How to Break Apple’s M1 Chip

My bad Dropbox organization habits brought Apple’s power-sipping MacBook Air to its knees in just a single day

Ernie Smith
Debugger

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The Apple M1 chip computer logo seen on a mobile phone screen next to a larger Apple logo
Photo illustration: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

I’m not a video editor, but I’m pretty sure I brutally slayed the M1 MacBook Air I just bought (8 GB RAM and a 512 gigabyte SSD, in case you were wondering) in less than a day of use.

It comes down to two reasons, really: The lack of an Apple Silicon-optimized Dropbox app (it’s coming), and a solid decade-plus track record of bad habits in terms of how I store my old projects.

So, here’s the deal: For a number of years, the content management system I used for my newsletter was based on Node.js, which generally stores its many parts inside of folders called node_modules. Any small Node applet inside of the primary Node app can also have a node_modules folder. These apps basically build on one another, creating a Russian nesting doll of sorts, each folder filled with its own tiny folders, of which there can be thousands included in a single directory.

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Ernie Smith
Debugger

Editor of @readtedium, the dull side of the internet. You may know me from @ShortFormBlog. Subscribe to my thought machine: http://tedium.co/