The first line of the smartctl output everyone's bandying about says that a total of 1% of the drive's capacity has been used, which means that in about 16.5 years (2 months * 99 / 12) their drive will go readonly.
What, exactly, is the problem with that?
It seems like there are a lot of assumptions in play in this "headline news":
(1) assuming that the reported numbers are valid for this measurement at all
(2) that they are not a bug in the IOKit implementation used by smartctl
(3) that they are not not a bug in smartctl itself
(4) that they are directly comparable to non-M1 hardware without further processing
(5) that they do not increment when Time Machine or other filesystem snapshots occur
(6) that they do not increment when APFS copy-on-writes occur
(7) that they do not include the total byte size of sparsely-modified files
I don't see anyone checking these assumptions yet, but if y'all do, supporting links on those points would improve this HN post considerably. There are other assumptions that could be tested too! Outrage is cool, but science is productive.
What, exactly, is the problem with that?
It seems like there are a lot of assumptions in play in this "headline news":
(1) assuming that the reported numbers are valid for this measurement at all
(2) that they are not a bug in the IOKit implementation used by smartctl
(3) that they are not not a bug in smartctl itself
(4) that they are directly comparable to non-M1 hardware without further processing
(5) that they do not increment when Time Machine or other filesystem snapshots occur
(6) that they do not increment when APFS copy-on-writes occur
(7) that they do not include the total byte size of sparsely-modified files
I don't see anyone checking these assumptions yet, but if y'all do, supporting links on those points would improve this HN post considerably. There are other assumptions that could be tested too! Outrage is cool, but science is productive.