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sdietric said:

Is there any question that this was not leased equipment? The article says Apple deems this “leased” equipment. I am sure it should be abundantly clear with the contract developers signed when they received the hard if it is or not leased.

wizard69 said:

elijahg said:

It'll be interesting to see how well the M1 manages to push the 15 million pixels on the 5K iMacs, which some of the discrete GPUs struggle with. That's quite a few more than the ~3m on the 13" MBP. 

It will be a problem for M1 but at a minimal I would expect an M1X.    Actually we could just ask a Mini owner with a 4K screen.   

Personally I don't see Apple giving up on discreet GPU's this year.   What would be interesting is if they have a program with AMD to produce an optimized GPU for the high end machines.   In this case I could see AMD & Apple implementing AMD's fabric interface instead of PCI-Express.  

smartctl -a disk0

to get a starting value of the "Data Units Written" and then wrote 400 GB to the internal SSD and then used the tool a second time to get final number. TLDR, it came out to almost exactly 400 GB using the tool. While I was writing the data, I watched the disk writes from the Activity Monitor Disk tab and also saw 400 GB being written.

Here are the numbers:

starting units: 12,724,656 [6.51 TB]

ending units: 13,506,170 [6.91 TB]

total: 781,514 [0.4 TB]

The math is simple arithmetic. subtract the starting units from the ending units and multiply by 512*1000. The result is 400,135 MB which is pretty much exactly 400 GB. This matches the 0.4TB of the result of subtracting 6.51 TB from 6.91 TB.

I've also looked at the smartmontools code and verified that the offsets they are using within the byte array returned by the macOS IOKit api are correct according to the NVMe specification. https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/NVM-Express-1_4-2019.06.10-Ratified.pdf (See section 5.14.1.2).

After my experimentation and research, I'm totally convinced that the latest version of smartmontools is working correctly and is returning the correct data on writes to the SSD and that offset to the Percentage Used value is the correct offset into the byte array. If Apple's NVMe SSD controller is not writing the correct value of the %used, that is on them but the actual number of bytes written to the SSD checks out and it is easy to repeat my experiment.

Edit: A point on the ambiguity of Power On Hours. The specification says this, "Power On Hours: Contains the number of power-on hours. This may not include time that the controller was powered and in a non-operational power state." So there is no mystery why the number for Power On Hours is low. The new M1 Macs are very low power machines that take every effort to reduce battery usage by turning off unused subsystems. This includes the SSD. And the SSD is very fast so the total on time is very short in general.

darkvader said:

tenthousandthings said:

Makes me wonder if the first new iMac is coming in March. I mean, rumors seem to point to later in 2021 for M2, but that’s a very long wait for this rumored iMac redesign. So maybe we’ll see a 24” M1 iMac with at least 32 GB memory sooner rather than later?

Surely there are developers who would prefer to put their $500 toward an iMac, instead of having to use it on a laptop or a mini?

Huh?  They'd certainly be better off getting an iMac now, while they're still worth having.

Of course, they'd probably be even better off just reporting the dev kit "stolen" and sell it on ebay to some crazy collector.  Might even be able to buy a decent Intel Mac Pro that way.

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

I wonder what would happen if I drove to the address on the FedEx label and tried to hand deliver it back to Apple?