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by rabuse 1832 days ago
A little off topic, but I bought a new Macbook Pro with the M1 chip with 8GB of RAM, and I'm worried about the swap usage of this machine wearing out the SSD too quickly. Is this an actual concern, as my swap has been in the multiple GB range with my use?
5 comments
cbsmith 1832 days ago
It's an actual concern for you. For Apple it's a variant on planned obsolescence. ;-)

Note though that memory use metrics on MacOS can been a misleading. Make sure that you're seeing what's actually there.

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ksec 1831 days ago
Generally speaking macOS is extremely write heavy for all sort of reason even before the switch to ARM. But in majority of case if should last 4-5 years without problem.

The heavy write bug Apple said was due to misreporting and was fixed ( so they say ).

I do think you should pay attention to it from time to time. iCloud Sync, Spotlight, Safari heavy tabs are all known to cause heavy paging in some corner case. You might end up having a TB of data written for no apparent reason. Apple used to ship their Macbook with MLC, on a 512GB MLC you could do 500TBW without problem, that is ~13 years of usage if you do 100GB write per day. Not sure about the M1 machines.

If you are doing Dev staging, Video and photos editing a lot these drive will fail quite quickly. In the space of 2 - 3 years. Although some would argue MacBook Air are not made for those task. And especially true if you have 8GB and 256GB NAND.

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Grazester 1831 days ago
Why did you get the 8 gig version? If you are using all this swap then your purchased the wrong MacBook.
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rabuse 1831 days ago
Honestly, don't run much, so didn't think it would be that bad stepping down from my 16GB machine.
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1-6 1832 days ago
From what I’ve been able to gather, the excessive paging may actually have to do with non-native apps running on the M1. Avoid those.
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rabuse 1831 days ago
Most of my programs are JetBrains IDE's and browsers. Don't know if they're optimized for M1.
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Liquid_Fire 1831 days ago
AFAIK most of JetBrains' IDEs are now native (other than Android Studio, which is still WIP). The mainstream browsers are also all native.

Remaining non-native apps include Dropbox, Spotify, LibreOffice and a few others. And basically all games with very few exceptions.

This website has a decently up-to-date list of what has been ported and what hasn't: https://isapplesiliconready.com/

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raihansaputra 1831 days ago
I think the excessive wear was caused by a bug. Try upgrading to the .4 release.
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