mine was 13" MacBook Pro. got 16" MacBook Pro to replace it. haven't had bit of swap use since. peace of mind alone was worth upgrade.
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8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple
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how do they do it? I've watched tons of videos where they take ssd from one Mac and put it in another Mac only to have it rejected as software isn't getting the proper code registered to the ssd that apple sent with Mac, the handshake fails so drive is rejected.
yup. its not issue I suppose if you're ok buying new Mac in 2-4 years. but id wager people buying base Macs are mostly going want to use it for longer then 5 years. I know people still using 2012 Macs for example. I'm hoping for 7 years myself. getting 8 more gb of ram is worth price but it's not an option at retail stores and apple never puts stuff on sale. so the price gap becomes lot bigger. if you buy m1 air from apple sure its only $200 but lets be frank no one outside apple sales m1 air for 999, its goes for $700 or less so its $500 increase to get more ram. now you in the sale price range of MacBook m1/m2 pro. when I bought my Mac mini, increasing ram and ssd to 16/512 brought it to $999. or I could get m2 pro for $1,099 at retail store. all this would be solved if apple sold base model stuff with 16gb ram option in stores like they do with ssd options. but I guess they know if they did the 8gb Macs would never sell if. clearly its not issue of making two difference skis per model as they offer 512gb option. nah their whole system is set up to push people up the tier to the pro products. a useable iPad Air is about same price of pro so get that , but 11" pro isn't too much cheaper then 12.9 pro, then bam casual people like me own MacBook Pro with pro chip that they only use 10% of its power lol.
Well, that was over a year and a half, not one year. (Actually, I measured that over two years, but it was a year and a half of 8-12 hours/day of abuse, the other six months were as a secondary computer). 45TBW over 1.5 years puts it at about 5 years.
But I was also using my computer for 8-12 hours a day, and was abusing it much harder than someone might abuse it for "everyday use". My memory usage of this kind was constant. I was doing a lot of virtualization, a lot of nodeJS and react projects, XCode work, and all sorts of other stuff. Swap was always in use, and it was being used very, very heavily. I would hit 3-5GB of swap usage for several hours out of a light day, and heavier days I pushed it closer to 7-11GB.
The only way you'll really know is to check the TBW stats on your drive. It's might be a lot less than you probably fear if you're using it less heavily than I did (or, at least, it might be worth checking to see). If it's less than 20TBW/year, you'll hit 7 to 8 years easily before you hit the rated TBW.
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If there is significant swapping there is no fix for that, it is still swapping and still utilising the SSD? However way you look at its more use of the SSD. There is no free lunch with swapping. Its not to say all SSDs will fail. It really depends on how much swapping takes place. If you test an 8Gb machine with 256gb that's swapping against a 16Gb that isn't, then you will not only see the difference in performance, but every swap is a step in the finite lifetime, especially of a 256Gb SSD.
So whilst a marketing man boasts to the effect that 8Gb unified Ram is as good as 16Gb on Wintel, it totally avoids the ramifications if the device has to swap with the SSD, which does reduce longevity of an SSD, such factors as write amplification factors play their part.
Of course trim helps, but if there is significant swapping, especially if the SSD is low, then its life will be shortened.
The problem for customers is that it probably won't occur when the device is under warranty, but if it was considered that selling an 8Gb machine with 256Gb was bound to mean significant swapping, and I would suggest selling a machine as pro with that line up would put Apple in for a potential class action, especially when they've openly suggested words to the effect that 8Gb is the equivalent to 16Gb on Wintel, without consideration of the potential problems that can create, and especially on any equipment with 'pro' in its name, as I wonder then if it would be considered fit for purpose.
Far better for Apple to recognise that if their aspirations to move into Gaming are to be realised, they will have to increase the base unified memory and likely the SSD too.
So better to react in advance of a problem then carry decent PR with it, than to continue with 8Gb 256Gb base configurations.
Even if it means increasing the price a few dollars, because I haven't seen any caveat warning from Apple about SSD failures as a result of buying a base configuration and doing so if being assured by any marketing person, it was fit for purpose.
I really doubt Apple is using SLC/MLC in their SSDs so his quote is on the mark for TLC drives. It’s industry standard average to have 150 TBW for a TLC 256gb SSD. Show me evidence otherwise if you disagree.
Agreed. Most SSDs outlast their TBW ratings anyway, but 150TBW is pretty standard for TLC drives (which are likely what Apple is using).
Apple is not remotely interested in being anywhere near the industry average. Of course they are using SLC SSDs. And you came up with that stupid number, so you’ve got to come up with evidence to uphold your outrageous claim!
Not sure if serious. Have you seen the size of a 4TB SLC drive? Ok give you a hint , it’s not fitting inside a MacBook Pro.
I think it's highly unlikely Apple is using expensive SLC NAND-Flash. If they did, they would surely boast about it somewhere. Possibly some portion of the chips is used as an SLC cache. Benchmarks of Apple flash is very consistent with comparable NVMe drives which use TLC technology.
I'm not interested in assumptions. I know for a fact that about ~15 TB represent roughly 1% of the SSDs expected lifetime. So its total bytes written is closer to 1500 TBW than 150 TBW. Check your S.M.A.R.T stats and tell me otherwise!
Yeah, I don't worry about SSD life expectancy. I recently ran DirveDx on my 2018 Mini that I purchased in 2019 with a 256GB SSD and DriveDx shows a 4% loss. Now i'm what anyone would call a casual user since i'm retired but judging by the number of used Macs sold even by Apple, if SSD failures were a problem, I don't think Apple would take the chance selling a refurbed Mac with a built in SSD.
Between 4 and 5% lifetime used within 5 years should result in a total lifetime of more than 100+ years at your current usage. The SSD might still die an early heat death, but not from wear through exceeding the writing limits of the cells.
There were several memory leaks in 11.0 Big Sur. I know for a fact most of them were fixed, but one in Finder stuck around for a while. Probably fixed by now as well.
Unlike some of the posters here, you at least understand basic SSD technology. The reason Apple can't be using SLC or even MLC is flash density. Other than cost, one of the main reasons majority of SSDs are now TLC/QLC is density which allows decent speed with just a few chips. SLC/MLC flash chips are much lower density and the few enterprise drives still using them requires quite a few chips in order to maintain decent speeds and can't fit in a M.2 2280 size, let alone what Apple is doing with just a few chips on their teardown. I don't know if people are confusing pseudo SLC cache in a TLC as a pure SLC drive.
Yea, a lot of people are in the mindset of "it didn't fail for me with X workload, so it must not fail for anybody." These things have to be scientifically measured, it's well known that TLC flash drives can't withstand as many writes as SLC flash drives (and pure SLC flash drives are almost certainly NOT what Apple is using).
Wear leveling and everything else taken into account, the estimates people are coming up with for TBW ratings on these things are generally pretty realistic by industry standards. They aren't bad SSDs by any means (Apple isn't using low quality drives), but no SSD has an unlimited lifespan. Even with SLC cache.
There is no M.2 interface and no 2280 module anywhere in a Mac. You're still not providing any data, just assumptions upon assumptions based on knowledge about cheap Samsung SSDs. Did you even know that Apple's SSD controller is integrated into the M1 chip itself? The 2×128 GB chips soldered to the logic board are only for storage. Can you calculate the cell technology from the size of these chips or not? And don't gimme a guess. Hard knowledge about Apple's technology or nothing.
Show me SLC solutions since you keep asking me for evidence.
Apple uses industry standard flash ram chips. There's no magical pixie dust that allows them to cram that much SLC flash with just 2-4 modules. No one has SLC NVRAM that can fit 4 TB in the space of 2-4 chip modules. Show me otherwise.
You CAN repurpose TLC/QLC NAND and use it as SLC but you will lose 66 to 75% of the total capacity. In other words you will need 3-4 times the number chips to get the same amount of storage. Apple would not be able to make 4-8TB MBP models in the tiny space they reserved for flash ram. The controller is irrelevant in this conversation.
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No matter how often you try to move the goal post. We’re still talking about a 256 GB SSD, which comes in one or two chip configurations. You claimed it must be TLC with a 150 TBW, despite the S.M.A.R.T stats suggest a 10× longer lifespan. Substantiate your claims or drop them.
So you're telling me Apple uses special SLC for the base models while using cheaper TLC in the higher spec models? Which would cost at minimum at least 3-4x as they're basically putting in anywhere from 768gb to 1TB of NAND if it was used as TLC and then repurposing it for 256gb. That's going against everything Tim "Maximize Profits" Apple stands for.
Where are you getting this information? Do you have a source that suggests that these 256GB drives have a 1.5PB lifetime write endurance? Apple has not published any such number.
(I have had SSDs fail far before the SMART statistics suggested that they were at 0% of their life remaining, and I know I am not the only one.)