6 ms·

I wonder whether we need to reset expectations on memory amounts. From seeing the reviews where they launch every application installed on the 8gb air and it re

by Joeri 6y ago

I wonder whether we need to reset expectations on memory amounts. From seeing the reviews where they launch every application installed on the 8gb air and it remains smooth I am suspecting that the unified memory and optimized storage interface means that for M1 macs 8 gb behaves like 16 gb on intel cpu’s.

EricE 6y ago
Just remember that if your machine needs to swap because of low RAM you are now writing to your SSD. The permanently soldered in SSD that has a finite amount of writes. Saving $200 on RAM up front could get wiped out if you kill your SSD prematurely with constant, heavy swapping. Here I see the fast SSD speed as a negative - making it painless to do something inherently dangerous towards the lifespan of your SSD.
- CraigJPerry 6y ago
  Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD? The SSDs from the previous gen are rated for something like 40Gb writes per day for 40 years i think. I’d guess the battery will fail first, then the keyboard or screen hinge, then the logic board. But thats a pure guess. I reckon the biggest risk is that all in one logic board, anything fails and you lose your HDD.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    > Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD? Obsolete, who defines that? I'm typing this on a MBP 2015. Still works perfectly fine (I did have screen replaced under warranty). Battery is replaceable on this machine, its sitting at ~85% capacity with 500 cycles. Apple hardware tends to have good resale value, too. Performance-wise, hardware tends to last longer and longer. Repairability-wise, yeah, that's a can of worms of a discussion.
    - CraigJPerry 6y ago
      I'd say a 2005 PowerPC iBook is obsolete. I'd also say a 2009 intel macbook is obsolete but the truth is, add an SSD into that and it's probably still fine under linux so maybe 2009 isn't obsolete for some users just yet (although i think apple no longer support that hardware). 2015 is modern, intel performance just hasn't changed that much since 2015.
- r00fus 6y ago
  Have you ever actually worn out an SSD using personal workloads (ie, not on a server)? I haven't yet and I own machines/SSDs from 12 years ago - benchmarks are still roughly equivalent to what I had to start.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    Yes, I have. My old ThinkPad R61 I added an OCZ SSD to. Not sure how much RAM it came with, but it was swapping a lot, I guess. Back then, SSDs had less of a lifespan than nowadays (even consumer-grade ones). I had the same on Windows + a SSD. Docker with some Sqlite applictions apparently did crazy writes. SSD went from 100% to 80% in like half a year time or so, when I noticed it. That SSD is still alive, but I had to adapt.
    - mlindner 6y ago
      Those early SSDs if I remember right had very low cycle limits, the limits now are over 10x better than they were then.
      - to11mtm 6y ago
        Depends which age/tech. Every additional 'Level' in the flash decreases the overall life cycle. Mind you, oftentimes drive controllers are fancier, often doing things like treating one of the sections as a less dense flash type to improve write cycles, and keep/move longer held data into the regions treated as QLC. But, that means that some heavy write patters will indeed wind up worse on a modern drive than the better MLC/TLC models.
      - rasz 6y ago
        Its the other way around. Early SSDs had huge P/E numbers in tens of thousands (SLC). Now we are down in the low hundreds.
  - freehunter 6y ago
    To re-iterate how much more reliable SSDs are now that they used to be, until about a month ago I worked for a vendor of hardware/software that is designed to read/write to disks hundreds of thousands of times per second (log collection and searching). When I first started working there ~5 years ago, they were testing out SSDs in the appliances and the team ultimately decided against it because they estimated the SSDs would burn out in under a year. By the time I left they were shipping appliances with SSDs that were predicted to have lifespans longer than the longest hardware support you could buy from the vendor (longest hardware support contract - seven years). Hundreds of thousands of writes per second, every second, for 7+ years, uninterrupted.

by Joeri 6y ago

EricE 6y ago

Just remember that if your machine needs to swap because of low RAM you are now writing to your SSD. The permanently soldered in SSD that has a finite amount of writes. Saving $200 on RAM up front could get wiped out if you kill your SSD prematurely with constant, heavy swapping. Here I see the fast SSD speed as a negative - making it painless to do something inherently dangerous towards the lifespan of your SSD.

CraigJPerry 6y ago
Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD? The SSDs from the previous gen are rated for something like 40Gb writes per day for 40 years i think. I’d guess the battery will fail first, then the keyboard or screen hinge, then the logic board. But thats a pure guess. I reckon the biggest risk is that all in one logic board, anything fails and you lose your HDD.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  > Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD? Obsolete, who defines that? I'm typing this on a MBP 2015. Still works perfectly fine (I did have screen replaced under warranty). Battery is replaceable on this machine, its sitting at ~85% capacity with 500 cycles. Apple hardware tends to have good resale value, too. Performance-wise, hardware tends to last longer and longer. Repairability-wise, yeah, that's a can of worms of a discussion.
  - CraigJPerry 6y ago
    I'd say a 2005 PowerPC iBook is obsolete. I'd also say a 2009 intel macbook is obsolete but the truth is, add an SSD into that and it's probably still fine under linux so maybe 2009 isn't obsolete for some users just yet (although i think apple no longer support that hardware). 2015 is modern, intel performance just hasn't changed that much since 2015.
r00fus 6y ago
Have you ever actually worn out an SSD using personal workloads (ie, not on a server)? I haven't yet and I own machines/SSDs from 12 years ago - benchmarks are still roughly equivalent to what I had to start.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  Yes, I have. My old ThinkPad R61 I added an OCZ SSD to. Not sure how much RAM it came with, but it was swapping a lot, I guess. Back then, SSDs had less of a lifespan than nowadays (even consumer-grade ones). I had the same on Windows + a SSD. Docker with some Sqlite applictions apparently did crazy writes. SSD went from 100% to 80% in like half a year time or so, when I noticed it. That SSD is still alive, but I had to adapt.
  - mlindner 6y ago
    Those early SSDs if I remember right had very low cycle limits, the limits now are over 10x better than they were then.
    - to11mtm 6y ago
      Depends which age/tech. Every additional 'Level' in the flash decreases the overall life cycle. Mind you, oftentimes drive controllers are fancier, often doing things like treating one of the sections as a less dense flash type to improve write cycles, and keep/move longer held data into the regions treated as QLC. But, that means that some heavy write patters will indeed wind up worse on a modern drive than the better MLC/TLC models.
    - rasz 6y ago
      Its the other way around. Early SSDs had huge P/E numbers in tens of thousands (SLC). Now we are down in the low hundreds.
- freehunter 6y ago
  To re-iterate how much more reliable SSDs are now that they used to be, until about a month ago I worked for a vendor of hardware/software that is designed to read/write to disks hundreds of thousands of times per second (log collection and searching). When I first started working there ~5 years ago, they were testing out SSDs in the appliances and the team ultimately decided against it because they estimated the SSDs would burn out in under a year. By the time I left they were shipping appliances with SSDs that were predicted to have lifespans longer than the longest hardware support you could buy from the vendor (longest hardware support contract - seven years). Hundreds of thousands of writes per second, every second, for 7+ years, uninterrupted.