Don't forget SSD degradation since it's not a user replaceable part and you can't do true external boots (it copies to the internal storage). That's my biggest worry.
SSDs aren't exactly known for high failure rates, especially if you're staying within their expected endurance. Sure, you can kill one by running fluid simulations of one, but any sane use case doesn't even come close to what you'd need to kill one with any decent level of expected endurance.
The only ones I've heard of dying are from brands I'd never trust in the first place, or from bad firmware, and my impression is that it's usually the controller dying, and with the controller being part of the chip itself on Apple Silicon, it's not gonna die without taking the rest of the machine with it, and for the most part, they just aren't.
The M1 is old enough that we'd know about it if the faliure rate was abnormally high.
> Sure, you can kill one by running fluid simulations of one, but any sane use case doesn't even come close to what you'd need to kill one with any decent level of expected endurance.
If fluid simulations are included in your definition of serious work, then you can't do serious work on any machine with less than at least 128 GB of RAM, probably more, be it Windows, Linux or Mac. Your SSD will be killed by excessive writes no matter the OS or what specific hardware you've chosen. You can probably get enough RAM on some of the highest end Macs to not have to swap to disk for fluid simulation of any decent size, although I haven't looked into that. 128+ GB of RAM is a big ask no matter your platform.
No widespread failures have been reported on M1s. SSDs often exceed their expected lifespan, especially when spec’d generously. But, monitoring tools can misreport, so be cautious drawing conclusions from early TBW readings.
So, when choosing a Mac, opt for higher RAM and SSD capacity to reduce swap pressure and spread wear.
If you are cautious, monitor TBW, but interpret the data with healthy skepticism.
