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?
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.
I've had one that gave up on 3 years, a couple months after warranty ended (that seemed to be quite common for that brand at the time).
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).
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.
But yes, older Macs were notorious for being great machines.
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.
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.
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")
I think my current work laptop is 6-7 years old. My backup laptop is 11 years old.
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.
The one which they called a "pig" internally where "lipstick won't fix it", but which they kept selling for years?
That totally broke my trust that Apple will address quality issues.
https://www.ped30.com/2021/03/23/apple-butterfly-lipstick-pi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
Here's one of the worse ones back in February: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1361847686417190918?s=19
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.
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 :)
See also: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-...
When you think of swapping as slow it's not because it eats CPU, it's because it blocks on I/O.
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.
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
There is no way this is normal :-)
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.
Check history, until a class action lawsuit forces Apple to admit the problem they will sweep it under the rug or they claim you are using it wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Did I miss it? Or can‘t I see it if there is no availability anymore? Anyone a link?
This link might work: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air/space-gray-ap...
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.
The lack of communication was a problem but "planned obsolescence" in this case is just tin-foil hat nonsense.
Most other smartphone brands: hold my beer
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.
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.