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Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

It arrived with 69% charge, by this morning 11am i had reached 21%. I left the screen brightness on the default setting and usage was a mix of installing software (mostly I/O i suppose), a lot of safari, around 4 hours of Citrix remote desktop, around 90 minutes of zoom, some light gaming last night to see if it works.

If you do anything that's heavy on I/O (packaging jar files in my case), this laptop is faster than my big desktop, the I/O is crazy fast actually.

Memory pressure has been low so far - my biggest fear opting for the base model but looks like i'll be fine - i spun up bunch of dev processes and was fine.

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I wonder whether we need to reset expectations on memory amounts. From seeing the reviews where they launch every application installed on the 8gb air and it remains smooth I am suspecting that the unified memory and optimized storage interface means that for M1 macs 8 gb behaves like 16 gb on intel cpu’s.

Just remember that if your machine needs to swap because of low RAM you are now writing to your SSD.

The permanently soldered in SSD that has a finite amount of writes.

Saving $200 on RAM up front could get wiped out if you kill your SSD prematurely with constant, heavy swapping.

Here I see the fast SSD speed as a negative - making it painless to do something inherently dangerous towards the lifespan of your SSD.

Have you ever actually worn out an SSD using personal workloads (ie, not on a server)? I haven't yet and I own machines/SSDs from 12 years ago - benchmarks are still roughly equivalent to what I had to start.

Yes, I have. My old ThinkPad R61 I added an OCZ SSD to. Not sure how much RAM it came with, but it was swapping a lot, I guess. Back then, SSDs had less of a lifespan than nowadays (even consumer-grade ones).

I had the same on Windows + a SSD. Docker with some Sqlite applictions apparently did crazy writes. SSD went from 100% to 80% in like half a year time or so, when I noticed it. That SSD is still alive, but I had to adapt.

Those early SSDs if I remember right had very low cycle limits, the limits now are over 10x better than they were then.

Depends which age/tech.

Every additional 'Level' in the flash decreases the overall life cycle. Mind you, oftentimes drive controllers are fancier, often doing things like treating one of the sections as a less dense flash type to improve write cycles, and keep/move longer held data into the regions treated as QLC.

But, that means that some heavy write patters will indeed wind up worse on a modern drive than the better MLC/TLC models.

Its the other way around. Early SSDs had huge P/E numbers in tens of thousands (SLC). Now we are down in the low hundreds.

To re-iterate how much more reliable SSDs are now that they used to be, until about a month ago I worked for a vendor of hardware/software that is designed to read/write to disks hundreds of thousands of times per second (log collection and searching). When I first started working there ~5 years ago, they were testing out SSDs in the appliances and the team ultimately decided against it because they estimated the SSDs would burn out in under a year.

By the time I left they were shipping appliances with SSDs that were predicted to have lifespans longer than the longest hardware support you could buy from the vendor (longest hardware support contract - seven years). Hundreds of thousands of writes per second, every second, for 7+ years, uninterrupted.

They are most likely shipping bigger SSDs :-) Bigger the disk bigger the TBW despite P/E going to shits with every node shrink/bits per cell jump.

Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD?

The SSDs from the previous gen are rated for something like 40Gb writes per day for 40 years i think.

I’d guess the battery will fail first, then the keyboard or screen hinge, then the logic board. But thats a pure guess.

I reckon the biggest risk is that all in one logic board, anything fails and you lose your HDD.

> Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD?

Obsolete, who defines that?

I'm typing this on a MBP 2015. Still works perfectly fine (I did have screen replaced under warranty). Battery is replaceable on this machine, its sitting at ~85% capacity with 500 cycles. Apple hardware tends to have good resale value, too.

Performance-wise, hardware tends to last longer and longer. Repairability-wise, yeah, that's a can of worms of a discussion.

I'd say a 2005 PowerPC iBook is obsolete. I'd also say a 2009 intel macbook is obsolete but the truth is, add an SSD into that and it's probably still fine under linux so maybe 2009 isn't obsolete for some users just yet (although i think apple no longer support that hardware). 2015 is modern, intel performance just hasn't changed that much since 2015.

>the I/O is crazy fast

I seem to remember watching a real time video transcoding demo, or something like that, on an iPad Pro and the dev demoing it saying it was the I/O that made it possible. Desktop machines with much faster processors would choke due to bandwidth limitations, but Apple can custom tune every aspect of the iPad architecture and aren't limited to standard, generic interfaces between components.

The original 5k iMacs were a similar case in some ways. It was only possible in an all-in-one design, because there wasn't a standard video connection at the time that was capable of the throughput.

> If you do anything that's heavy on I/O (packaging jar files in my case), this laptop is faster than my big desktop, the I/O is crazy fast actually.

Tt's got a rather fast NVME SSD, 2.7GB/s reads and 2.2GB/s writes (Intel version was 1.3 and 1). Don't know if the IOPS & latency improved, but it wouldn't surprise me much.

Do they still ship these Airs with 720p webcams from the 2000s? I have a 2020 Macbook Air that has a terrible webcam.

I recently discovered this app that makes your iPhone (or iPad) a webcam for your Mac—the difference between the shitty webcam Apple ships and this is eye-opening: https://reincubate.com/camo/

Yeah and the low light performance isn’t great either

I have a feeling an improved webcam (and FaceID) will be one of the features Apple will use to distinguish their forthcoming higher end MBP's.

Surely, they won't keep using the same aging technology. At least I hope not.

Unpardonable in the age of covid. And I'm tired of trying out no name webcams from Amazon and hooking them with dongles and they barely stay on top of the monitor.

8GB integrated memory spec?

Yeah. I don't hold out hope of it surviving any vm workloads (vagrant, docker desktop etc.) but i'm ok with just installing the cli tools and connecting to remote clusters.

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