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It’s not in my experience. “Normal users” are starting to run into this issue as I can anecdotally pass along (browsing, google suite, slight photoshop use, etc). I actually had lots of reservations before I “green lighted” those first gen M1 MacBook Airs at 8GB across family and friends. Unfortunately I unreasonably fell for the rather over hyped reviews across the board (“I want to believe”). It’s especially on me as my last private intel MBP before my “maxed out” M1 MBP wore out its on-board SSD after only 4 years and that one was large (1TB) with ample memory for the time (16GB). It’s running my personal “hack on Linux” from the SD card slot since so it’s somewhat cool but yeah..

My current work machine, a M2 Pro MBP at 32GB actually has less usable memory than my sluggish i9 MBP had - due to unified memory. We know the CPU/GPU is great but the memory story really isn’t, my system is palpably less responsive with a couple of documentation / bad web interface Safari tabs too many… RAM configurations are just prohibitively expensive even for “well off” companies / purchasers at this point so it’s often a struggle to fight for more.

I’ve been a big Apple / Mac fan and loyal customer since Panther but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye here.

These constrained memory configurations - even when streamlined OS / system software optimizations are in place (are they? still?) - are probably playing a good part in their great margins but they do need to go with the time (bloated websites and apps) as well of course their own stacks running on top.

2 comments

Thank god I'm not the only one to know the truth. My experience is similar to yours and I agree on everything.

I started using Macs with Mac OS 9.2 but now I want out. The pricing is absurd and there is no way to circumvent that since no upgrade possible.

I don't care much about battery life/power consumption and the actual use case is overblown, if you get one of the powerful chips and push it, you are looking at 30-50W power consumption; so even with a 100kWh battery, we are talking 2-3H at best.

In other words, if you want to game, compute, encode, render, or whatever high performance task you are still going to need a cord anyway. The rest of low power task is actually done very nicely on much cheaper devices that have more than enough battery life (from cheap tablets, including iPads to Chromebooks).

Also macOS currently has a software problem in my opinion and Apple stupidly push for subscription out of greed. If I have to subscribe for my computing needs I might as well get the cheaper devices and use software that can run anywhere, including sub 500$ potato.

Apple has made a terrible mistake strategically; you can't have your cake and eat it too. If they want to sell expensive, limited hardware they need to have cheap non-subscription software that is best in class in enough categories. If their hardware is only useful to run competitors' software and subscription stuff they have to be competitive on the hardware price...

> It’s especially on me as my last private intel MBP before my “maxed out” M1 MBP wore out its on-board SSD after only 4 years and that one was large (1TB) with ample memory for the time (16GB).

I wonder how that's possible, and whether that's an outlier rather than a case of probable risk to SSDs. I've got the impression that it shouldn't be likely to wear out a modern or semi-modern SSD with any kinds of typical laptop workloads.

I daily drove a 500 GB off-the-shelf SSD in a 8 GB ThinkPad for ~8 years, and while it was for personal device, I used it a lot and even played games on it, often ran into swapping, even hibernated semi-regularly at times, etc., and there were never any signs of problems with the SSD.

4 years sounds like pretty bad luck.

It’s probably fully deterministic in that case. It was bought summer 2015 and the SSD intermittently started to have write errors end of 2019 so 4.5 years. Were you running a “hackintosh” on that one? macOS is way more memory intensive than Linux on desktop in my experience / usage pattern.

No, no macOS. I just wouldn't expect that the software would make such a difference. I also wasn't sparing with that machine, went gigabytes into the swap regularly, the SSD was often at 85-90% capacity, and yet I was nowhere near depleting the reserved blocks and had zero problems after years of use. (I can't remember when exactly I bought the SSD but I think it was 2015 or 2016 and I used it until 2023.)

I guess it's possible, it just sounded like individual bad luck to me. My impression has been that you really have to write a lot to wear out the expected life of a non-ancient SSD.