In your opinion is the slower SSD controversy in the base M2 Air overblown?

[1BadManVan]

Well.. im bowing out of this thread. unfortunately 99% of the people trying to put down this MacBook dont actually own one lol. So this will go around in circles for months, they want to blindly follow some reviewers that run them on very unrealistic circumstances and call it proof, there's not a whole lot of hope then. Ill sit here and enjoy the heck out of nice new m2.

Have a good night everyone!

 

[throAU]

I agree and disagree. I think Apple did this as a cost saving measure and think it's not great. Will it affect everybody? No. It probably won't affect most. But buyer beware. You should know your use case and what you need.

But the M2 is actually snappier for certain things because its single core score is higher than the M1.

They may also have done this due to manufacturing constraints - its likely that 256 GB NAND chips are easier to source as no one is bothering to make smaller ones any more.

The instances where a machine with 8 GB of RAM and a maximum bandwidth off device of 1-4 gigabytes per second outrunning this SSD are.... miniscule.

I mean, the machine can fill its 8 GB of RAM entirely in 5 seconds instead of ~4 from SSD. Which is unlikely to ever happen, because the OS is going to remain resident to a large degree.

Any other scenario outside of loading data into ram or swapping data out of RAM (which isn't done at max SSD rate anyway, its done in smaller pages which either SSD likely won't reach peak throughput with) will be almost entirely network or port speed IO bound unless you're hooking up to a high speed thunderbolt storage enclosure (in which case, work off that? and how many entry level Air owners will have one? Answer: likely zero).

The onboard SSD will outrun 10 gigabit ethernet by a factor of 1.5. It will outrun WIFI by a factor of 10. It will outrun USB thumb sticks and micro-SD cards by a factor of 10 or more....

 

[ThailandToo]

Most overblown thing in tech. Absolutely ridiculous that MKBHD brought it up. I expect Max Tech to go for clickbait but not some of the more respected influencers. Problem is people cannot tell the difference in real world use. Only if transferring massive files maybe? Or when using an app designed to test the speed. Haha.

 

[BootsWalking]

Most overblown thing in tech. Absolutely ridiculous that MKBHD brought it up. I expect Max Tech to go for clickbait but not some of the more respected influencers.

You believe the mere mention of SSD performance dropping by 50% in a tech reviewer's video is ridiculous? So MKBHD is supposed to withhold that information from his viewers?

Problem is people cannot tell the difference in real world use. Only if transferring massive files maybe? Or when using an app designed to test the speed. Haha.

Exporting photos in Lightroom and doing merges in Photoshop are not real-world tests?

 

[colocolo]

Exporting photos in Lightroom and doing merges in Photoshop are not real-world tests?

I would like to meet the person that buys an entry level Macbook Air with just 256GB for Lightroom and Photoshop heavy use for it to matter.
Faster is better, I agree. From a principle standpoint, that an older gen should not be faster than a newer gen, I understand and concur.
But to claim that working with big files on a computer with a small SSD is a problem because of the speed in said drive, is kind of far-fetched. They would save more time by having an even slower external drive instead of having to move and delete every file they work in from their internal drive just to make space.

 

[BootsWalking]

I would like to meet the person that buys an entry level Macbook Air with just 256GB for Lightroom and Photoshop heavy use for it to matter.
Faster is better, I agree. From a principle standpoint, that an older gen should not be faster than a newer gen, I understand and concur.
But to claim that working with big files on a computer with a small SSD is a problem because of the speed in said drive, is kind of far-fetched. They would save more time by having an even slower external drive instead of having to move and delete every file they work in from their internal drive just to make space.

Why is exporting 50 photos considering heavy use? That's one outing. I use the internal SSD on my notebooks for speed and convenience, then periodically offload the results periodically to an external drive. Btw, an external TB3 NVMe drive would be faster than the 256GB internal SSD.

 

[Asiatic Black Hebrew]

Imagine how dead and boring this MacBook Air section of this forum would be if apple had not downgraded the 256gb ssd? lol

It wouldn't be dead because those same posters would just latch onto any other perceived slight that the YouTube crowd came up with.

 

[fisherking]

I would like to meet the person that buys an entry level Macbook Air with just 256GB for Lightroom and Photoshop heavy use for it to matter.
Faster is better, I agree. From a principle standpoint, that an older gen should not be faster than a newer gen, I understand and concur.
But to claim that working with big files on a computer with a small SSD is a problem because of the speed in said drive, is kind of far-fetched. They would save more time by having an even slower external drive instead of having to move and delete every file they work in from their internal drive just to make space.

i do a lot of work in affinity photo, and so far, it's been great. and i have always kept 'archived' work on a (backed-up!) external.

in 6 years, my 12" macbook ended up with 120GB avail (out of 256). i will be fine 👍

 

[colocolo]

Exactly. If you work with 50 photos of, say, 4 MB each, how much slower is it going to be? 20 seconds total?
On the other hand, if you are going to work on 100GB of files so you can measure the difference in a couple minutes, then you probably miscalculated the size of your hard disk. Exporting to an external drive will probably take more than those extra minutes I would think?
And yes, if an external drive is faster, and also it will not fit in your internal drive, it probably will not matter!
Anyways, do not mind me as I have no stake in this. I agree, faster is better. It should be as fast as possible.
I just sometimes take issue when real-world scenarios and math disagree.

 

[colocolo]

i do a lot of work in affinity photo, and so far, it's been great. and i have always kept 'archived' work on a (backed-up!) external.

in 6 years, my 12" macbook ended up with 120GB avail (out of 256). i will be fine 👍

Yep, and you probably wouldn't have noticed the speed difference then i would guess between these two SSD's.

 

[Ethosik]

It wouldn't have been a big deal if Apple had A., made it clear and obvious what's up with the 256GB SSDs when you order an M2 Air on apple.com, and B., had set pricing for 256/8 M2 Air at the same $999 that we saw for the og M1 Air.

But in the end, I think it all comes down to pricing: The added performance boost from the M2 chip and the overall upgrades to the M2 on all fronts simply aren't enough to recommend it when comparing it to the M1 Air or the 14" M1 MacBook Pro.

-$1199 is way overpriced considering the downsides of the 256GB M2 SSD and total value compared to the base model M1 Air. But if you then upgrade to a full-speed 512GB, then pricing is too close to the 14" M1 MacBook Pro.

So the big "controversy" for me is really just how low value in relation to price all the M2 configurations are compared to the options above and below it, the M1 Air and the 14" MacBook Pro.

I wouldn't recommend anyone buy it.

It’s no secret that larger capacity offers faster drives. I’m not getting the 7GB/s as advertised on my Mac Studio. I only get 5. My 16” MacBook Pro M1Max only gets 3 and my M1 Mac Mini gets 2.

 

[Ethosik]

Personal experiences have absolutely nothing to do with it. This is about performance and getting your money's worth. In the Infiniti example, should a person be quite content with a car that drives great at 65 mph (which is the speed most people drive) if it cannot perform above 100 mph? I would say no.😉

Personal experience is everything here. If you KNOW 1.5 GB/s is an issue to you, you would never have purchased it to begin with. If drive speed is so critical, you need to research ahead of time. I won’t blindly trust Dell/HP or whoever to have those stats in every SSD config available. I do my testing.

 

[Ethosik]

MaxTech is a clown show. Can we please stop citing them like they’re an authoritative source?

Their test was also on a nearly full SSD. Which is never good for SSDs.

 

[Heat_Fan89]

What if Apple put in an SSD with better reliability than the M1 MacBook Air? Or do you know the TBW on the new SSDs?

I think people overly obsess over TBW. There was a member on MR who purchased a base 2018 Mini, who put the SSD thru hell and back and after 3 years has lost about 5% of the SSD's life. I have a 2018 Mini that I also use everyday and when I checked a few months ago, I lost around 1% of the SSD's life span. The tech in SSD's is pretty freaking awesome and the TBW is not the maximum number it can go even higher. Manufacturers will post their TBW just for warranty purposes and a CYA for just in case.

 

[Analog Kid]

I mean, the machine can fill its 8 GB of RAM entirely in 5 seconds instead of ~4 from SSD. Which is unlikely to ever happen, because the OS is going to remain resident to a large degree.

You’re still being too conservative. Everything in SSD is compressed, everything in working RAM is not only uncompressed but sparse. Take a losslessly compressed 14 bit RAW image. Decompression typically doubles the data size, conversion to 16bit will add another 15%, debayering into 3 color channels will scale the memory use by 300%. Already we’re at 8:1.

But who has 1GB RAW images? Video, maybe, but then you have the added frame-to-frame compression. Of course you can probably fill that 8GB of RAM with 12GB of data because of memory compression, so maybe call that a wash.

It really is a fairly contrived use case that can trigger a user perceivable difference with these bandwidths into a storage pool of that size. There’s parallels here, I think, to the debates about gold plated HDMI cables.

I’m wasting far more time writing this post than a two chip SSD would save me in a week.

They may also have done this due to manufacturing constraints - its likely that 256 GB NAND chips are easier to source as no one is bothering to make smaller ones any more.

My guess is that two 128GB chips were cheaper when the did the M1 and 1 256GB chip is cheaper today. Apple has almost certainly done the testing and, as with everything the do, optimized it for price to user experience.

 

[Analog Kid]

Their test was also on a nearly full SSD. Which is never good for SSDs.

Yes, I know. “Clown show” wasn’t an uninformed opinion….

 

[spiderman0616]

"Overblown controversy" might as well be the tagline for this forum.

Remember when the 2nd-gen Macbook Airs came out and people were going crazy comparing the speeds of the different SSD vendors, and the quality of the different LCD suppliers? https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...our-ssd-model-and-display-model-here.1192807/

Or “storm in a teacup” works here too. There are some people on here that have absolutely no perspective on how big the world is, how big the Apple user base is, and how little “normal” people care about write speeds.

 

[ascender]

Apple should have explained about the single chip and the impact on speeds, but the truth is that for 99% of people who buy that base machine, they'll never notice its "slow" speeds, so yes, I think the reaction to it was blown way out of proportion, but that's the age we live in and we all know Apple are held to account in a way other tech firms aren't.

 

[Queen6]

Apple should have explained about the single chip and the impact on speeds, but the truth is that for 99% of people who buy that base machine, they'll never notice its "slow" speeds, so yes, I think the reaction to it was blown way out of proportion, but that's the age we live in and we all know Apple are held to account in a way other tech firms aren't.

Spot on, YT clickbait, million subscribers etc. I think that Apple gimped the base model for business reasons that make sense. As said unless your pushing an M1 Air/13" Pro to the max you likely wont see a differnce.

M2 Air looks to be a very capable product and can replace far larger systems with ease. I came up on really weak computers by todays standards. Those that think these notebooks are only capable of light work have no idea of the potential...

Q-6

 

[1BadManVan]

Apple should have explained about the single chip and the impact on speeds, but the truth is that for 99% of people who buy that base machine, they'll never notice its "slow" speeds, so yes, I think the reaction to it was blown way out of proportion, but that's the age we live in and we all know Apple are held to account in a way other tech firms aren't.

Apple isn't going to present a product and explain its fault when trying to show it off. The same way Dell doesn't advise people who get their new 13 plus that it will get worse battery life than its predecessor. Considering the Dell XPS 13 plus is a top recommended laptop, you have to actually dig to find its many issues being reported. Overheating, failed motherboards, driver issues, trackpad issues, worse battery life then last years model etc... Doesn't seem to be making any headlines though for these issues, but keeps topping the charts for a top recommended laptop lol.

MacBooks are definitely held to a higher standard by reviewers, even when comparing to equally as expensive windows alternatives. Apple gets criticized for the slower ssd speeds even on their more expensive models because its not gen 4 speeds. Yet most windows laptops aren't and reviewers complement their ssd speeds saying they are more then fast enough.

As a consumer who tries to research to make the right decisions, you really gotta dig down past the top layer of clickbait and bs to find the real facts it seems. Though its quite clear people get stuck at the click bait titles and make their conclusions based off that. Because im sure not seeing many threads flooded with actual owners of the M2 complaining about its speed. People love to complain on here so there should be not shortage of those threads if this was actually the case lol

 

[Jimmdean]

Unfortunately its deficiencies are based on business decisions and not technical ones. there's really no reason this model has to be inferior to the 14" MBP in every way but one, but that's just the way Apple does business.

 

[fisherking]

Unfortunately its deficiencies are based on business decisions and not technical ones. there's really no reason this model has to be inferior to the 14" MBP in every way but one, but that's just the way Apple does business.

and your source for this amazing statement? 'business decisions and not technical ones"

also, there are logical reasons for it not to be as powerful as the 14" MBP; that's the whole point; that these different macs have different purposes...

 

[Jimmdean]

the purpose of this mac is apparently to get people all riled up...

 

[1BadManVan]

the purpose of this mac is apparently to get people all riled up...

Success!

 

[Queen6]

Success!

lol

Q-6