Marvin

BMac23 said:

I am hesitant to purchase a new Mac Mini until I can find out what type of flash it uses. The following APPLEINSIDER story reported that the M1 Macs used Toshiba TLC NAND flash:

Questions raised about M1 Mac SSD longevity, based on incomplete data

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/02/23/questions-raised-about-m1-mac-ssd-longevity-based-on-incomplete-data

What type of flash does the 2023 M2 Mac Mini use?

Do all 2023 M2 Mac Mini models use the same type of flash? If so, is it TLC or QLC?

Or, do the less expensive models use QLC and the M2 Pro models use TLC?

Or, do all models now use QLC?

Apple specs don't disclose the flash type, but I think it's a fair and legitimate question, especially for anyone who hopes to keep a Mac for a long time.

Thanks in advance if you can help!

It’s difficult to know what endurance they will have without Apple providing the spec. Sometimes teardowns show model numbers and they could be looked up in Toshiba’s database for TBW endurance numbers.

It would be safe to assume the SSD will have over 100TB TBW endurance for the 256GB. You would be able to write the whole drive over 400x. Most people will write less than 10GB per day so it would easily last over 10 years.

People working with movies can write more data but even then it would be rare every day and they’d be best using external drives.

Running out of RAM and paging can cause this problem too so make sure to get enough. If someone gets 8GB when they need 16GB, it can write out multiple GBs per day.

I actually have an old Mac laptop from 2014 that exceeded its TBW and makes the laptop unusable from the internal drive. Drive writes randomly cause kernel panics. It’s annoying that the hardware can only be used by booting externally and would need a logic board change but after such a long time, the hardware isn’t worth much and it’s not expensive to buy older replacement laptops.

If you plan on using the Mac for a long time, buy as much RAM as you can to avoid paging, buy the larger SSD models and use external drives for caches like render caches. There are tools to monitor drive writes and health so you can see heavy writes and avoid them.

https://www.macworld.com/article/338844/how-worried-should-you-be-about-your-m1-macs-ssd-lifespan.html

https://www.macworld.com/article/334283/how-to-m1-intel-mac-ssd-health-terminal-smartmontools.html

In general, plan to get a usable lifespan of 8 years from a computer.

danox said:

Apple Vision, Pro  will have minimum one 1TB storage and 24 gigs of memory (M2 maximum is 24 gigs), but the X factor is the R1 co-processing chip it could have another 24 gigs of memory and even more storage capacity.

The R1 chip really is the great unknown………

R1 is a video processing chip, it just needs a small amount of fast memory for the framebuffers. 4k framebuffer is 3840 x 2160 x 5 bytes = 41MB, 12 cameras + displays is < 1GB of memory, could be 2GB to handle 8K, compositing buffers etc.

M2 needs more memory as it's running apps. Each app can use 2GB.

The SSD storage is for persistent data. It would be nice if the minimum is 1TB and for Apple to do this across their product line. SSD is really cheap now. 2TB PCIe SSD is ~$100, 1TB is $50-80:

https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-Internal-Gaming-MZ-V8P2T0B-AM/dp/B08RK2SR23
https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Plus-PCIe-NAND-6600MB/dp/B098WKQRDL

Today Apple charges $400 for 0.75TB and $800 for 1.75TB, this is 8-10x higher than mainstream SSD prices, nearly $500/TB. If they charged 4x premium for SSD, they could make 512GB standard on entry Macs with 1TB a $200 upgrade and 2TB a $400 upgrade and 1TB would be standard on devices $2k+.

appleinsideruser said:

£22! Not 22 pounds. 

You wouldn’t write 28 dollars!

Apple has made it easier to handle symbols now. When a text field is selected, the fn-key with the globe on it brings up the character panel with all the emoji and symbols.



This can be changed in settings > Keyboard, first tab.

This character palette can also be enabled from settings > Keyboard > Input tab, show input in menu bar.

In the settings > Keyboard > Text tab, there's also a panel for custom text substitutions. Currency abbreviations can be added there like GBP and hitting space after will switch to the symbol. It's useful for all kinds of abbreviations like instead of remembering shift-alt-k is the  logo, it can use an abbreviation like apl.

Japhey said:

macgui said:

Why is it so hard to find something with AppleInsider's search function? Trying to find more info on the various 17 betas I did a search for iOS 17 betas after watching this video and Search returned:
https://appleinsider.com/search/?query=iOS+17+beta

This wasn't helpful but going to another site got me what I wanted. WTF AI? Search as been like this as long as I can remember. Did I use bad keywords?

I get better results by doing a web search and including “Apple insider” at the end. Way faster. Way more accurate. Way less irritating. 

Search engines also have keywords to limit searches to a particular site using site:appleinsider.com. So the search term can be:

"site:appleinsider.com ios 17 beta"
"site:appleinsider.com ios 17 beta 2/3/4/5"

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
https://www.google.com/advanced_search

diz_geek said:

bloggerblog said:

Hmm am I the only one who frequents Trailers!?

Nope - I usually open it a couple of times a month. Going to miss it - was always great for seeing not just previews for the big blockbusters but lots of smaller films as well that I otherwise wouldn’t have heard of!

danox said:

jeffharris said:

Who knew they even had an app like that.

Just what I want to do.
Sit and watch a bunch of trailers for movies I'd never want to see.

I guess if you can't afford a streaming service…

What is refreshing about the trailer program is that there’s no bullshit ads or pop-ups. The interface is clean, simple and easy to use, try it before it disappears. You can watch a trailer at your leisure and there is no garbage in between you and the trailer, well course other than the trailer itself.

There are trailers in the Apple TV app on all Apple devices, including Macs, this is what's replacing the Trailers app. On Mac it's /Applications/TV.app. In that app, go to the store tab, there are trailers available for most of the items.

It would be good to have a simpler filtering system. It's nice to be able to list all movies by year but sort by popularity/rating/release date and be able to filter out movies below a certain rating.

For going on a trip that is offline like a flight, you could search all movies in the last 10 years above 7/10, sort by popularity, tap a bunch of them, rent all, and store on iPad and you'd have decent movies to watch in a few minutes.

Potentially it could play the trailers back to back with a skip option.

Like an advanced search > start year, end year, above rating, sort by popularity/rating/release date, Genre (multiple). It would return a list of results and there can be a button to play trailers so you could sit through them in order and favorite/wishlist the ones you like or skip/ignore.