There was quite a bit of discussion about that when the M1 first came out, but none of it really seemed to have happened six years later. The target audience isn't in danger of wearing it out and the ones that will push the limits will grow tired of it and sell it in a year or two or move on to the Neo 2, which might have 12gb of ram due to the expected chip.
I still think it's a great machine, but I think all these worries about NAND dying really haven't come to fruition, and probably won't. I have about a hundred plus of various SSD Macs in service and not one has failed in any circumstance aside from a couple of battery issues (never charged and sat in the box for 2 years, and never off the charger).
If swapping was causing SSDs to fail on M1 Macs, we would never see the end of the hysterical articles about "NANDgate". Since we haven't seen any in all these years, it's seems pretty certain it's not happening.
Exactly. If some sort of random Dell model has a failure, you'll never hear about it because there's only a few thousand or so in circulation. But if any Apple product which sells in the tens/hundreds of millions has an issue, you'll hear about it whether you want to or not.
Hysteria would be if all had an issue like the keyboard gate, but this isn't an issue, it's a design limitation for certain uses cases which not everyone has. Some users will wear out faster than others due to usage patterns. If their M1 dies after 6 years of heavy usage, do you think they'll investigate if it was the NAND that died and go online to tell the news, or will they chuck it and buy new one?
NAND is still the same wearable part that regular X64 laptops have, Apple doesn't use some magic industrial grade parts but same dies that Samsung, Micron and SK ship to X64 OEMS, and those are replaceable for a reason, because they eventually fail.
The reality is most 8GB M1 Macs are still working just fine 6 years later. Power users know they need more than 8GB of RAM and will buy a MacBook Air or Pro with 16GB+.
The MacBook neo is for students, grandparents, travel, etc.
Hell, even if it dies after 6 years it was still a better experience than using a $500-600 windows PC and the cost comes out to ~$8/month spread over 6 years.
>The reality is most 8GB M1 Macs are still working just fine 6 years later.
Do you think SSD drives are replaceable for no reason? Just because M1 mac aren't failing left and right doesn't mean their NAND won't fail.
Even though I like the NEO, I can't in good faith buy a machine with soldered wearable parts. That's like buying a car with soldered brake pads because "in 6 years average users don't feel like they need changing".
I still had laptops on my hands from 20 years ago that work fine simply because you can swap their drives with fresh ones. How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?
"How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?"
Probably quite a few, MacBooks have had soldered SSD's for over 10 years now. My 2018 McBook Pro still has a perfectly functioning SSD. I still see people using 2015 and older MacBooks all the time. There is no widespread SSD failure issue after 10+ years of Apple soldering the SSD's.
For most people the SSD's are lasting longer than the useful life of the device.
> Do you think SSD drives are replaceable for no reason?
The number one reason why laptop OEMs primarily use replaceable SSDs is so that they can switch SSD vendors on a monthly basis to whoever is the lowest bidder at the moment. The number two reason is so that they can offer multiple storage capacity options without building different motherboard configs (though in practice, a lot of OEMs never get around to actually selling the alternative configs). Repairability is a very distant third place.
> Do Mac users check and report their SSD wear anywhere?
As a data point: I got a 14" MacBook Pro with a 512 GB SSD the first day it was available in 2021, and I've used it daily since then.
According to the SMART data ("smartctl -x /dev/disk0"), the SSD "percentage used" is 7%, with ~200 TBW. At this rate, the laptop will probably outlive me.
My boomer dad does more things on his phone than I do and I'm Gen X. It's actually astonishing how much he does on his iPhone. I'm dragging out the laptop and he's on his iPhone happy as a clam.
I've heard that GenX/Millenials are in a sort of PC goldilocks zone. People older than that cohort don't know computers and therefore use phones for everything, people younger don't know computers and also use phones for everything.
I think this is a great generalization, I'm not sure I would have bothered with a PC if I had a smartphone as a child/teenager, but I also have no regrets about the smartphone free era I grew up in.
This depends a lot on too many factors. I'm not of your target age group, but not only me but most of my friends are similarly technically minded. Many of us were rooting our phones back in school, even though it wasn't needed of course.
I'm a tech loving boomer, I always use my PC for banking, ordering, etc. My wife, however, almost always uses her cell, which is great for when we are traveling. Even though we're only five years apart in age, she's lite years ahead of me with a cell. I freely admit part of my reluctance for using my cell is the mobile tracking ability of companies.
Sorry, I should have noted. I haven't installed any apps from banks, FB, Amazon, ebay, credit card companies, reward programs or anything like that on my cell. Sure, there are apps in my cell that I basically can't uninstall that track. Just not one's I've installed myself.
I can understand FB and rewards programmes, but can I ask what level of privacy you believe you're achieving by logging into your bank on your laptop instead of your phone? Same for Amazon, eBay, credit cards.
You can choose to not allow location tracking on those apps if that's your concern.
<You can choose to not allow location tracking on those apps if that's your concern.>
That's true, but can we really trust those settings? As for my laptop, like my desktop, it stays home where if/when it's tracked, it shows I'm not on the move. The above apps you mentioned are not on my cell so I don't use it for those apps, ever. I realize by using those apps, only at home, I am giving up some of my privacy, I just don't give it up with my cell.
Surely every mobile app developer on the planet would quickly discover that those settings aren't what they say they are if that were the case. I think it's perfectly reasonable to trust them.
You can also use a VPN to mask the IP address of your devices, both phone and laptop, though it's a bit redundant at home if you have to give your home address anyway.
Yes you're right. I meaned a different video, but I can't find it right now.
I've looked it up, and back then MacOS had a bug which exacerbated that issue.
Here is an article
It's weird how this works. Saw something similar when working for a bus company. After reaching a minimum amount of sales for a bus route, everything after that is basically pure profit. However, how do we get those last sales? Well, by bidding higher on people searching for transfer between those two cities. Let's say the ticket was $20. We could end up for instance accepting to bid $10 for an ad that would lead to a sale. So for every $10 of pure profit we then got, Google also got $10. In a sense it was a good deal for both parties, but it's also kinda insane that in the end, Google made as much profit on our busses as we did.
They are. But it's misdirected to blame card fees, when they're so tiny.
If anything, they are benefitted by accepting cards, since they get customers who purchase on credit. Or just in general because many people have less resistance towards making a card purchase compared to a cash purchase.
The Stripe rate is a careful blend. There are many cards that are cheaper to process and there's probably a few that are more expensive to process at that rate, it works out in the wash in favor of Stripe. Also, that 30 cents is a large percentage if you're looking at a $5 transaction, for example (6%!)
I don't get it either. I've rolled out well over a hundred of these in a higher education setting and I have never had one have a hardware issue or needed to retire it other than wanton damage. I still have a ton of M1s in circulation and they are great still. I had to just replace a Dell with only 2.5 years of service, they tend to fall apart.
Twenty years ago, I worked at a Dell laptop repair facility, which primarily supported education customers.
>other than wanton damage
Some fairly clever students read their warranties closely and figured out how to get annual upgrades without violating warranty exclusion clauses. Very clever. Very annoying.
I wish I could say Samba worked properly under Windows. I've been migrating file shares to Teams/OneDrive sync as Samba is not reliable anymore. Too many "Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user" or variations on that theme.
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