According to the projections from back then, base model M1 Macs should be experiencing mass SSD failures right around now...
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Were the fears of SSD wearout due to swap on 8GB Macs overblown?
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theolderoldcoot
macrumors member
skottichan
macrumors 65816
Well there was a bug that wrote too much to the SSD in the earliest versions of macOS for Apple silicon that was fixed about 6 months after release. If the projections you are talking about were from then, the situation is different after the bug fix.
Analog Kid
macrumors G3
At least. And yet this keeps coming up again and again and again. Apparently nobody listens to those sites, only the ones that predict doom in the snarkiest ways possible.
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FreakinEurekan
macrumors G3
Of course the fears were overblown. This IS MacRumors.
I just bought an iMac Pro that was used a lot for audio work. So I got it home and ran DriveDX on it. SSD wear was 1%. So I have another 99 * 6 years left on the system. I did this with my other Apple Silicon systems and had similar results.
Assuming a straight line. Such things are more likely to be a curve, with increasing decline over time.
However, I agree that the panic over SSDs has been overstated, and they should last much longer than the useful life of the Mac as a whole.
Even without the "swapgate" non-issue, some Cassandras have been prophesying the doom of small SSDs in Macs with little RAM -- but Apple has been selling such models for well over a decade.
We have a base 2018 mini. For those unfamiliar with this model, it has 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB SSD. My wife used it until this year and did not complain about it at all. I replaced it with an M1 mini 16/512 and gave her a larger monitor and she really likes the M1 mini. But I'm sure that she would have been fine with the base M1 mini. If I were paranoid about the SSD issue, I'd just run it off an external SSD. I used to use the M1 mini as a testing platform for multiple versions of macOS and it runs fine off an external SSD.
There are valid issues on hard drives and you can often pick up 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019 iMacs really cheap because of HDD wear resulting in really bad performance. Slap on an external SSD and you have a nice system with a nice display for $100-$300.
I'd guess that base specs are fine for the vast majority of consumer PC users which is why Apple sells them that way.
The subject is SSD wear, which is a mechanism not applicable to HDDs. I suspect the iMacs are cheap because of the unpopularity of Fusion drives not HDD wear.
Certainly an external SSD is a good way to upgrade a Fusion iMac.
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