Resolved Massive Factory Reset

[RedNova6289]

Hey everyone,

I would like to have your opinion about erase & factory reset.

I often erase my devices.

Since I bought them, I must have done this at least twenty times (yes...)

On my MBA M1, iMac, iPhone and AW.

I have performed smartmontools tests on macOS which indicate 0% of pourcentage used.

Do you think these massive erase/resets can cause problems ?

I seem to be noticing software (crash, bugs,) and synchronization issues that I didn't notice before.

Thank you for your advice and your non-judgment.

Edit : This is my last smartmontools report from my MBA M1 acquired 11 months ago :

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)​

Critical Warning: 0x00​

Temperature: 35 Celsius​

Available Spare: 100%​

Available Spare Threshold: 99%​

Percentage Used: 0%​

Data Units Read: 19.399.420 [9,93 TB]​

Data Units Written: 10.008.910 [5,12 TB]​

Host Read Commands: 378.225.367​

Host Write Commands: 184.098.043​

Controller Busy Time: 0​

Power Cycles: 259​

Power On Hours: 228​

Unsafe Shutdowns: 10​

Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0​

Error Information Log Entries: 0​

 

[Bigwaff]

Possibly. If you keep rolling the dice, eventually you’re going to roll craps.

 

[okkibs]

It makes no difference. You can do this all day long if you want, the hardware doesn't care if you use it to watch movies, or run intense workloads, or press the reset button over and over again.

But be aware that the current Apple operating systems operate from a read-only immutable snapshot, meaning that the core system, whether MacOS or iOS, will be identical down to the last bit across all Macs/iPhones/...

After a reset the apps and data you stored will of course be gone, but the booted OS will be literally identical to what was on there before. No matter where you install the OS from, in the end it's always the same, the Apple device in fact phones home to Apple's servers after the OS installation to verify that the installed OS is 1:1 identical. And the device only turns on and boots if that check is successful.

In other words, even though the resets delete your data, everything else will just end up 1:1 as it was before. So the resets won't really change anything about how the device works. (Of course all apps and settings need to be reapplied.)

 

[RedNova6289]

It makes no difference. You can do this all day long if you want, the hardware doesn't care if you use it to watch movies, or run intense workloads, or press the reset button over and over again.

But be aware that the current Apple operating systems operate from a read-only immutable snapshot, meaning that the core system, whether MacOS or iOS, will be identical down to the last bit across all Macs/iPhones/...

After a reset the apps and data you stored will of course be gone, but the booted OS will be literally identical to what was on there before. No matter where you install the OS from, in the end it's always the same, the Apple device in fact phones home to Apple's servers after the OS installation to verify that the installed OS is 1:1 identical. And the device only turns on and boots if that check is successful.

In other words, even though the resets delete your data, everything else will just end up 1:1 as it was before. So the resets won't really change anything about how the device works. (Of course all apps and settings need to be reapplied.)

Thank you okkibs for this answer.

Do you think that the problems seen on the installed software are specific to the editor and not to these multiple erase/factory resets?

For example, Firefox and iStats worked fine before, but here I see problems at times.

Same thing yesterday with the synchronization of the concentration mode between my devices.

I invested a lot of money in 2022 with all these purchases and I will be sad to have damaged them myself.

 

[okkibs]

The issues will be related to software, there is nothing damaged. It's just that sometimes you might run into some bug, and every time you repeat the entire setup process, you have a small chance of encountering a problem. So if you setup a device once, likely everything is fine. If you set it up 20 times such small issues now have 19 more chances of randomly popping up.

You can think of it as setting up 20 different devices once vs. setting up one device once. If you set up 20 devices, you might end up with one or two that aren't working as they are supposed to despite doing the same steps on all these. That's just how it goes with complex software.

There really is nothing you can permanently damage on modern computers, if you want you can set them up and reset them 20 times per day every day 365 days a year. The actual stress that this puts on the hardware is nearly zero, much, much less than what some common demanding workloads require. Editing movies on the Mac, filming prores on the iPhone, and so on, these are all much more demanding.

 

[RedNova6289]

The issues will be related to software, there is nothing damaged. It's just that sometimes you might run into some bug, and every time you repeat the entire setup process, you have a small chance of encountering a problem. So if you setup a device once, likely everything is fine. If you set it up 20 times such small issues now have 19 more chances of randomly popping up.

You can think of it as setting up 20 different devices once vs. setting up one device once. If you set up 20 devices, you might end up with one or two that aren't working as they are supposed to despite doing the same steps on all these. That's just how it goes with complex software.

There really is nothing you can permanently damage on modern computers, if you want you can set them up and reset them 20 times per day every day 365 days a year. The actual stress that this puts on the hardware is nearly zero, much, much less than what some common demanding workloads require. Editing movies on the Mac, filming prores on the iPhone, and so on, these are all much more demanding.

Thank you !

 

[Silverariel]

If you already did so many restarts maybe try to come to your own conclusions as well. You possibly have the data to compare each time you do a factory reset.