Apple M1 Macs appear to be chewing through their SSDs

It can be higher. TLC is often warranted for ~600 drive writes over 3 to 5 years. Obviously, since this is a safe threshold, many will keep working. Techreport.com did a huge test a few years back that showed some drives beat their ratings a few times over.

But let’s compare. Your linked article claims an endurance 10x higher than retail drives (5800 drive writes). That’s not even remotely likely. These are all now TLC drives, and companies have more experience in how long drives will last now, so the ratings are pretty accurate. In 2 months the linked author used 2% of his expanded figure. Assuming the often warranted retail endurance instead, that’s actually 20%. I have a 1TB drive in my desktop I’ve been using for compilation workloads for 2 years. The % used isn’t even at 1% yet, and that’s assuming the lower endurance rating.

Something is wrong here.

Someone points out that it might be related to Apple’s nvme controller reporting differently, and that might partially be the case. It it also looks like 16gb RAM machines write less, which suggests it’s caused by a very aggressive swapping solution.