It is by design, but not that much. That's the point. The machines are designed to use swap and memory compression to greatly enhance responsiveness even with less physical RAM than competitors. And that works well for most users. But there's a bug in the heuristic, and for some users, it starts pathologically swapping.
We've seen the numbers go up in the activity monitor. Even while doing ~nothing. Fast. That is obviously a bug. Even with some Electron apps open and such, I guarantee the working set of active apps was nowhere near the physical RAM size. And so, that's a bug.
Terabytes per day of swap activity is not normal, no matter how much these machines are designed to swap on purpose.
As I said, there's one user with 20% usage as reported by the drive. That's not TBW, that's real (they're at >500 TBW, for what it's worth), and it means that machine is going to have a dead SSD within 2 years if the issue isn't fixed.
> Terabytes per day of swap activity is not normal, no matter how much these machines are designed to swap on purpose.
1TB is only 62.5 * 16GB. If its paging out 8GB+ apps (quite easy for chrome with a number of tabs) it only takes one memory hog to increase the TBW in a few hours of typical app switching for a mobile app developer.
This edge case is pretty extreme, sure, but its still a MINIMUM lifetime of 2 years. It doesn't mean its suddenly going to die when it hits 100%, and even if it did it should be covered by warranty. And this usage is an order of magnitude more than the vast majority of other reports that were made.
Im inclined to think its a non-issue, but totally respect your position.
As an aside, I use tab suspenders on my browsers - habit from my intel mac where chrome frequently caused memory congestion. Its probably why I get away with running 2 iOS simulators, an android emulator, xcode, intellij, 3 vscode instances, safari, firefox and chrome, and a bunch of utilities and services on an 8GB machine - but ill still be first in line for a 32GB+ 16+ core machine, because then ill be able to run VMs :D
A user having high drive usage doesn't make it an issue, let alone the same issue.
That user you linked to is using Catalina (as they mention in their twitter thread where they demonstrate a 3% usage increase over 2 weeks), so it will be completely unrelated to the support for silicon, which wasnt added until Big Sur.
We've seen the numbers go up in the activity monitor. Even while doing ~nothing. Fast. That is obviously a bug. Even with some Electron apps open and such, I guarantee the working set of active apps was nowhere near the physical RAM size. And so, that's a bug.
Terabytes per day of swap activity is not normal, no matter how much these machines are designed to swap on purpose.
As I said, there's one user with 20% usage as reported by the drive. That's not TBW, that's real (they're at >500 TBW, for what it's worth), and it means that machine is going to have a dead SSD within 2 years if the issue isn't fixed.