For some, it’s just a balm for a tortured soul: the M1 Mac can be brought to your knees. This is easier than it sounds. Macs on Apple Silicon are not magic artifacts, they are just another type of computer. Their possibilities are not limitless, even if they exceeded expectations and are incredibly good, the laws of physics cannot be fooled. Ernie Smith, a journalist at Tedium, effortlessly made one of Tim Cook’s monsters burn up battery power in a couple of hours, spin the boot ball madly, and brake desperately. To do this, I did not have to edit the video with an incredible resolution or look for the only correct answer to the question about the meaning of life.
In recent years, Ernie Smith has seen little point in buying a new Mac. Not because of an allergy to everything apple – just fine with the Hackintosh and Linux installed on the HP Specter Folio, just like this laptop itself – and, frankly, Macs have not been inspiring for a long time. But what his fellow journalists wrote (and continue to write) about the M1 and Mac’and with the M1 inside, did not leave him indifferent. Fighting with himself took some time when he defeated mistrust and doubts, all configurations of M1 Macs except the minimal ones had already been snapped up, and before the new year, they will not be delivered.
On the UK site Amazon, he bought a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD – by the way, as I write this, they are also “temporarily out of stock”. I installed the Dropbox application (there is no version for Apple Silicon yet, but it will be released soon) and launched it, after which the synchronization with the “cloud” began. This brought the M1 Mac to its knees. Actually, if you do not go into details, this is the whole recipe.
MacBook on M1 isn’t all that powerful
The MacBook Air is noticeably warmer, and if it had a fan in its design, it would squeal like mad. And then a non-standard thought came to Ernie’s head: they say that the battery charge is enough for the M1 MacBook Air for 18-20 hours of battery life – it’s time to check it out. And he disconnected Air with a 100% charged battery from the power supply.
Read More: Why MacBook Overheats and How to Fix It
By removing the main suspect from the game (I will name him in the next part), and restarting the process, Ernie was able to significantly speed up it and reduce the load on Apple’s most everyday laptop – this time the battery was discharged to 30% in four and a half hours. It turned out that the culprit was not alone. Synchronization continued in the morning, it took several more hours. Then, of course, the MacBook Air turned into a miracle computer and “flew” again – but this is “after a fistfight”, isn’t it?
Why does my MacBook freeze?
For more than ten years, Ernie has accumulated over 200 thousand files in Dropbox. Including traces of the life activity of the content management system on Node.js, which no longer exists. The directory node_modules, the main application of this system, with a huge number of very small files, and others. Working with small files isn’t one of Dropbox’s strengths – but which one of us doesn’t have any flaws? Moreover, these directories and their contents, even if the CMS were still in use, need not be synchronized. Ernie blames himself for the fact that everything is so neglected – laziness and bad habits – but it would be more correct to blame Dropbox. The end-user is not obliged to monitor the internal aspects of the life of the software running on him.
But node_modules were just one of the criminals, not even the main one: in the past years, Ernie has “played” with Dropbox more than once or twice, trying one or the other – and, failing to achieve the desired result, did not delete anything. What these tricks were and what he wanted to achieve, Ernie does not say. Apparently, they still worked, but not in the way intended. Well, hundreds of thousands of small files have not gone anywhere either.
After some thought, Ernie found some more facts in defense of the weakest of all M1 Macs, which not only lacks a fan but also has only seven living cores in the GPU. Presumably, Ernie has this Air. Syncing storage to Dropbox wasn’t just about the M1 MacBook Air. That’s not the worst thing. This time. The “translator” Rosetta 2 took part in the synchronization – which, of course, could not but affect the result. These are two. And unlike some other computers, the M1 MacBook Air did the trick, albeit with difficulty.
