Sometimes I look at activity monitor and it is swapping a bit but I don’t notice any perf degradation so I stopped thinking about it.. shrug
Battery life is the true game changer though. When I went out with the 16” I had to make sure I had 100% charge, if I wanted to use it for ~3-4 hours while out. With the Air I can grab it with 25% battery left and be fine for the same amount of time.
The “actual” pro machines with M1 derivatives are going to be incredible…so long as apple doesn’t make another Touchbar/butterfly keyboard-esq mistake.
I was lucky if I could even make it to 4 hours battery on the 16", but the real killer for me was heat and noise. It was like sitting in front of a little aeroplane all day long, and because the video out is wired up through the dedicated GPU, just plugging it into an external monitor added an extra 20W to dissipate. It also had weird sleep issues the entire time, if I left it connected to a monitor overnight I'd often sit down at my desk the next morning to find it burning hot, fans blasting, with the lid closed.
So happy to see the back of that piece of crap. It got reasonable reviews at the time, I can only imagine that either no-one tested it with external monitors, or because it was the first model to drop the butterfly keyboard people just gave it a pass on everything else.
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 12,515,207 [6.40 TB]
Data Units Written: 13,202,995 [6.75 TB]
Host Read Commands: 264,092,805
Host Write Commands: 158,635,815
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 188
Power On Hours: 223
On the low end assuming 200TBW that means you have used about 3.3% of the life of your SSD and on the high side you have used 6.75%. Lets say you got your M1 on release in November, that would mean you are using about 1.68%/month on the high end and .84%/month on the low end.
Assume it lasts 200TBW, which I don't think they will, you would be on track for a 8 year lifespan of the SSD. Otherwise 4 years on the low end, assuming the write amount stays the same (which won't likely happen), which would imply you are using the same or less swap.
Every year, I find that I use about 1-2gb more on average, so for me/my usage patterns I almost find the 16gb of memory in the MBPs to be a slap in the face. I have a 13'' and a 16'' MBP with 32/64gb respectively and I don't think I would find anything less acceptable. Right now, my typical memory usage is around 30-40gb when I run docker, vscode, chrome, slack, zoom, etc. I am not even running any VMs(other than the docker vm), I typically will spin those up elsewhere.
For reference, this is my 16'' daily MBP after nearly a year (4.84TB write) and I typically pull down lots of logs/data.
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 4,406,559 [2.25 TB]
Data Units Written: 9,454,881 [4.84 TB]
Host Read Commands: 183,307,692
Host Write Commands: 406,821,556My 3.5-year old MacBook Pro has 119 TB of writes, and still claims 79% "available spare":
Available Spare: 79%
Available Spare Threshold: 2%
Percentage Used: 15%
Data Units Read: 256,111,725 [131 TB]
Data Units Written: 232,470,299 [119 TB]
Host Read Commands: 2,872,362,421
Host Write Commands: 1,547,764,735
As Flash cells start to fail they are replaced by spare. Because of write leveling this is delayed for a while, but then as each cell reaches its 300 or 3,000 writes, they all start to fail.
brew install smartmontools
smartctl -a disk0