Just purchased my first Mac after using Linux for most of my adult life. How big of a concern is this? I am seeing mixed reports when looking around - should I be questioning my purchase if I was expecting my M1 Air to last a few years?
As you said, mixed reports (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26244093) and not much followup since then. The most common worst-case numbers from that thread, if sustained, would indicate a 4-5 year maximum lifetime.
If this actually turns out to be a widespread problem and Apple doesn't address it in a timely update you may see a class-action lawsuit and/or Apple warranty repair service in a few years.
Yes, it sucked that it took so long to redesign it. The bad keyboards started appearing around 2016, and it wasn’t until 2019 that a redesign first appeared, on the new 16” MacBook Pro.
But Apple have always been good about free, no-questions-asked, out of warranty replacements for faulty/sticky butterfly keyboards. Not really sure what more you could reasonably want them to do.
Because they extended the warranty replacement to four years for the keyboard? Once that's done and now they are going to push people towards buying entirely new models since an out of warranty keyboard repair on these things is something absurd like $600-700 IIRC.
Trust was eroded because every year they came out with some improvement on it that was supposed to fix the problem, then at the end of the year models with those keyboards were added to the expanded warranty program.
I think it would have been better if they had a real fix for this issue, it probably would have been expensive for them with a redesigned top and bottom case to fit a decent keyboard but right now the butterfly keyboards seem like ticking time bombs. Eventually they will die and Apple will either ask several hundred to repair it or say parts no longer exist and buy a new one.
>Not really sure what more you could reasonably want them to do.
1 Admit the issue before a class action lawsuit is running
2 Put immediately a statement that there "could" be an issue and it is investigated. Apple kept their mouth shut and the fanboys attacked the people that reported the issues that they use the keyboard wrong or some even claim that is is an anti-Apple conspiracy.
"it's okay that Apple made this mistake, because they were always willing to replace your useless trash when it broke for you!"
Maybe Apple should have just swallowed their pride and addressed it in a single product cycle. I was one of the people waiting for the keyboard to be fixed before buying a Mac, and I just ended up switching to Linux before it happened. I ended up buying an M1 Macbook Air, but it doesn't get much use these days besides multiplatform testing.
For Apple Laptops, more like 7-8, at least in the old days.
Typically you would only replace them when they (gradually) became annoyingly slow for daily use.
Agreed, I had to upgrade all of of my PowerBooks/MacBooks at some point with RAM and larger HDDs/SSDs.
And my last Apple Laptop is from 2012 and I learned that Apple now drops support by the OS considerably earlier than in the old days (i.e. unecesarily early, most 8-10 year old MacBooks would be perfectly fine for daily use, but now unsafe) - at least that was my impression.
And installing Linux on them is always a mixed bag (fans, trackpad, etc.), even though it sure is better with Intel Macs.
I bought a macbook air in ~2012 and it was unusably slow after a year. bought a thinkpad to put linux on after that that I'm still using today (although admittedly it's a bit of a wreck now - still, it lasted for 8 years)
The MacBook Air was not really a "high performance" machine to start with though - you can't compare that with a ThinkPad :)
And it was seldomly updated, so you could get very aged specs.
If you bought a MacBook 2011/2012 you would typically get an HDD and between 4 and 8GB RAM. Software requirements/demands sky-rocketed shortly after that. On a non-Air you could at least upgrade this yourself, which gave the machine new life ("just like new")
it did have a 128gb ssd. The thinkpad was also an x1 carbon (also 4gb of ram), so it had a similar form factor, not sure about cpu specs, I probably should have mentioned that.
Interesting, I wonder why mine slowed down so much then. From what I remember it was after an OS upgrade, it was my first time trying a mac, and I ended up being disappointed and going back to linux, but I also didn't do a deep dive into figuring out the reasons for it.
I believe the 2011 era MacBook Air (EveryMac.com confirms only the 11”) had an entry level 2GB RAM variant. That one probably got pretty painful after just a couple OS updates.
My HP laptop is 7 years old and still works well. 4xxx i7 8 threads, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD (upgrades, of course.) A new laptop with a newer CPU and NVMe would be faster but it's still subjectively fast enough for my work. I'll upgrade when it breaks down and I won't be able to repair it. I keep an eye on candidates.
Not anymore. Now Apple will drop MacOS support for their computers way earlier. I tried to update my barely used MacBook from 2012/2013 somewhere last year and learned that it was dropped quite some time ago - so if I would have kept it on the newest release (there were serious bugs, I was hesitant), I think it would have got around 8 years max, if memory serves me right. No security updates at all anymore, not possible to download older release than the newest. I did not expect that.
And I had to upgrade SSD and RAM 2 and 4 years after buying, it became unusable for work (granted, it was not spec'ed out originally).
MacBook Pros and Airs from 2012 are supported by Catalina, and that is still getting security releases. It does require 4GB of RAM though if you didn’t have that to start with.
If you bought your MacBook until MID 2012, you're out of luck though.
And 10 years old would be early 2011, and those are also not supported.
Mojave has the same requirements basically, that leaves High Sierra, and High Sierra had a few months of support left (ended Dec 2020), so I just aborted.
Obviously that depends on a number of factors, including whether you purchase early or late in the generational cycle, whether you spring for the extra memory, total hours of runtime, exposure to rough handling / mechanical stress, and of course blind luck.
Not anymore? It's not like battery replacement is very viable on modern Macs, and the SSD wear issue means that most of these "daily driver" machines will end up dead in more like 3 or 4 years.
But yes, older Macs were notorious for being great machines.
> It's not like battery replacement is very viable on modern Macs
Why? Apple still offers battery replacements for modern Macs, and some more adventurous types of people still do it themselves. They're glued to the chassis, not spot welded.
Apple SSDs have historically had a lower TBW than the rest of the drives on the market, and combined with their swap abuse issue right now, I think it's fair for people to be alarmed.
Not if the computer becomes a paperweight after those 5 years. If Apple wants me to consider a Mac, they need to make the NVME user-servicable, no exceptions. If the current chassis leaks are true, Apple has no excuse not to use the extra space inside their Professional(!!!) machine to give it a relatively standard feature found in laptops half it's price. There's no excuse anymore.
Still I think a lot of Thinkpads need some parts (often the motherboard!) replaced before they run out of extended on-site repair warranty. The small sample from my co-workers seems to indicate that the rate for that is over 50%. Maybe I just happen to know all the people who use their laptops as shovels.
That said, my 2015 HP Zbook (previously in contracting work, now personal use) still works perfectly, only now with third keyboard, third battery, and a bit of superglue.
From what I could understand, it's related to how much of your workflow runs over the RAM capacity, at which point the memory gets shuffled off to the SSD, and loaded back when it's needed.
I got the 8GB RAM version, and been mainly using it for Unity + JetBrains Rider, both demanding around 4-6GB by themselves. Doesn't help neither of them are ARM native, I'd imagine. So I'm in big trouble :)
A suggestion until ARM native Rider is available. We have a few 8GB M1s that are used for .net development using Rider and we're using the DataGrip swap hack proposed here and it's working great (was unusable without it):
Huh that's a funny hack, will give it a try, cheers!
I wonder if the GoLand/ PyCharm JBR folders will work, since I already have those and they are both ARM native. It's definitely the UI performance that kills me, have no issues with the other editors on the laptop otherwise. Running Unity in parallel likely doesn't help either, though.
A YouTuber investigated (but no shell commands AFAIK, observing through Activity Monitor), but seems like Rosetta 2 apps might also contribute to the high disk usage.
Activity Monitor is not a reliable way to inspect memory usage, it's optimized for speed of calculation. Use 'footprint' and 'zprint' or Xcode/Instruments instead.
Activity Monitor is almost just as useless as Task Manager in terms of reporting memory footprint. Not only will Apple's API constantly hide resources from native apps (like how Safari conveniently hides it's rendering processes), but MacOS's memory model is completely at odds with their measurement techniques. Either way, you're better off using top to measure your system's footprint, if anything.
Apple's APIs don't hide anything, programs on macOS just spawn subprocesses for reasons that mostly have to do with security. top(1) is not a very good way to measure footprint, footprint(1) is (and Activity Monitor uses the same APIs internally for its "Memory" column).
As far as I can tell, Activity Monitor and footprint(1) both grab the phys_footprint field from proc_pid_rusage. I have not seem them diverge yet, so if there is more to this that I am missing I (as the author of a system monitoring tool of this sort) would be interested in hearing about it.
See "there’s more columns than that". The single process "memory" column does match but AM doesn't show coalition (multiple process) memory totals, the compressed column is an estimate, footprint --vmObjectDirty also exists and is a valid way to look at things, etc.
Ah, I see what you mean now; yes, it's not reliable in the sense that there are ways to measure it that look a little harder. That being said, I'm not sure I'd classify it as "inaccurate"–it has, in my experience at least, been a fairly good first approximation of memory usage.
only anecdotal at this time, and it’s been awhile now. Specifically, a video editor posted a blog about how their laptop failed which required an out of pocket board replacement. Someone speculated in comments here that the drive may have reached lifecycle but it wasn’t confirmed or examined by an expert in a write up or anything. Not sure specifically what hardware but no reason to believe it would be a proprietary drive any different than other laptops’. IMO skeptical of PEBKAC or clickbait. Nothing in the post was informative or illuminating. > last a few years It will and to be insured instead of just confident one can opt for that $200 warranty extension
11.4 is in beta so not many people are using it, but at least one of the folks with the issue is running it and said it improved things.
Apple were definitely made aware of it, hence why it being fixed in 11.4 makes sense, though there is no official statement that I'm aware of.
I was never able to reproduce it myself; we never found a specific trigger, but some people have the issue consistently and others (most) don't. I only managed to trigger thrashing with very blatant memory pressure (i.e. allocating most of the system capacity and continuously reading it to keep it hot), which obviously isn't what these users were doing.
People have looked at the OSX swapper code, and there were some hints that the algorithm it uses to decide to swap may have had some bugs; if 11.4 fixes it then I'm sure we'll find out once the XNU source drops and we diff it. Nobody has actually tried to root cause this outside of apple (i.e. using debug XNU builds on an affected workload/user).
Also, we never confirmed that this was an M1 exclusive issue. There's some evidence that this is a Big Sur regression that affected all Macs, it's just that the effects aren't obvious on Intel ones because the age of the SSD makes it hard to draw conclusions unless you're actively watching lifetime writes over the course of weeks. On M1s, since the machines are young, the problem is obvious with a single data point.
I still don't see how this can be classed as a bug by anyone other than apple.
You have a single case of 10% lifetime usage (plus a 20% one you mention), along with thousands of reports of people with 2-5% - which you also stated was too high - based on your insistence of using TBW (which can vary by up to 10000x depending on the tech) instead of percentage used (supplied by the manufacturer).
I had an out of memory alert on my machine earlier because i opened a typescript file in VLC. It was using 26GB of memory (and climbing) when i noticed it and killed it. I have an 8GB RAM machine. The machine remained fully responsive throughout. That simply wasnt possible before.
Its definitely swapping a lot, for sure, but don't you think that there is a possibility that this is by design, sacrificing disk writes (i am 50TBW and still ONLY 2% "used" on a 256GB drive since launch) to make app switching more responsive?
I guess we will see when you are able to diff the source, and you can shut me up once and for all :)
It is by design, but not that much. That's the point. The machines are designed to use swap and memory compression to greatly enhance responsiveness even with less physical RAM than competitors. And that works well for most users. But there's a bug in the heuristic, and for some users, it starts pathologically swapping.
We've seen the numbers go up in the activity monitor. Even while doing ~nothing. Fast. That is obviously a bug. Even with some Electron apps open and such, I guarantee the working set of active apps was nowhere near the physical RAM size. And so, that's a bug.
Terabytes per day of swap activity is not normal, no matter how much these machines are designed to swap on purpose.
As I said, there's one user with 20% usage as reported by the drive. That's not TBW, that's real (they're at >500 TBW, for what it's worth), and it means that machine is going to have a dead SSD within 2 years if the issue isn't fixed.
> Terabytes per day of swap activity is not normal, no matter how much these machines are designed to swap on purpose.
1TB is only 62.5 * 16GB. If its paging out 8GB+ apps (quite easy for chrome with a number of tabs) it only takes one memory hog to increase the TBW in a few hours of typical app switching for a mobile app developer.
This edge case is pretty extreme, sure, but its still a MINIMUM lifetime of 2 years. It doesn't mean its suddenly going to die when it hits 100%, and even if it did it should be covered by warranty. And this usage is an order of magnitude more than the vast majority of other reports that were made.
Im inclined to think its a non-issue, but totally respect your position.
As an aside, I use tab suspenders on my browsers - habit from my intel mac where chrome frequently caused memory congestion. Its probably why I get away with running 2 iOS simulators, an android emulator, xcode, intellij, 3 vscode instances, safari, firefox and chrome, and a bunch of utilities and services on an 8GB machine - but ill still be first in line for a 32GB+ 16+ core machine, because then ill be able to run VMs :D
A user having high drive usage doesn't make it an issue, let alone the same issue.
That user you linked to is using Catalina (as they mention in their twitter thread where they demonstrate a 3% usage increase over 2 weeks), so it will be completely unrelated to the support for silicon, which wasnt added until Big Sur.
Swapping isn't CPU-intensive, and Apple also implemented the memory compression as custom CPU instructions. Swapping is I/O intensive, and these machines have stupid fast SSDs which is why they can get away with it.
When you think of swapping as slow it's not because it eats CPU, it's because it blocks on I/O.
Its all very interesting. I wish apple would be less tight lipped about how it all works together. Theres so much guesswork because we don't fully understand how the new arch is being utilized.
With a maximum memory size of 8G it's a bit anemic so you likely wouldn't get that much life out of it anyway, hope you got the 16G version. Apple is pretty good at the planned obsolescence game, so getting the larger memory would at least help stave that off for a bit.
I'm skipping these for now, I run Linux on all my machines and it typically takes a while for the wrinkles to be ironed out, and x86 has much better support than M1. I do think it is time that we became less fixated on x86 and more CPU architectures is better. Another reason for the skip is that the last two Apple products I've owned (both MacBook Airs) have not lived up to expectation, the one had a keyboard that went bad after only two years with nothing but perfectly normal use, the other has a battery that didn't even go through 50 full charge / discharge cycles and that only holds 5 minutes worth of charge. Both of these issues developed out of warranty.
> Apple is pretty good at the planned obsolescence game
Nah, they suck at it.
My GF is just finishing her bachelors thesis in the living room on my 2013 MBP with 4 GB RAM. First battery, updated all the way from Mavericks to Big Sur. Still supported, still useful and prettier than 80 % machines out there.
Just out of interest, is she still using the same HDD? I find that the performance of older MacBooks are pretty awful under recent version of Mac OS if the storage hardware is the older non-SSD drives. My old $work MacBook with a HDD was thankfully swapped out for a SSD version -- the difference was night and day. Though this SSD machine is starting to slow down noticeably with Big Sur...
Since 2012 the MacBook Pros switched to all Retina and all SSD so yeah it's got an SSD. Anecdotally my 2012 retina is still doing great, also on Big Sur. Battery is pretty shot though.
You're right. Macs have excellent build quality and are durable as hell. Planned obsolescence with Apple is seen more with iPhones. There was the recent story about Apple slowing down older iPhones via software updates [1]
This isn't a case of planned obsolescence. If anything it's exactly the opposite of that, trying to prolong the useful life of a phone as its battery degrades. This did of course lead to them offering a $29 battery replacement for affected phones (after they were caught doing this).
The lack of communication was a problem but "planned obsolescence" in this case is just tin-foil hat nonsense.
It’s 16G and I just retired my 2012 MacBook Pro because I really wanted to try the M1.
It was still going strong after almost a decade of use and got €300 as a trade-in. If that’s Apple‘s idea of planned obsolescence, I support their plan.
Same here. The home iMac Core Duo from early 2008 was finally decommissioned last year, after 12 years (had an SSD change only). Up until that moment it had been the "go to" computer in the home and 24/7 running a Plex server, Sonarr and Transmission.
My 2012 MBA is used daily and heavily by my mother and graphic designer sister. My 2015 MBA replaced that iMac and now I'm trying to find an excuse to replace my current 2019 MBA because M1s are reaaally attractive. Essentially I've convinced myself Apple is anouncing laptops later in the year that look like the newest iMacs, just so I wait.
>Apple is pretty good at the planned obsolescence game
If that's their game, they are terrible at it.
Seeing that Macs hold their resale value for longer, for mobile they release iOS updates for longer than any other Android vendor, and so on.
What Apple is good at is making the product an "Apple only can fix/change" affair. But that's not the same as planned obsolescence game.
>With a maximum memory size of 8G it's a bit anemic
Is it? The majority of non-Apple laptops in 2021 are sold at 8G and below. And for people's use (web, surfing, email, Slack, Zoom, regular apps, etc) that the Air and smaller MBPs are aimed at, that has always been plenty.
(In fact, outside of video, audio, 3D, VM, and number crunching work, it's crazy that people would need more than that for the same stuff, computationaly wise, we did 10-15 years ago with much less RAM - blame Electron).
And 16GB and below is something like the 95% percentile or above.
Agreed, I'm going to stay on android til Apple puts a USB-C port in the iPhone. Most of my colleagues use iPhones and they're supported way longer than our android counterparts(Samsung exclusively).
That said, was this upgrade to Android 7.1 officially supported by Samsung?
In 2015, Apple released the iPhone 6S. It has not stopped receiving day-one software updates. For anyone who still has one (two in my circle of family and friends still have their 6S) they are still working great on iOS 14.5.
All the M1 Macs can be upgraded to 16 GB, including the Air, and macOS uses memory compression by default, so there can be a bit more life to these machines than you'd otherwise expect.
Edit: Since posting this comment, the parent has been edited to include "hope you got the 16G version" -- at the time I replied, jacquesm's comment mistakenly asserted an absolute "maximum memory size of 8G."
It's a custom build option, I'm guessing you're onto the page with the couple of preset options? If you click "select" on a model you get a second page that lets you customise stuff like RAM and SSD.
