Posted by tosh 7 hours ago
I have a PC with a 10+ year old 256GB SATA Samsung SSD that's still in top shape, but that's different because that drive has those 256GB split over several NAND chips inside, so wear is spread out and shuffled around by the controller to extend lifespan. But when your entire wearable storage is a single soldered chip, I'm not very optimistic about long term reliability.
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).
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?
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
(But it's encrypted, so you'd better have backups because you can't read it off the chips.)
I thought wear leveling worked at the page/block level, not the chip level? On an SSD, if there was a failure of an entire chip, you're still screwed.
I can see this could be a weaker spot in the durability of this device, but certainly it still could take a few years of abuse before anything breaks.
an outdated study (2015) but inline with the "low end ssds" i mentioned.
https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-t...
No it doesn't. Most 1TB drives are rated for around 600 TBW, so enough to overwrite the drive 600 times, nowhere near 300k cycles. If you search for specs of NAND chips used in SSDs, you'll find they're rated for cycles on the order of hundreds to thousands, still nowhere near "300k".
https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/crucial-mx500-4-tb.d95...
That was until I realized how many reports are coming from people talking about their work laptops loaded with endpoint management and security software. Some of those endpoint control solutions are so heavy that the laptop feels like you've traveled back in time 15 years and you're using a mechanical hard drive.
Some of this is not _just_ a corporate problem. Why would Winzip have an auto run application and tray application in the first place? Every single app seems to think they need one, and it's a classical tragedy of the commons. Perhaps on a virgin Windows install, your app with autorun and a tray icon will be more responsive. But when 20 other apps pull that same trick, no one wins.
This is actually one of the reasons I'm not excited at the idea of Linux defeating Windows. If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.
I use a corporate Windows VDI at work, so the experience is understandably subpar there, but it is still horrible on high.end hardware. Took me half a day just to herd it through update after update, while avoiding linking it to a Microsoft account despite its protests.
It's literally used to run only Steam and Firefox, and it still sucks compared to the ease of install/management of Linux. Ubuntu LTS took me about an hour to set up dual boot, apply updates, install Steam, and every other software and tool I use daily.
Why is Windows 11 still so clunky in 2026? It doesn't feel like the flagship product that many bright minds have improved for three decades. Why are hobbyists and small companies outperforming Microsoft's OS management?
Not nine different/only somewhat overlapping pieces of software from companies that were competitors. Nine equivalent products. I guess defender made ten.
Except they were unusably slow. Literally.
Log in when class starts, you may get control after 10+ minutes. Opening a web browser was a mistake you may not live to regret.
The network there was not fast. The various security stuff slowed every computer down a lot.
I suspect they were already older and maybe underspec. Probably had 4200 RPM disks or something.
But the combination meant they were 100% worthless.
Microsoft also puts a lot of crap into a default install that you may want to disable. Windows 11 with some judicious policy editor settings isn't so awful.
At the same time, as someone with a well maintained Windows gaming rig, I don't like spending time in the OS these days. Something about transparently doing stuff that puts money in their pocket while inconveniencing me gives me the ick.
They are more incentivized by that than the few lost sales from people who know better to look for low crud machines.
And on more expensive machines they’d just be leaving money on the table. So they still often ship bundled crud.
Similar to spyware on TVs. Margins are razor thin. They’re going to make them up somewhere.
If your Explorer context menu is taking more than a split second to load, there's something wrong with your hardware.
First experience of Windows 11, trying to download a file through firefox caused my 18 core 10980xe to have the entire UI freeze for the full time the download was going.
Reverted back to windows 10 immediately and the problem went away.
Windows 11 is full of spyware from the Mothership
I think that Apple has gotten so used to having fast storage in their machines that the newer OSes basically don’t work on spinning rust.
My home laptop is even faster.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17011372
This was the latest UTM in the App Store, so native Hypervisor.Framework access for arm64 Windows acceleration.
A Neo will win a race with a similar speed Windows computer full of bundled crap and security slop.
But it would work the other way around too.
The nice thing about Macs is even if you see a lot of what Apple puts on the computers as useless trash (“Why the hell do I need iBooks?”) it’s not stuff running in the background interfering with everything you do the way bad PC security software bundled on cheap Windows PCs or forced by corporate often does.
I can tell you my last work Mac slowed down noticeably (though not too bad, luckily) the day they decided to put the corporate security crud on it.
The newer security crud we use now seems much better behaved though.
Also it isn't 2-3x faster, stop with the made up nonsense please. Just checked and my 3 year old AMD laptop is on par with the NEO geekbench score I found online (slower in single core but faster in multi core), not 2-3x slower.