at least the 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms

Oh, well that's not so good if it's just emulated x86.

The parent's argument stands, even if the details are slightly off.

Apple switched from torx to pentalobe screws because torx wasn't proprietary enough.

Also, they keyboard wasn't held down with 60+ screws, it was held down with rivets which is arguably worse. They could painstakingly be drilled, tapped, and replaced with screws if you were really masochistic.

> because torx wasn't proprietary enough

What does this even mean, when you can easily buy both types of screwdrivers at any hardware store?

Reportedly Torx, and later pentalobe screws are used because of their tiny size and lower profile, a philips head at that scale (0.8mm) is instantly stripped.

I agree that torx is useful. It's also an international standard.

Pentalobe is not an improvement over torx - torx was arguably working fine for Apple, but they decided to invent and start using a proprietary, non-standard screw anyway. The consensus at the time was that Apple did this to deliberately make it harder to get into their products.

The only reason you can find them now, 12 years later, is because third parties started to make the hardware, because it turns out getting into Apple hardware is something a lot of people eventually want or need to do.

Apple's attempt to lock you out of your own hardware didn't work, because ifixit and others spent tens of thousands of dollars on custom tooling. It was a big deal at the time, the hardware wasn't available anywhere, let alone at a hardware store.

> The consensus at the time

It was an angry article by iFixit that started the whole controversy. They could very well have done it for reasons related to licensing, or machinering, or space savings, or who knows what else. The fact the MBP 17" never used them, while the smaller models did, hints towards that.

You may have taken the stories at the time at face value, but within weeks you could buy pentalobe screwdrivers and they surely did not cost 'tens of thousands of dollars' to develop - screws are cold pressed and very simple to produce.

> they keyboard wasn't held down with 60+ screws, it was held down with rivets which is arguably worse. They could painstakingly be drilled, tapped, and replaced with screws if you were really masochistic.

I just replaced a keyboard in a Macbook Air. It is screws around the outside, then the dozens of rivets on the inside. If you're okay with the old keyboard being destroyed, you just rip it out: the rivets just pop out, and the replacement keyboard gets put back in with screws. So it was a pain, but the drilling/tapping isn't required.

Total cost $35, plus some quality time with my kid.

> Apple switched from torx to pentalobe screws because torx wasn't proprietary enough.

That was a simple and cheap change with clear benefits for Apple in terms of discouraging modifications to devices they support so the cost versus benefits actually makes sense for Apple there.

Whereas to suggest they designed a whole property storage controller interface just for the purpose of discouraging user servicing doesn't make sense at all. If that was the goal why not just use off-the-shelf NVMe modified to have some kind of secret power-on key or something?

Because there’s no way to spin that as a benefit for the user.

Optics is the most important factor and it’s something Apple’s marketing department does better than most companies.

There are lots of ways they could spin that as a benefit for the user (i.e. security).

It would be a poor explanation, but even when there's a good explanation, as you can see it is still dismissed as just "good optics". So how do you tell the difference between "good optics" and features that provide real benefit?

Some of my common CNC manufacturing runs use jigs with screws to hold odd-shaped products cut from large plate stock. I’ve tried many different styles of screws. Philips is great if you match the driver to the screw. The wrong driver will sort of work ok. If you buy a pack of Dewalt driver bits, you will note that each one is labeled. Match that label to your screws, and you should have a good fastener experience.

When I need to use a screw thousands of times, in manufacturing processes, I buy 18-8 Philips.

I use Torx only for one specific application: for user-serviceable finished products that have previously had support problems with idiots who can’t be bothered to select the right screwdriver. Some folks simply can’t do it. So, the most problematic products end up with Torx fasteners, which problematic customers mess up by using the wrong size Torx or even hex wrenches, and my support guys have a script for these problems that goes through “you didn’t use a T-10 wrench; there is nothing more to be said and nothing to be done for it. It’s black and white. Sorry.”

I understand proprietary screws being anti-consumer but torque screws?

Every building site I have been on almost exclusively used torque screws and every hardware store sells torque screwdrivers in every size. I wish more manufacturers would use torque screws since the heads don't show the same kind of wear.

And yes manufacturers aren't building their devices with them being repairable as primary design goal. This is understandable and there always will be a trade off. Even devices that are designed to be relatively easy to repair like Lenovo ThinkPads or HP Pro/EliteBooks have these trade-offs depending on the form factor.

The socket doesn't have to be on top of a pcb, given apple's history of "tweaking" standards its hard to believe the thicker argument. Given how reliable m.2 is (I've personally never seen a problem with one that seems to be seating related). I'm betting socketing the SSD actually makes the device more reliable long term since your looking at just replacing a disk in a couple years if it fails vs basically replacing the entire motherboard, which has got to be the most expensive part.

So, this is likely just penny pinching the manufacture, and assuming the customer will bear the repair fee if it breaks.

You're thinking about reliability in a different way from Apple. By the time the SSD fails, it's not Apple's problem anymore, it's your problem. (Or, more likely, Louis Rossman's problem.) Conversely, an SSD that gets jostled out of a socket if the product gets bumped the wrong way (maybe because the courier kicked the package around) means time and money spent on in-warranty repairs.

Also, Apple never actually used M.2. All of their socketed SSDs are proprietary form factors, though there are cheap adapters you can buy that will let you use M.2 drives.

<i>an SSD that gets jostled out of a socket if the product gets bumped the wrong way</i>

You know the other side of m.2 is screwed in, right? Anything that manages to "jostle" a m.2 drive out of the socket has likely also destroyed the machine.

> Using socketed M.2 SSDs introduces a class of problems ("the SSD isn't seated correctly")

I can't get around to how people say such stuff with a straight face - Apple is a 20-30 year old trillion dollar hardware company and its engineers can design high-tech processors, but apparently can't ensure that a RAM or SSD remains fixed in a slot? Do you really believe that?

> There are probably other reasons

Sure there are, and I'll list the major ones - planned obsolescence (soldered parts are harder to repair) and increased profits through price gauging on upgrades.

> planned obsolescence (soldered parts are harder to repair) and increased profits through price gauging on upgrades.

Neither of these really makes sense.

Planned obsolescence: Apple laptops retain their resale value for a very long time. Even if 8GB of RAM is no longer enough for you, there are plenty of people who'll still be able to use the device for many more years. The days are long over where computers became obsolete after a few years without upgrades.

Price gauging on upgrades: Almost everyone buys the base configuration, and almost no-one upgraded RAM or HD even when the hardware used to allow it. Whatever increased profit Apple are making from upgrades is going to be absolutely tiny.

If Apple really wanted to price gauge on upgrades, they'd at least stock the 16GB models in stores. My guess is that it's barely worth Apple's while to make these models at all, in a purely economic sense. What you're paying for isn't the cost of the RAM/storage itself, but the money necessary to make it worth the bother of making additional models which almost no-one buys.

> Planned obsolescence: Apple laptops retain their resale value for a very long time.

Planned obsolescence here means limiting upgrades and repairs, and making repairs or replacement so costly that you prefer to buy a new device if the current model develops performance issues or has hardware failures. With the M1 this is even worse now as you can't even run other base OSes on it reliably, thus making its users susceptible to systemic obsolescence (not including hardware or software compatibility when the OS is upgraded).

It has nothing to do with the resale value of a product. (It is a humbug argument as nobody can predict what the value of your device will be tomorrow if some newer technology comes along. Moreover, soldered parts and non-user-replaceable battery actually make such laptops even less desirable in the seconds market because they cannot be upgraded, unlike the older Apple laptops).

> Almost everyone buys the base configuration, and almost no-one upgraded RAM or HD

I'd really like to know your source for this.

> What you're paying for isn't the cost of the RAM/storage itself, but the money necessary to make it worth the bother of making additional models which almost no-one buys.

Again, share your source for this really ridiculous argument - they wouldn't need to bother with all this if they didn't solder the parts in the first place.

Planned obsolesce does have a bit to do with resale value, as it determines how much it costs to sell your existing device and replace it. This in turn has implications for whether upgrades are worth the money. Few upgrade ever for any reason; even fewer upgrade if it's economically feasible to sell your old model and buy a newer one. Apple doesn't need to do anything nefarious to stop people upgrading their MacBooks.

In looking at repairs you have to factor in reliability as well as replaceability. We're seeing a trend towards laptops becoming harder to repair but also intrinsically more reliable. No-one complains that laptop CPUs can't be replaced, for example, because CPUs are reliable enough that it's not an issue. We're well on the way to the same being true of internal flash storage. On top of that, Apple is reaping significant benefits in energy efficiency, reliability and performance from closely integrating components. That is something that benefits everyone who buys a MacBook. Hardly anyone benefits from removable RAM or SSDs.

I think some people mistakenly think that Apple could just stop 'soldering down' the RAM and SSD, but they must not realize how closely integrated everything is in the M1 MacBooks. The idea that Apple did all of this extraordinarily expensive R&D just so that they could sell a few more RAM or SSD upgrades is bordering on a conspiracy theory. As I said, there is so little demand for 16GB MacBook models that Apple doesn't even stock them in stores.

Overall, I just don't see any evidence that Apple has bad motivations here. It seems to me that you are just speculating uncharitably.

> We're seeing a trend towards laptops becoming harder to repair but also intrinsically more reliable.

The trends are separate and not related. I have a 10+ year old laptop with replaceable parts and it still runs great without any issues. With the European Union introducing the Right to Repair bill, I expect to see a reverse of this trend soon, and more repairable electronics in the future. If Apple and the others stop their selfish and unethical lobbying against the Right to Repair movement in the US, then the American consumers will also enjoy the same benefits and not be taken for a ride.

> The idea that Apple did all of this extraordinarily expensive R&D just so that they could sell a few more RAM or SSD upgrades is bordering on a conspiracy theory.

Perhaps it does for the ignorant. But it is already recognized that firms like Apple that indulge in this already know that the profit from such unrepairable devices offset the additional expense on the R&D required to create it. Even the wikipedia page on planned obsolescence specifically points this out:

   Producers that pursue this strategy believe that the additional sales revenue it creates more than offsets the additional costs of research and development, and offsets the opportunity costs of repurposing an existing product line.

And, as mentioned already, everyone already knows how Apple is actively lobbying in the US against the Right to Repair bill thus clearly proving that what you call a "conspiracy theory" is indeed a deliberate and entrenched business practice in Apple.

>The trends are separate and not related.

Sure, but as failure of any given component becomes less likely, the advantages of making it replaceable cease to outweigh the disadvantages. An M1 MacBook Air with replaceable RAM and SSD would not have the same performance, battery life or form factor. 99% of Apple's customers care way more about those things than they care about upgradeability.

>But it is already recognized that firms like Apple that indulge in this already know that the profit from such unrepairable devices offset the additional expense on the R&D required to create it.

I'm baffled by this claim. If all Apple wanted was to make their laptops unupgradeable then they could just solder on generic CPU, RAM and SSD components – no R&D needed.

I try not to use the term 'conspiracy theory' lightly, but the claim that Apple's transition to the M1 architecture is motivated primarily by 'planned obsolescence' really is a conspiracy theory.

>An M1 MacBook Air with replaceable RAM and SSD would not have the same performance, battery life or form factor.

citation please.

Discrete replaceable components use up more space, which leaves less space for battery. On top of that, Apple are most likely getting power consumption and performance benefits from integrating the SSD controller and reducing the length of the traces to the RAM chips by an order of magnitude (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25258797). Take a look at the logic board for an M1 MacBook Air: https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/38927-74332-MBA-Tea... There's just no room for RAM sticks and and M2 slot. You could make a different laptop with those features, but it's a laptop that from the point of view of most consumers would be worse.

>but it's a laptop that from the point of view of most consumers would be worse

"Worse", but the insignificantly "better" one is landfill in a few years time when the battery/storage/keyboard/anything has a fault, or even just when it needs more RAM or storage.

Most consumers are just ignorant.

Do you have any stats on this? I'd be surprised if Apple laptops ended up in landfill quicker than their competitors' on average, given the huge second hand market. You also have to bear in mind that the vast majority of 'broken' laptops just get thrown away or put in a cupboard, regardless of whether it would be theoretically possible to repair them.

This sounds like hogwash.

It's the usual Apple stuff, "we've put so much amazing into this laptop that it doesn't matter that it's starved of RAM!". New phones have the same amount of RAM as this laptop.

You will never convince me that an SSD sprinkled with Apple magic is better than having enough RAM. NEVER.

Also you will never convince me that a non-replaceable storage is somehow necessary, or better in some way than replaceable storage, even if it shaves tens of nanometers extra thickness from the laptop. NEVER.

Apple has been doing this ridiculous stuff for decades now and its victims just keep on falling for it.

Punched in the face over and over again - from dongles, to batteries, to proprietary connectors that are abandoned the next year, to lack of headphone sockets, to overheating GPUs because of inadequate heatsinks, to unibody that isn't actually unibody and bends when you tilt the screen, to needing to replace your motherboard because your keyboard got a speck of dust in it, to screens that crack if you look at them wrong, to phones that don't work if you hold them wrong, ad nauseum. Please sir, can I have some more?

They've been punched in the face for so long that now they get a headache when they're not getting punched. It's some kind of bizarre form of masochistic Stockholm Syndrome.

THE WORST PART OF IT ALL is that the market success of this consumer-hostile garbage influences the rest of the industry and ruins other products like a cancer, so now it's super hard to find a phone with a headphone socket or replaceable battery.

Fuck this shit, FUCK APPLE, and fuck their customers for not using their wallets to demand better, and thereby encouraging and normalizing the terrible behavior of this horrible company.

8GB isn't enough for everyone, but it is enough for a lot of common consumer tasks. If you check out comparisons between the 8GB and 16GB M1 models, it's surprising how hard you have to push them before the difference in RAM becomes apparent.

I personally would have liked to see Apple bump up the base spec to 16GB. But hey, the 16GB models are available if you need them.

8Gb is the least-bad part of my little rant.

It is bizarre to me how many problems I've literally never seen before in my life some people on this site can come up with to defend Apple's decisions, especially things like this on a website which purports to be Hacker News.

How could an M.2 SSD be seated incorrectly? It's either in and screwed down or it isn't. As for making the machine thicker, this obsession with shaving every last micron off has become almost cartoonish. I'll take serviceability and good keyboard travel over fashion statements any day, even if my laptop has to be a millimeter or two thicker because of it.

Once that soldered-in SSD goes, that expensive fashion statement is just more e-waste.

With this was true. The M2 design is terrible from an engineering perspective both mechanically and thermally. At best the mounting is a hack job.

I agree with the problem though. M2 is just a crappy answer to it.

Come on man, nobody has problems with their SSD not being seated correctly with any other brand. There are screws to hold them in, they're not going anywhere.

The thickness thing - how thick is an M.2 SSD? 3mm? Get real.

Apple is consumer-hostile and their products are disposable, that's all there is to it.

> I really don't understand why Apple is apparently incapable of making these laptops use standard, replaceable m.2 NVMe SSDs.

Because those SSDs don't have Apple magic. Apple's SSDs are designed to be directly attached to the M1 CPU to provide low latency, high throughput storage -- what amounts to nonvolatile RAM, allowing an M1 Mac with 16 GiB max to vastly outperform an x86 PC with much more RAM at the same tasks.

No, really, though, it's so they can charge an arm and a leg at the Genius Bar for SSD replacements.

How is the Genius Bar going to replace chips soldered to the board? They’re not that genius.

Replace the whole board, charge an arm and a leg for it.

For perspective: 2 year old MacBook Pro 2018 256Gb. (Mostly used for development purposes)

  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        37 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          99%
  Percentage Used:                    42%
  Data Units Read:                    892,035,478 [456 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 786,976,871 [402 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 4,989,739,415
  Host Write Commands:                2,554,081,641
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       137
  Power On Hours:                     2,132
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   70
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0

And a 6 month old Intel i3 MacBook Air 256Gb

  Critical Warning:                   0x00 
  Temperature:                        48 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100% 
  Available Spare Threshold:          99% 
  Percentage Used:                    1% 
  Data Units Read:                    59,113,734 [30.2 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 47,319,687 [24.2 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 596,571,150
  Host Write Commands:                318,913,173
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       93
  Power On Hours:                     384
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   21
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0

FWIW my 256GB SSD + 116GB RAM M1 MBP13 had 0.9 TB writes in 6 weeks, so very close.

A similar configuration Intel MB12 I use in 3.5 years also had writes at the same rate.

That's an impressive amount of RAM!

3 month old, 8GB/512GB, M1 Air

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        56 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          99%
  Percentage Used:                    2%
  Data Units Read:                    153,706,243 [78.6 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 133,607,337 [68.4 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 2,004,724,611
  Host Write Commands:                380,685,816
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       178
  Power On Hours:                     358

That's a lot of write. I think that's 157 full writes of your disk. You're writing out almost a terabyte (or is this terabits?) per day.

Your reads are also low in ratio to your write.

Are you swapping? This almost looks like pages swapping in and out of memory.

to give a comparison:

        PM951 NVMe SAMSUNG 512GB
        SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
        Critical Warning:                   0x00
        Temperature:                        52 Celsius
        Available Spare:                    100%
        Available Spare Threshold:          50%
        Percentage Used:                    4%
        Data Units Read:                    30,314,686 [15.5 TB]
        Data Units Written:                 35,402,028 [18.1 TB]
        Host Read Commands:                 601,326,085
        Host Write Commands:                793,617,758
        Controller Busy Time:               17,248
        Power Cycles:                       3,897
        Power On Hours:                     9,506
        Unsafe Shutdowns:                   343
        Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
        Error Information Log Entries:      5,351

This is from my daily driver 2016 Dell XPS13 9350.

Used for years with rolling-release linux + windows for gaming. multiple reinstall of every OS and since a year, hackintosh.

> I really don't understand why Apple is apparently incapable of making these laptops use standard, replaceable m.2 NVMe SSDs.

Because if they did that, users would be able to replace them.

If that was the concern they could just solder a plain NVMe drive. Blocking user repairs doesn't require the creation of a whole new purpose-built storage controller interface, so that can't explain their rationale here.

>I really don't understand why Apple is apparently incapable of making these laptops use standard, replaceable m.2 NVMe SSDs.

Profit.

>making these laptops use standard, replaceable m.2 NVMe SSDs

Because not using them gives Apple control of the exact specifications and capabilities of their M1 SSDs.

Else they're bound to be compatible with the lowest common denominator standard connectors and drive implementations.

Aside from profit ("paying more for custom parts"), this is also how they control "the whole widget", and how they can innovate (like with the M1 CPUs/SoC components) when others drag themselves with me-too standard parts.

Was the allure of a Mac ever that "you can build your own from standard parts"? If anything, it was always the opposite: it's not a PC.

> Else they're bound to be compatible with the lowest common denominator standard connectors and drive implementations.

The fairly common Samsung 9x0 Pro Nvme SSDs are way faster in almost all benchmarks. So I don't think that argument holds.

This really is about charging a premium for additional storage - and not due to technical reasons.

If there’s no data available about 256GB models, then there’s no way to assess whether their speculations are valid. I look forward to more data.

My 1TB NVMe drive in my Intel mac desktop is at 1% after 18 months, and shows some 46TB of writes by their data collection method. At least 600GB of the data is music albums that haven’t changed since I first copied it over, and I’m mildly curious whether it’s truly writing 32GB/day for 18 months (since I never run out of RAM and I don’t do large I/O activities).

But they’re all focused on M1 so I’m staying out of it and letting them do so.

I have a 256GB, bought it exactly two months ago. 55TB written, 3%. Not doing anything crazy with it, it's mostly a Chrome machine.

55TB written in 2 months for a chrome machine is insane. My 2016 MBP has 55 TB written in those almost 5 years.

My three months old 256 GB shows 9 TB written and 0% used. I mainly write in VS Code on this machine.

For contrast, my PC “system” PCIe drive bought in 2018 shows 6,7TB, and “data” SATA SSD has 1,5TB wear, which is used for games, etc. The drive at work had around 8-10TB since 2016 last time I checked.

I was never concerned with wear, have moderate demands/usage and used these drives as much as needed.

> People that are willing to pay for that much NVME probably use it a lot.

I guess it depends on the use case. I have a 2TB drive for my home macbook pro because that's where all my photos/videos get synced to. There shouldn't be a lot of reads/writes to a significant part of my drive even though it's large.

You say "the first 2" yet those were hand picked by the post author among the many, many posts on twitter reporting 1%.

>And speculating what that would look like for a 256GB drive.

Why "speculating"? Couldn't they get someone with a 256GB drive to ask them?

It also seems to me there are a couple jumps in the initial tweets here (particularly the assumption of the same write rate on 256 GiB models as on 2 TiB models). But regarding several of the assumptions you mentioned here:

> (4) that they are directly comparable to non-M1 hardware without further processing

> (5) that they do not increment when Time Machine or other filesystem snapshots occur

> (6) that they do not increment when APFS copy-on-writes occur

> (7) that they do not include the total byte size of sparsely-modified files

smartmonctl is a tool that inspects the drive's built-in statistics about physical writes. If it shows significant jumps from snapshots, copy-on-write, and sparse files, it's because those feature aren't working as designed in minimizing physical writes.

I also find it unlikely that a bug in smartmonctl or IOKit would show incorrect but plausible-looking values. More likely in the SSD's firmware. But I'm not getting alarmed just yet. (I also don't own an M1 Mac, so that's easy for me to say.)

As always, this thread is full of FUD instead of facts.

You are spot on with your 1% statement (which could be as little as half that, due to rounding). The percentage used is base on the figures set by the manufacturer. It is the one used in drive warranties. Also - worth pointing out that it doesnt mean the drives stop taking writes at 100%. This counter actually goes up to 255 (per spec), where 255 means 255+. Its literally just for life "expectancy".

Some people saying to ignore that and to look at TBW. They simply dont know what they are talking about! No discussion around the nand type on these drives. Is it SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC? or is it one if the hybrid modes, such as pSLC, or iTLC which act like the higher categories? This can mean the difference between <1k and >100k+ P/E cycles.

We simply dont know what the OS is doing. I know that I can have WAY more applications open (and remaining responsive) on my 8GB M1, than i could my 16GB i7. It doesnt feel like traditional swap - so maybe its not. Maybe its way more aggressive, suspending entire applications to disk in the background - taking advantage of the massive bandwidth to make the UX better at the cost of drive writes. We simply dont know.

From following the original thread, the vast majority of people reporting 1% usage since launch. There are a handful with higher usage than that. We dont know what these people are doing on those machines, but its evident from the figures that that the writes generally scale to the amount of ram on the machine. 8GB machines generally seem to be a lot less usage than 16GB. Maybe these people with HUGE amounts of writes are running a memory hog like chrome, which consumes all available ram on the machine, and which is paging when they background it. Some people reporting 8hr daily usage since launch with 200 drive power on hours (drive hours arent same as uptime, as drives can be suspended for power saving), others reporting 800 for same "uptime". Clearly it is due to the workload.

EITHER WAY, the "percentage used" is definitely the figure to go on, because only the manufacturer knows exactly what NAND types they are using (unless someone wants to enlighten us?) as well as the wear levelling algorithms on the controller.

> Maybe they are suspending entire applications to disk in the background

This tactic of suspending unused tabs has MASSIVELY reduced by browser memory usage. Originally with "The Great Suspender" then built into FF natively when I switched to that. This should be used everywhere.

It's seriously game changer for some like me who keeps open 100 tabs.

Yeah, I use this in safari. Its fantastic.

What is the name of the extension/setting?

"Tab suspender": https://apps.apple.com/lt/app/tab-suspender-for-safari/id149...

Like Chrome, Safari also suspends tabs on startup. That is to say, tabs are only loaded when first used.

It depends on your workflow, but I don't use an extension for this. I occasionally just quit and restart it; takes less than five seconds.

That's not what the extension does, it 'expires' tabs you haven't looked at in a few minutes. Clearing up the memory.

Clicking on the tab will load them.

>says that a total of 1% of the drive's capacity has been used, which means that in about 16.5 years (2 months * 99 / 12)

And cellphone reception bars accurately tell you signal strength on Apple product https://mspoweruser.com/apple-admits-to-the-iphone-lying-for...

What really matters is the number of write cycles drive performed, not some imaginary dumbed down single number "Percentage Used" indicator.

> their drive will go readonly.

Cn you point me to a drive manufacturer/model which reliably goes into READ ONLY mode after encountering a defect/exceeding wear limit? Hint: Even most expensive Intel server drives will silently die on you despite claiming read only fallback.

Just in case I all for science and now gonna try to debug what processes cause heavy writes to disk. Easier for me because I don't really use much except browser and some games.

> The first line of the smartctl output everyone's bandying about says that a total of 1% of the drive's capacity has been used, which means that in about 16.5 years (2 months * 99 / 12) their drive will go readonly.

Problem is that my SSD end up 3% dead two months after I bought M1 and after month of daily browsing / Netflix. So that news got me really worried about what gonna happen if I actually move my files to that laptop, connect it to DropBox and and gonna compile C++ on it and might be do some Java web development. What if I end up with 5% capacity loss a month?

On top of that, you don't get answers by just posting numbers and blaming Apple.

Numbers do not mean anything without context.

It would be really interesting to understand what applications folks with both higher and lower numbers use daily. And what their developer habits are. Do they use a specific browser or a specific toolchain?

But ultimately, someone should probably write a little app or daemon that can just keep an eye on what specific processes are doing disk i/o. I think if people ran that for a while and then posted _that_ output, there would probably be some better answers.

Agreed. I've seen thousands of mac minis in CI farms writing 1+ TB / day (all day, every day) and they're slowly starting to die 4 years in. It's hard to write flash to death with that kind of write load. I wouldn't worry about that.

Are there any numbers with precision below one digit? If not, 1% could mean a lot of things and muddle any takeaways to nil.

> 1% of the drive's capacity has been used, which means that in about 16.5 years (2 months * 99 / 12) their drive will go readonly.

Makes me wonder if the engineers at Apple decided it was an acceptable trade off.

Yes, no one uses 16 year old laptops

Well, maybe using 16 years old machine today - but what about using current machine in 16 years ? A lot of stuff has stabilized and has been "good enough" for many use cases for quite a while.

Software support is less than 10 years so in 16 years you'd be very far behind on security patches.

Well, on Mac and other proprietary hardware & software combos.

Enterprise Linux distros such as RHEL regularly provide 10-12 years of support you can pay for per major version and presumably you will be able to upgrade the major version to reset the time.

Same thing for community Linux distros - Fedora, Debian of OpenSUSE already work on current 16+ years old hardware and one can expect that to continue in the future.

My 2006 white plastic MacBook is still in use.

It's just a friend's kid's video player right now, because with OSX it's become too slow for most uses, but if someone put Linux or BSD on it....

Especially 1st gen of new platform laptops, with all the potential quirks. I think that's also why Apple priced them very affordably.

I still use my apple 16GB ipod touch to play music, its in a speaker that has a dock for it. Still works, and I use it to play music. The hardware works. But almost none of the software works, except the music player. The browser no longer works, otherwise I would play music off of spotify or youtube. That thing is probably 13 years old now.

Good for you. Do you use a 16yo laptop though? Because that is the topic here.

Performance improvements have slowed a great deal since then. Assuming you aren't doing anything particularly heavy, you can easily get away with using a Sandy Bridge CPU (10 years old) for most tasks. You'll likely still be able to use it in 5 years just fine. That applies even moreso for something as performant and efficient as the M1.

Case in point, my ThinkPad T420 has been in use since 2011. Even though it's no longer my main driver, the performance is more than good enough for when I need a backup device.

For comparison, 16 years ago, we're talking about single-core 32-bit CPUs, the very first version of their Centrino brand, DDR2 RAM and IDE/PATA HDDs. There's just not much you can do with those limitations.

The performance improvements due to parallel computing hardware (think Metal GPUs and their successors) will be so insane in 16 years that your current laptop won't stand a chance at doing anything what will be considered standard then.

Increasing parallelism is irrelevant for most workloads due to Amdahl's law.

Amdahl's law is only relevant if you can't change your algorithms. If you can, then most of the time it's a non-issue.

The human brain runs off umptillion neurons each running at 100-1000 Hz (depending on measure). Not GHz, MHz or even kHz. Hz. Obviously it's an extreme case, but if general intelligence can be achieved without fast serial computing then there should be lots of things we can do with a few dozen cores all running at GHz rates.

That's bullshit. All of the programs I have written recently had an incredible speedup after porting relevant parts of the program from single-threaded to GPU.

Right now we are hitting the threshold of incompetent programmers and tools long before any other.

Only occasionally, I have an old windows laptop with a CD rom drive. I have some old backups photos on CDs. Its from the 2000s so not sure how old it is exactly.

Still use my 2010 MBP 15”. I changed out the battery twice and swapped in a SSD drive. It’s my only dvd drive. I also have a 2011 Air 11” that still works.

That’s right. I use an 18-year-old laptop.

Nearly no one, I would venture to guess.

This couch side laptop I use to read and search things is a 2011 MBA. Not 16, but maybe it'll make it...

My 2011 MBA from grad school is pretty much done, its so slow. I replaced the battery and the charging port and its doing better but still about to end. Good 10 years though.

Yeah, after posting I was thinking about that.

I have a very lean setup on it with Linux. I don't think it'll last too much longer to be honest.

I mainly use it if I'm on my phone, but find something that a bigger screen/keyboard would help.

But I can't do much on it. Even a RPi has more RAM on it.

I have an Iphone 4 that still serves as a remote control for my music setup. The battery was replaced once, 2014 or so.

My 2017 MBP is showing 97% capacity. It's my daily driver. So at this rate I can expect the SSD to last 291 years? Really? Either these numbers are bogus, or the capacity drop over time is far from linear.

That's just the wear capacity; an SSD can still suffer random failures at any time. The controller and DRAM aren't designed to last for decades.

I have gone through 2 SSDs in my rMBP mid 2015 (16GB RAM). This was the last model with replaceable SSDs, I believe. I am on my third now:

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        38 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          10%
  Percentage Used:                    7%
  Data Units Read:                    82,062,737 [42.0 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 81,415,281 [41.6 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 539,567,311
  Host Write Commands:                561,934,808
  Controller Busy Time:               3,863
  Power Cycles:                       3,059
  Power On Hours:                     2,705

> (2) that they are not a bug in the IOKit implementation used by smartctl

"While we're looking into the reports, know that the SMART data being reported to the third-party utility is incorrect, as it pertains to wear on our SSDs" said an AppleInsider source within Apple corporate not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. The source refused to elaborate any further on the matter when pressed for specifics.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/02/23/questions-raised-...

I am sitting at 10% after 60 days... so my drive will go readonly in 1.6 years.

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)

Critical Warning: 0x00

Temperature: 33 Celsius

Available Spare: 100%

Available Spare Threshold: 99%

Percentage Used: 10%

Data Units Read: 546,457,001 [279 TB]

Data Units Written: 510,545,911 [261 TB]

Host Read Commands: 3,130,642,888

Host Write Commands: 1,491,509,201

Controller Busy Time: 0

Power Cycles: 118

Power On Hours: 930

Unsafe Shutdowns: 18

Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0

Error Information Log Entries: 0

Sorry that I don't know much about SSDs but what do you mean by "their drive will go readonly"? Can you elaborate? Thanks.

SSDs have a limited number of total write cycles they can undergo before they wear out. See e.g.:

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000137999/hard-driv...

Decent explanation here: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/210492-extremetech-expla...

In addition to what's been said, Flash cells lose data over time and need to be rewritten.

The controllers take care of this. But an SSD that has gone read-only, assuming it can in fact go read-only, is an SSD that will quickly lose all its data.

You are also assuming it's linear, no?

We are also assuming it'll grow at all.

The premise of the comment is that we don't have enough data.

datapoint:

  CPU: M1
  Model: MacBook Air
  Age: 1 month
  RAM: 16GB
  SSD: 512GB

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        27 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          99%
  Percentage Used:                    0%
  Data Units Read:                    3,463,221 [1.77 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 1,571,934 [804 GB]
  Host Read Commands:                 51,945,085
  Host Write Commands:                23,518,851
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       83
  Power On Hours:                     18
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   3
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0

> What, exactly, is the problem with that?

Literally the entire thread appears to be "people who can't do maths correctly, misinterpreting a third-party tool which may or may not be accurately reporting the information in the first place, running around like their hair is on fire."

Apple's own Activity Monitor shows hundreds of GBs of disk writes per hour on my M1 Macbook Pro. Smartctl output showing 10+ terabytes of writes per month looks about right. Apple doesn't provide lifetime TBW numbers but e.g. Samsung seems to only cover about 150-250 terabytes written total for various 250GB SSD models.

Go have a look at the linked thread, where people are basic their hysteria on three order of magnitude errors.

Or the trillion dollar proprietor of the software can disprove these claims and escape defamation. Why don't you take the first step in the assumptions you pointed out because nobody seems to be interested in damage control.

I read this article and immediately tried it on my own 2014 MacBook out of curiosity. Turns out its a third party command line tool that doesn't come with macOS that's reporting statistics on a proprietary system on chip SSD that has only been available for 2-3 months. This thing is probably not using an off the shelf SSD controller and the chances are the information is just wrong. Some of the stats reported down the thread look like they don't stack up as in impossible amounts of data written in the time the drive is reported as being awake.

If it is true and M1 computers start bricking in two years time, which I find unlikely, then these people can take their computers to be fixed, if that doesn't happen, a company can't sell something doesn't work, so I would take it to small claims and exercise my contractual right for the goods supplied to be fit for purpose.

I think its Apples turn to respond. I don't see this as anyone elses responsibility. Until then, all available data clearly points to a premature death of many M1 machines.