Macbook Air 2020 M1 consumes SSD life too fast
Don't get carried away with news stories. This is the main takeaway.
There's a number of reasons why you shouldn't be worried or concerned (yet).
In the comments you indicate that Apple somehow secretly configured the SSD to use it as RAM. This is not the case - this is not how of any of that works. When a Mac runs out of RAM, it uses the disk as a replacement - this is known as "swapping". It is a basic technique used on all Macs (not only M1s) and is also used on all other modern operating systems such as Windows, Linux, etc.
There's no indication anywhere that the M1 Mac swaps more than an Intel Mac with the same amount of RAM.
There's also no indication anywhere that the SSD in the M1 Mac Mini is somehow "worse" or degrades faster than SSDs in comparable Intel Macs.
The whole scary news story here hinges on the fact that a SMART value is seemingly high on these machines. However, it is really jumping to a conclusion that this means that the drive is actually degrading or that the machine will stop working in a short while. For multiple reasons:
- These numbers could very well be interpreted incorrectly. SMART values have always been problematic in that different disk vendors use slightly different definitions and units, and sometimes do not report numbers according to standards - and that their reporting might even change on the same hardware just with newer firmware.
It could very well be that the numbers are a factor 1000 off because the units are wrong. We cannot know that. Remember that on the M1 Mac, we do not have a direct connection to a Samsung SSD controller or similar (that we have been used to on older Macs) - but rather everything goes through the special Apple integrated disk controller that handles security.
The right thing here is to contact Apple for clarification on how the numbers should be interpreted.
- It is not so that a SSD drive just suddenly stops working when the lifetime left indicator raches 0%. That's not how this works. Essentially the drive keeps a score of usage, and the vendor has built in some more or less arbitrary threshold number. It could be that this number represents what the vendors will treat as warranty cases, it could be that this number represents what the vendor think is the an average drive's life time - or it could just be any old random number.
In practice it is very common for drive manufacturers to have this threshold be much lower than the actual average life time of drives.
Without confirmation from Apple we cannot really conclude that this number means anything in practice.
In any case, if the drives in M1 Macs should die from ordinary usage in less than a year, Apple would have to replace those drives for everyone.
So either (a) the numbers that you make lots of conclusions from are not correctly interpreted, or (b) Apple made a huge oversight and sold products that wear out much faster than ordinary.
Without further information, I would assume (a) is the most likely. Press Apple for more information and we can know for sure. If (b) is the case, Apple would have to do a recall program of some sort.