One thing I’m leery about in recent Macs is the inability to repair failed SSDs. The storage mechanism wears out over time – you only get so many writes to an individual location. The parts do a balancing act to equalize the wear but the parts will eventually fail.
With the Apple Silicon Macs there have been statements that you don’t need as much RAM as in the Intel Macs. I think those statements are based on the very fast swapping that can occur in this architecture. However every swap means a disk write. So going with a minimum RAM system, putting money into the SSD capacity first, might be the wrong approach to preserving life.
The reason it is “not for RICH dudes” is that if you buy a new Mac each year it probably won’t be around long enough for SSD failure. The bottom line is that a 1TB drive is good for 600 TB of writes before it will fail. Smaller drives have proportionally less TB of writes before failure.
Massive swap use usually occurs when you’re working with lots of big files; photo and video. If you’re not running with big files, then you’ll have a lot less swap to deal with.
I have an Intel MBA with 8 GB of memory and I hardly use swap with my personal computer use habits. However, if I get an M1 MBA, I’ll get it with 16 GB of memory and a 256 GB SSD because I know I don’t need much storage, but I will need more memory because most actively developed apps are Electron and use more memory than native apps.
Because of the fact that you can’t replace modern SSDs is a very big reason to use multiple forms of backup: both Time Machine and either SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.
600TBW is just the manufacturer’s guarantee. Realistically, an SSD will last an order of magnitude beyond that. For most users that’s 20-30 years of heavier use, and lighter use will never wear the SSD significantly.
Maybe, but the video shows a bunch of MacBooks with failed SSDs. Of course I don’t know what percentage this represents and the video is from a repair shop so only sees failures.
I do know that in designing products that use EEPROMs (different but similar technology) I always took steps to minimize writing. Doing it wrong and the parts can actually be destroyed in seconds.
I agree with @sgtaylor5 I’ve never purchased a macbook with more than 8GB ram, even when my company was paying. Currently I’m running Safari, Edge, and Chrome, mail, messages, photos, Arq, and Terminal. And activity monitor says swap used is 256K.
I paid $1000 for my M1 MBA. If I had added 16gb of ram and 512GB of storage it would have cost me $1400 and the chances of it being destroyed for some other reason would be the same.
You have a valid point but, for me, it’s not worth spending more on a computer for “insurance” against an SSD failure. IMO the odds of needing a “too expensive” repair on an out of warranty M series Mac is a much higher risk.
I purchase only what I need and am happy if my laptop lasts 3 years.
I understand. I guess I would just suggest running smartctl yourself to get an idea of realistic wear for your use case. For example, the computer I’m writing on has written 60TB in about 22 months and is projected to last another sixty years (and it would not be unusual for wear to exceed 100%.) Others have worn faster but usually on track to last at least 20 years. The worst I saw in the last few years was an 8GB M1 on track to last 15 years.
More typical drive failure in a personal computer comes from electrical or heat. Environmental factors you mention are more likely to damage the computer in other ways before they prematurely wear the flash.
In a constant use situation (server/datacenter) you do adhere more closely to your formula of projected writes and age, but even there you’re looking at roughly 1500x and 15000x for write-optimized flash if you’re using one of the primary manufacturers Apple uses for their SSDs.
I’m definitely not opposed to having a bigger drive on a Mac but I wouldn’t want someone to spend that money just because they were afraid of wearing out a smaller SSD early.
Another anecdata (love the term): I put a SSD drive in my 2010 MBP in 2013. The computer has been in storage since 2018, and I booted it up a couple days ago in search for some files I forgot to upload to iCloud on its day. The old beast woke up and, to my surprise, it felt more responsive than I remembered. The only tell-tale sign of its longevity was the non-retina display and a surprising smell of old electronics (capacitors? battery? who knows). But the thing was still serviceable.
Edit: For the curious reader, no, I did not find the files. Bummer! Which means that the most common source of data loss is not hardware failure, it’s user failure.
It’s always a probability of failure - the “expected life” is really a “mean time between failures (mtbf)”. For relatively new (or reliable) devices there won’t be enough data to compute this accurately and it is always a MEAN - 50% will fail before that time and 50% after with very early or very late failures being increasingly improbable (good old bell curve).
Given that any Mac is dozens of subsystems and chips, and they all have different mtbfs, it really is chance how long the Mac will last and what failure will kill it off. One average, Macs will last quite a few years, but some won’t and some will last much longer.
Worrying about SSDs instead of screens, motherboards, power supplies, batteries etc. is probably a step too far.
The problem is that the more the components the greater the failure rate (lower the MTBF). And a failure of the SSD is no longer replacing a $100 part but an entire $1000 logic board. Right To Repair will never help here because that Mx processor module which contains the SSD can’t be repaired by mere mortals.
The problem with an SSD as compared to, say, RAM or the processor, is that the SSD has a known wear mechanism. Every write slightly destroys the part. It’s not as bad as a mechanical part, but probably the worst MTBF of any electronic component in the computer.
So therefore in applications where the drive gets heavy use, such as video editing, the wise move is to use an external drive for the heavy writing, and have that be the expendable device instead of the whole computer.
Software like Backblaze copies larger files before backing them up - and by default it copies them to the primary drive. This is configurable, but backing up an external Plex library (particularly one with a significant amount of churn) or something similar could very well result in all of that data being written to your primary drive as part of that backup process. And of course if the files change, same thing all over again.
I’ve also seen my 32 GB/1 TB 2018 Mac Mini with over half its RAM free and 3 GB of swap being used. So there are apparently use cases where Apple, for some reason, prefers to use swap instead of RAM, even if the RAM is sitting there and completely available.
Only one of those two is Apple’s fault - but there are non-obvious edge cases that can cause your drive to be used extensively.
Personally, I recommend it to tons of end-users. The thing isn’t whether it’s end-user or techy though, but rather that it’s a software process that potentially does unexpected things to the lifespan of your computer.
Can’t speak to Backblaze as I was aware of the potential problem from Crashplan before I switched - but with my dataset I burned 300+ TBW in just a couple of years as a web dev (i.e. not doing things to intentionally grind the disk) using CrashPlan. That was back when SSDs were replaceable, of course.
But what if failure on one device gets synced to all of your devices so now you need to decide how far back to go with your snapshot backups and then restore the interim incremental backups?
FWIW I’ve never worked for anyone who was concerned about the lifespan of a PC or Mac. If one fails they just purchase another just like ink pens and toner cartridges.
IMO, the data that is produced on those machines is frequently the second most valuable asset of a company. The first being the employees.
Don’t be so sure the work is lightweight. I’m also a web dev and have been astonished at what happens when you add a bunch of dependencies to a project – especially in Javascript world. Here are two random apps I have on my machine:
Note-taking app in React: 368 MB, 54 586 files
Tutorials marketplace app in Rails: 96 MB, 9 547 files
If I had to add up all the web-app projects on this Macbook it will probably be more than 10 million files. So if reading and writing that lot has an outsized impact on SSD life I can see a profession like ours being harder on the machine than one would at first guess.
All that said, I’m not worried about it at all. As mentioned by someone above, I make my living with this machine and a couple of years of service is sufficient. This particular one is a 2019 16" so it is already approaching “acceptable” life and I expect it to last some years still.
I get the “lots of files” thing - but even if you were changing every one of those files half a dozen times per day (which I’m guessing you’re not), that shouldn’t account for more than a terabyte or so of wear per year.
I disagree. Yes, I make my living with this machine - but that doesn’t matter in a longevity calculus where largely-fungible alternatives are available.
That’s especially true when I’m looking at how much Apple charges for their laptops. I buy upgraded RAM and a larger SSD to accommodate my needs, and that sets me back $1500-$2000 every time I buy a machine. For that money, I expect my Apple hardware to be functional after 6 or 7 years. There are other high-quality laptops that have replaceable parts that I could expect to get much more than 2-3 years out of.
If Apple were to sell me a laptop that failed within 2-3 years, that would quite possibly be the last Apple computer I would buy.
One general comment from my hardware hubby. “SSD drives fail spectacularly with basically no way to recover data from them and very little if any warning even using the SMART feature.”
Frequent incremental backups during the work day are also necessary and yes, I have had an SSD drive flat fail on me well within warranty periods. I would have preferred a spinning drive on my MacMini but that was not an option.
What I would like displayed on the system info storage report is exactly how many writes have been done to each drive, IOW a more accurate measure of MY specific use.
I agree! I’m a dev working with React and Javascript/ TypeScript daily, I also do backend development with C# and Java. I have a MacBook Pro 14" 16GB, 512GB, and have been using it for 20 months now. This is a company owned MacBook that is replaced every 3 years.
It seems that my SSD did not suffer that much in those 20 months.
SSD’s can fail for many reasons, that’s why I would prefer that they can easily be replaced. It’s not only an issue with Mac’s, I have many collegeaus that use Windows laptops that also have fixed SSD’s unfortunately.
We couldn’t use flash at all if we were dealing with those kinds of write-rate-to-storage-size ratios in general computing.