MalcolmOwen

DangDave said:

We should be asking Malcolm Owen to think before he creates misleading headlines for his articles, of course unless his intent was to stir up AppleInsider readers and posters for the fun of it?

My apologies if it seems that the headline is misleading, as it didn't seem that way to me at the time of writing. I have tweaked the headline to make it a little more readable. 

moiety said:

AppleInsider staff –

Can we please NOT show that video keyframe image

The video shows a similar incident of a child being dragged under, but getting out and walking away. The caption text has been adjusted to advise the child in the video survived the incident. 

JustSomeGuy1 said:

Mostly decent article but some of your important numbers are WAY off. You wrote:

The cells in an SSD are durable for at least 5,000 read and write cycles in the cheapest Triple Level Cell-based flash memory chips, though more typically around 10,000 cycles for mid-range Multi Level Cell-based chips. Even at the low end of the scale, that still equates to over a decade of usage based on the one complete drive-write per day rating.

TLC can be 3000 cycles at the high end, less at the lower end, with 1000 cycles typical today. MLC is irrelevant, as there are no MLC consumer drives, nor have there been for quite a while. (Maybe Samsung still sells one? They're going to rare and costly, if they exist at all.

Typical warrantied DWPD on consumer TLC drives is 0.3. Some go lower. 1DWPD is firmly within the domain of Data Center SSDs, and not even all of those (though some will go to 3DWPD or more).

All your math after that is wrong because the base number are wrong.

I've got one of these Macs and I have zero worries about this. Apple uses more flash than anyone else in the world and they're not going to screw this up. They couldn't, really - that much bad flash isn't available. I mean, if they wanted to cheap out they could have gone to QLC, and they didn't.

OTOH, it's possible that the 8GB machines are so fast even when paging that users don't realize that they're thrashing their disk. That's unlikely to be a real problem for most people, but I guess time will tell. If you are a heavy-duty user and you buy an 8GB machine... you were just asking for trouble. But I still doubt you'll find it.

Hi there. The article used figures I determined in 2020 for an explainer, and were quite difficult to ascertain at the time. I searched based on your 3000 figure and it seems that Google somewhat agrees. 
The article has been updated to be based on a 3000 usage figure, though the point of the matter still stands as we are still working from generalizations. Instead of 13 years under the original calculation based on 1 DWPD, it's just over 8 years, which is still a mighty long time for that level of usage. 

As much as it may be valid to discuss down to 0.3 DWPD, that's pretty much in the realm of the average user, who isn't likely to encounter this sort of problem. That, and I'd rather think Apple would err towards more premium-grade components for something as important as storage...

No-one really knows what Apple's storage is capable of, except for Apple itself. Hopefully it's a question that Apple will be able to answer for us. 

melgross said:

Something/s not right. They were talking about software running up to 3.8 times faster, so how could performance be equal to a two core Air chip. I just watched it, and I didn’t get that it was equivalent. We’re all missing something.

it just occurred to me what they said. I also said this on Arstechnica. It’s the four efficiency cores that are equal to the MacBook Air x86 chip, not the entire M1

This is correct. First version of the article was done at speed, and has been updated with the clarification. 

radarthekat said:

Apple was on the mark in its decision to stop reporting unit numbers for its major products.  That decision was made in 2014/2015, I believe, when the watch release was being planned.  Apple thinks things through years in advance.  Bravo.

Actually, Apple's decision was more recent than that, announced in November 2018. 
Given the widening of Apple's iPhone product line, the iPhone ASP wasn't going to be a great indicator long-term for which products were most popular, so Apple was probably right to stop those types of analytics from taking place.