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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
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.
Dropbox traditionally has not handled lots of small files particularly well. And in the past, my Dropbox folder has brought computers large and small to their knees… and made them kick up the fans.
Here was a fanless, highly optimized computer with a chipset said to allow for comically robust battery life — Apple claims 18 hours, and many reviewers have gotten close to that. How’d it do? Well at first, I thought it was holding its own. However, I soon noticed that Dropbox was taking up three-quarters of my RAM, and that my swap file was reaching 10 gigabytes in size. Even after letting it sit around overnight to sync, it still wasn’t done — and worse, I started seeing beach balls.
