M1 Air with 16GB of RAM owners - How much swap memory does your Air use?

[Mity]

I currently have the base M1 Air with 8GB of RAM that I use for streaming videos at night, mainly YouTube. I normally have about 10 tabs open with most of them being static pages and a couple YouTube tabs. I am very surprised by how much swap memory the machine is using, especially since the only two programs I have open are Chrome and Mail. I wrote about my experience here: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...hy-is-my-intel-mbp-not-using-as-much.2338386/

So, I wanted to find out how much of a difference the 16GB model would make. For those of you that have the M1 Air with 16GB of RAM, how much swap does your computer use and how many / what programs do you have open?

 

[StoneJack]

I have 16GB RAM, 512 GB SSD model. Use it for office work, presentations, some writing, all main office apps are installed: Pages, Keynote, Numbers, MS Office, also if necessary, FCPX and Logic Pro are installed for video and audio work. I am using it since December 2021 and I have not seen a rainbow ball or anything else to indicate that the excessive load.

 

[szymi81]

Regarding YT I think that the problem could be Chrome instead of Safari

 

[Mity]

I have 16GB RAM, 512 GB SSD model. Use it for office work, presentations, some writing, all main office apps are installed: Pages, Keynote, Numbers, MS Office, also if necessary, FCPX and Logic Pro are installed for video and audio work. I am using it since December 2021 and I have not seen a rainbow ball or anything else to indicate that the excessive load.

Any idea of how much swap is being used in Activity Monitor in the disk tab? Or what the memory pressure is in terms of GB used per 16GB?

I also have not seen a beachball but one reason for this could be that many tasks are being stored on the SSD via swap.

 

[Mity]

Regarding YT I think that the problem could be Chrome instead of Safari

I consistently have ~20 Chrome tabs open on my Intel Mac but I'm usually using that machine for far more demanding tasks like coding. Zero swap used (Intel Machine has 64GB RAM). I'm surprised that just 2 YouTube Chrome tabs are enough to cause such high swap usage on the base M1 Air. That's why I asked how much this happens on the 16GB model.

 

[StoneJack]

Any idea of how much swap is being used in Activity Monitor in the disk tab? Or what the memory pressure is in terms of GB used per 16GB?

I also have not seen a beachball but one reason for this could be that many tasks are being stored on the SSD via swap.

To be honest, I don't even need to see either memory pressure or swap stats. It just works, as I said, I am not interested even in those stats.

 

[StoneJack]

I consistently have ~20 Chrome tabs open on my Intel Mac but I'm usually using that machine for far more demanding tasks like coding. Zero swap used (Intel Machine has 64GB RAM). I'm surprised that just 2 YouTube Chrome tabs are enough to cause such high swap usage on the base M1 Air. That's why I asked how much this happens on the 16GB model.

Definitely Chrome.

 

[Mity]

Definitely Chrome.

No, I'm saying that it is not just Chrome. Although the RAM is much higher on my Intel MBP, I do far more demanding tasks. I would expect swap to be higher on my Intel MBP. Just 2 YouTube tabs on my M1 MBA is enough to trigger massive swap.

 

[Mity]

To be honest, I don't even need to see either memory pressure or swap stats. It just works, as I said, I am not interested even in those stats.

Then you have no idea how much swap is being utilized on your machine. You should be interested because it means your SSD will not last as long.

 

[bag99001]

I had an issue with Chrome taking up huge amounts of processor and ram. It was strange because it didn't start that way when I first got it a month after release. Removed and then reinstalled Chrome - all fixed since then. Worth a shot as an easy troubleshooting step.

 

[chabig]

Then you have no idea how much swap is being utilized on your machine. You should be interested because it means your SSD will not last as long.

I'm with StoneJack. The operating system manages the machine as designed by Apple. Users have no need to monitor the inner workings of things like swap or memory use. The lifespan of an SSD will exceed the lifespan of the computer. All that time stressing about little things over which you have no control will be wasted.

 

[Mity]

The lifespan of an SSD will exceed the lifespan of the computer.

Not according to the test like the one I linked above and various others on YouTube. I want my computer to last at least 3 years, preferably 5, especially for a computer that I'm simply using for streaming.

 

[JPack]

About a dozen Firefox tabs with relatively light Photoshop.

 

[chabig]

The video to which you linked involved a bug in macOS that has since been fixed. An SSD will easily last 5 years.

 

[ArkSingularity]

The video to which you linked involved a bug in macOS that has since been fixed. An SSD will easily last 5 years.

Apple reportedly uses Samsung SSDs in most of their Macs. If this is accurate, I have pretty good faith that the SSDs will last a while. People have been able to successfully test them into the petabyte (lifetime writes) range, which is ridiculously impressive for flash memory. I've never once had a single Samsung flash device fail on me.

I am curious as to what kind of NAND is being used in the Mac SSDs though. MLC is much more durable than TLC flash is, and will last longer. TLC is much more common these days, but given the price point and the high performance of Mac SSDs, it's not entirely unlikely that Apple may be using MLC instead.

Either way, I agree. Apple's SSDs seem to have a pretty good track record for longevity and endurance, and they seem to use high quality flash with adequate over-provisioning. They will likely far outlast their actual rated endurance specifications.

 

[JPack]

Apple reportedly uses Samsung SSDs in most of their Macs. If this is accurate, I have pretty good faith that the SSDs will last a while. People have been able to successfully test them into the petabyte (lifetime writes) range, which is ridiculously impressive for flash memory. I've never once had a single Samsung flash device fail on me.

Apple uses Kioxia (Toshiba) for recent M1 Macs. Previously, they used SanDisk (e.g. 2018 MBA).

 

[Mity]

The video to which you linked involved a bug in macOS that has since been fixed. An SSD will easily last 5 years.

Wrong.

 

[Mity]

About a dozen Firefox tabs with relatively light Photoshop.

View attachment 1977202

That's more like it. Looks like I will have to upgrade to the 16GB version.

 

[Mity]

I used the technique that I found on this Reddit thread: Save your M1 SSD by turning off Swap Memory

and I also removed the media cache for Chrome as shown here: How To SAVE Your Mac's SSD! (M1 Swap Memory Issue/Browser Disk Caching)

and I am now using zero swap!

https://imgur.com/FffKoRr

 

[ArkSingularity]

Apple uses Kioxia (Toshiba) for recent M1 Macs. Previously, they used SanDisk (e.g. 2018 MBA).

Ah, I stand corrected. Good to know, thanks for sharing.

 

[StoneJack]

Then you have no idea how much swap is being utilized on your machine. You should be interested because it means your SSD will not last as long.

I am not interested because I already studied the matter before ordering MBA M1 and I ordered 16GB configuration because it decreases swap. So it is a matter long resolved.

 

[Frixos]

I have several MS Office applications open, along with a dozen Safari tabs (one YT tab), and a couple of other apps.

This is the 16GB 512GB 8c GPU M1 MBA. I definitely think the RAM and storage upgrades were worth it.

 

[jdb8167]

Wrong.

He posted a follow up video about 4 months later (about 9 months ago) and showed about 76 TBW with 6% used. He claims in that video that the lifespan of the M1 MBA is just under two years but the percentage used contradicts that. Based on the 6% used after 4 months his MBA should last for well over 5 years. I’d expect even longer since the amount written was halved in the latest video after 11.4 Big Sur.

 

[neo_cs193p]

I would say

He posted a follow up video about 4 months later (about 9 months ago) and showed about 76 TBW with 6% used. He claims in that video that the lifespan of the M1 MBA is just under two years but the percentage used contradicts that. Based on the 6% used after 4 months his MBA should last for well over 5 years. I’d expect even longer since the amount written was halved in the latest video after 11.4 Big Sur.

His conclusion was to boot off an external disk. I would say if you need to do that, you've already lost. A laptop means portability, and for me this starts with no booting from external drives.

So I would say use your laptop liberally, how you would normally expect a $1k+ laptop to be used. However, always back up your data diligently. If the SSD fails within the reasonable lifetime of the computer (5-7 years?), ask Apple to replace it on a FREE out of warranty repair. We should all do this. It is not admissible for SSDs these days to die earlier than that, because Apple changed the way the OS swaps memory.

Not to mention that with recent Apple laptops, a dead (soldered) SSD means a dead laptop (at least as a portable, performant machine). They need to take responsibility if they screwed this up.

Otherwise, enjoy your awesome MBA!

 

[jdb8167]

I would say


His conclusion was to boot off an external disk. I would say if you need to do that, you've already lost. A laptop means portability, and for me this starts with no booting from external drives.

So I would say use your laptop liberally, how you would normally expect a $1k+ laptop to be used. However, always back up your data diligently. If the SSD fails within the reasonable lifetime of the computer (5-7 years?), ask Apple to replace it on a FREE out of warranty repair. We should all do this. It is not admissible for SSDs these days to die earlier than that, because Apple changed the way the OS swaps memory.

Not to mention that with recent Apple laptops, a dead (soldered) SSD means a dead laptop (at least as a portable, performant machine). They need to take responsibility if they screwed this up.

Otherwise, enjoy your awesome MBA!

If you didn’t purchase Apple Care with your M1 MacBook Air then it makes sense to keep track of the TBW on the internal SSD. Even with the excessive writes some are seeing, the MacBook SSD likely won’t fail in less than a year. There are strategies that will reduce the amount of writes that are far less intrusive than booting from an external SSD. Hoping that Apple will replace your motherboard after your warranty expires is a problem. They might but I wouldn’t want to rely on it as a solution.