Isn’t basically m1 air equivalent in specs?

I’ve got that one and I’m yet to feel limited.

Maybe/maybe not (we don't know how identical the A18 chip is to what shipped in the iPhone) - but it does determine that the virtualization stuff that was added to the M1 (in the era of the A14) has now moved over to the A series, at least enough to support macOS.

Is this a trick question? Of course. However Apple imposed artificial limitations, like disabling JIT.

from what i seen in "low end" ssds like the "120gb sata sandisk ones" under windows in heavy near constant pagging loads is that they exceed by quite a lot their manufacturer lifetime TBW before actually actually started producing actual filesystem errors.

I can see this could be a weaker spot in the durability of this device, but certainly it still could take a few years of abuse before anything breaks.

an outdated study (2015) but inline with the "low end ssds" i mentioned.

https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-t...

There was quite a bit of discussion about that when the M1 first came out, but none of it really seemed to have happened six years later. The target audience isn't in danger of wearing it out and the ones that will push the limits will grow tired of it and sell it in a year or two or move on to the Neo 2, which might have 12gb of ram due to the expected chip.

I still think it's a great machine, but I think all these worries about NAND dying really haven't come to fruition, and probably won't. I have about a hundred plus of various SSD Macs in service and not one has failed in any circumstance aside from a couple of battery issues (never charged and sat in the box for 2 years, and never off the charger).

Most flash has average wear out after 300k cycles. Let's say 64GB is used for swap. That's 19200 TB or 19.2 PETABYTES of Swap usage. Let's say you swap 12GB a day, you will burn out that 64GB of Flash Storage in 4.38 years and my guess is that amount of swap usage is extremely high that user would probably replace laptop sooner out of performance frustration.

Yeah. It's the first production Mac using an A-chip and is a Mac that has had many things cut out for savings. The question is did Apple feature cut required functionality.

It uses the iphone processor (which I think still might be one of those Mchips?) so I think it was ok to be unsure.

Took 6 minutes from power button to login prompt this morning. Probably even longer from login responsive desktop. So yes, probably!