Apple 13" M1 MacBook Pro (Space Gray, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) $1199 + Free ship

^ THIS.
At this point consumers should either considers the rock bottom priced MBAir 8GB RAM and expect a lifespan of 1-2 years at most. Or, cough up for 16GB RAM and hope it will last longer. The SSD on the 8GB machines WILL fail, there is no magic in that. Just be prepared that you can absorb an annual expense of roughly $1000, do not expect to use these Apples for 10 years.
Besides short life expectancy (like Ferrari ), really brilliant laptops

yes, I've seen. I have many, and I procure in the millions of $ annually for corporate use as well.
The new M1 OS is not magic as I said - Apple soldered fast SSD to the mainboard, similarly to what is done on phones, the swapping between RAM and SSD is faster that way, and creates the end user feeling of instantaneous switch between applications. It allows Apple to use cheaper CPUs because the RAM is on the CPU substrate and defects in lithography usually happen in memory area. This is the very same efficiency scaling that GPU makers use. Hence Apple started with 8GB chips until they harvest enough 16GB substrates.
Intensive usage of SSD however will destroy it. The SSD is not the resistor type hybrid RAM that HP or Intel have designed but never produced. Very likely we will start seeing some M1 laptops failing after 6 months...
Again, there is nothing magical in Apple. In fact, in heavy corporate use /we have tens of thousands Apple laptops/ I see more problems with Apple than other. Apple's hardware is also very corporate unfriendly for fix and maintenance - a downtime of a software architect will cost me several thousand dollars a day - we monitor a lot of related metrics.
However, for a retail user a BASIC Apple product makes more sense - basic MBAir for $800 /employee discount/ is great deal - basically with tax and accessories you assume $1000 annual depreciation which is OK rate for a quality made product. If it survives longer, you "profit". Beyond that model the financial risk increases (catastrophic failure), which is NOT slick.

lol. I've 2015 macbook pro running 12 hours a day since then. zero issues.

The claim is that the M1 Macs are swapping to storage way more than earlier models, which might result in a shorter life for the integrated SSD than people have gotten in previous Macs.

Macs are some of the most reliable computers around, and I say that as a windows guy. If M1 supposedly has super short ssd life is the claim, someone should back it up with some sources. Otherwise it's nothing but fud.

Also, think this through - Apple would take a huge hit to their reputation and their balance sheet, through Apple care repairs, if millions of M1 systems start dying in 2-3 years. Given that, if there are huge tbws every day, I suspect it's an os or firmware bug and not an intrinsic cpu design issue.

For anyone who thinks the memory swap will cause the SSDs to breakdown in a year is just living in fantasy land. The average user probably won't even use their laptops everyday. Those that do should be able to use it for at least 5 years. For a 256GB drive with 600x P/E cycle, can write 80+GB a day. How many people are writing 80GB to the drive everyday? Failing in a year would be like writing 400GB a day. For 10 years, just write on average less than 40GB, which is pretty doable.

It's not the user that's consciously doing most of those writing, it's the computer/operating system. I've had my computer for almost three years now, 40GB RAM & 2TB SSD. I mostly do web browsing and occasional Word, Excel on it. Yet, Samsung says I've written 36TB of data to the SSD. Can you imagine someone who uses their machine with more demanding apps? Luckily, I can swap the SSD. With Apple computers, you're screwed.

I can imagine that. The good thing is that SSD life span is high and I'm sure Apple's SSDs are on par with Samsung EVO series and you can write well over 600x harddrive size for TBW. These drives will still outlast majority of the components in the computer or outlast the computer's useful lifecycle. I'm not saying that Apple's software using more swapping isn't an issue. It is, but people are blowing it way out of proportion. They won't die in 2-3 years outside of a few heavy users on 8GM of RAM. For 99+% of the users, these drives will last 10+ years easily. And I'm not sure why heavy users are using the 8/256 version in the first place. Get a proper 32 or 64GB RAM laptop if you're a heavy user.

8GB RAM means more data being written to the SSD as a swap file. 256GB of storage means a lower life span. Combine the two and if the reports of excessive swap filing are true, you've got a major disaster waiting for anyone that chooses the cheaper machines. They're using those configurations because reviewers told them the M1 Macs were blazing fast and that was all they needed. Furthermore, Apple doesn't even offer 32GB/64GB configurations. Finally, I remember people here constantly saying most people don't need a lot of storage because of the cloud and external drives. Well, more RAM and more storage helps a lot in situations where the storage format is an SSD.

That is all true, but would it affect the average user? The 99%? I understand that it would affect people editing 4K or have 100 tabs open. But for the average user? It's not going to matter.

FYI
https://www.macworld.com/article/...bytes.html [macworld.com]

My 2-month old M1 just got the black screen of death Seems related to the Big Sur update according to this article - https://macexpertguide.com/m1-mac...ack_screen

Will they back up the drive if I take it to an Apple store? I have important docs in it for patents, code snippets from work, etc. I don't want them uploading the data to their own backup server. Sorry this is my first macbook.