I can say without a doubt, the Mac minis are really good though.
It should be illegal to sell a desktop computer with a hard drive that can never be replaced.
All hard drives go bad eventually, and while my 2012 Mac mini allowed me to keep swapping out the hard drive. Which made it a great computer up until I kind of retired it when I bought a new m1 Mac mini.
The current m1 Mac minis are all guaranteed to die within 10 years when the hard drives fail. Sure, you can do an aftermarket replacement, sure, I guess you could weld a new hard drive in .
But most people are going to just throw them out and buy new ones. I imagine depending on your usage, you might blow out your unreplaceable hard drive even sooner. Won't surprise me if these drives start failing within five or even 3 years for people storing tons of large files
Say you make a lot of 4K and 5K movies, I can't imagine a tiny 256 SSD getting files written to it, and delete it from it over and over again will last that long.
> I imagine depending on your usage, you might blow out your unreplaceable hard drive even sooner.
It's possible, but seems unlikely since TBW ratings are super-conservative.
> Say you make a lot of 4K and 5K movies, I can't imagine a tiny 256 SSD getting files written to it, and delete it from it over and over again will last that long.
Honestly, that wouldn't be enough to do much anyway. I'd venture that pros are more often using external TB3 SSDs (often in RAIDs) or a DAS. I understand that the boot drive may be used for caching even in that case.
Some real-world data: My M1 Air /w 1 TB SSD has written 368 TB total, and SMART thinks it's got 88% of its lifetime left. Depending on how good SMART is about estimates like these, that would give the Air SSD a TBW of 3,000 or so.
It's so ironic that this is the end game for a company that thought they were saving the earth by making you buy a charger for you cell phone separately
It should be illegal to sell a desktop computer with a hard drive that can never be replaced.
All hard drives go bad eventually, and while my 2012 Mac mini allowed me to keep swapping out the hard drive. Which made it a great computer up until I kind of retired it when I bought a new m1 Mac mini.
The current m1 Mac minis are all guaranteed to die within 10 years when the hard drives fail. Sure, you can do an aftermarket replacement, sure, I guess you could weld a new hard drive in .
But most people are going to just throw them out and buy new ones. I imagine depending on your usage, you might blow out your unreplaceable hard drive even sooner. Won't surprise me if these drives start failing within five or even 3 years for people storing tons of large files
Say you make a lot of 4K and 5K movies, I can't imagine a tiny 256 SSD getting files written to it, and delete it from it over and over again will last that long.