[joe_mamba]

>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.

1. How do you know nothing happened? Define nothing in this case. Do Mac users check and report their SSD wear anywhere?

2. Didn't the OG 256gb M1 have 2 128MB NAND chips instead of one 256 meaning better wear resistance?

[randomfrogs]

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.

[havaloc]

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.

[joe_mamba]

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.

[windowsrookie]

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.

[joe_mamba]

>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?

[windowsrookie]

"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.

[wtallis]

> 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.

[astrange]

Just because it's soldered doesn't mean it can't be replaced.

(But it's encrypted, so you'd better have backups because you can't read it off the chips.)

[duskwuff]

> 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.