Apple seems to have fixed the highly reported issue with SSD wear and tear in M1 Macs with the release of macOS Big Sur 11.4. Many user had been sharing reports that the number of reads and writes on M1 Macs was considerably higher than its was on Intel Macs due to increased swap usage, which meant that it would potentially shorten the life span of the non-replaceable SSDs. This was tested by many websites and YouTubers and confirmed to be an actual issue.
Issues with M1 Mac high SSD swap usage were due to incorrect data reporting
However, as per a new report by AppleInsider, the issue was not an actually problem with the SSDs on M1 Macs, but a problem with the data reporting. The SSDs were functionality normally but the incorrect data reporting meant that tools showed a higher number of reads and writes, which was attributed to higher RAM swap, specially on M1 Macs with just 8GB of RAM.
A source within Apple has confirmed to AppleInsider that the reporting issue has been fixed with the release of macOS Big Sur 11.4. The update also fixes another issue where uptime statistics were not being reported correctly, and third-party apps and tools showed incorrect data.
The issue was confirmed to have been fixed in early macOS Big Sur 11.4 beta builds by Hector Martin, the developer behind Asahi Linux, a Linux distro fully compatible with Apple Silicon Macs. As macOS Big Sur 11.4 was released for all users over two weeks ago, the fix has been publicly available for M1 Mac customers and should be applicable for M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and the recently released iMac.
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