I wonder how that's possible, and whether that's an outlier rather than a case of probable risk to SSDs. I've got the impression that it shouldn't be likely to wear out a modern or semi-modern SSD with any kinds of typical laptop workloads.
I daily drove a 500 GB off-the-shelf SSD in a 8 GB ThinkPad for ~8 years, and while it was for personal device, I used it a lot and even played games on it, often ran into swapping, even hibernated semi-regularly at times, etc., and there were never any signs of problems with the SSD.
4 years sounds like pretty bad luck.
I guess it's possible, it just sounded like individual bad luck to me. My impression has been that you really have to write a lot to wear out the expected life of a non-ancient SSD.
I started using Macs with Mac OS 9.2 but now I want out. The pricing is absurd and there is no way to circumvent that since no upgrade possible.
I don't care much about battery life/power consumption and the actual use case is overblown, if you get one of the powerful chips and push it, you are looking at 30-50W power consumption; so even with a 100kWh battery, we are talking 2-3H at best.
In other words, if you want to game, compute, encode, render, or whatever high performance task you are still going to need a cord anyway. The rest of low power task is actually done very nicely on much cheaper devices that have more than enough battery life (from cheap tablets, including iPads to Chromebooks).
Also macOS currently has a software problem in my opinion and Apple stupidly push for subscription out of greed. If I have to subscribe for my computing needs I might as well get the cheaper devices and use software that can run anywhere, including sub 500$ potato.
Apple has made a terrible mistake strategically; you can't have your cake and eat it too. If they want to sell expensive, limited hardware they need to have cheap non-subscription software that is best in class in enough categories. If their hardware is only useful to run competitors' software and subscription stuff they have to be competitive on the hardware price...
My current work machine, a M2 Pro MBP at 32GB actually has less usable memory than my sluggish i9 MBP had - due to unified memory. The RAM configurations are just prohibitively expensive even for “well off” companies / purchasers at this point so it’s often a struggle to fight for more.
I’ve been a big Apple / Mac fan and loyal customer since Panther but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye here.
These constrained memory configurations - even when streamlined OS / system software optimizations are in place (are they? still?) - are probably playing a good part in their great margins but they do need to go with the time (bloated websites and apps) as well of course their own stacks running on top.