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MacBook Air Teardown Reveals M2 Chip and Single Storage Chip for 256GB Model
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The thing is that we simply don’t know why Apple used only a single chip instead of two. People make the assumption that it’s due to nefarious reasons, no matter that we’re all suffering from a parts shortage worldwide. Apple uses tremendous volumes compared to most vendors, except maybe HP and Dell. The easiest explanation is the simplest. They couldn’t get their hands on enough 128GB chips. The disaster in February where Western Digital lost 6.5 billion gigabytes worth of flash storage due to factory contamination makes me think it’s a simple parts shortage. I haven’t looked, but does Apple use those same chips for their iPhones? If they do, they’re probably hoarding what they can get for their iPhones where they sell five times more phones than Macs each year. Most of the iPhones they sell each year are 128GB and 256GB phones.
If they can’t get the parts, what do you expect them to do? Postpone release for six months to a year until the flash storage market is able to recover from the huge loss?
As others have argued, Apple could have short-changed things in a lot of places. Why flash? There are a lot of things they could have cut corners on that wouldn’t have affected performance. It’s not just the cable and headphone jack. There are a lot of internal or external parts they could have cut. They could have saved a huge amount, far more than the flash, just by using a lesser screen and a smaller screen that couldn’t have done 500 nits, leaving it at last year’s 400 nits. Why a 13.6” screen when they could have used a crap 720p webcam and cut out the notch, leaving the screen at 13.3”? No one would have had an issue with those, since we would have just thought that they were keeping things the same for an entry-level model. The MBP didn’t get a 1080p webcam. So why expect the MBA to have one?
See how they could have left things all the same as last year’s and saved a lot more than they would have on a small 128GB flash chip? Those are big ticket items I mentioned, not the penny ante headphone jack. It’s much easier to see it was a simple parts shortage. If they can’t get the parts, there’s not much to be done about it. They’re not going to push storage to 512GB because a lot of people would complain. Most people don’t need 512GB. People who are demanding 512GB be the new base just want their 1-2TB for cheaper since the upgrade would be less, not because the average person needs 512GB. They don’t. Three out of four people in my family could get by with 128GB. I’d love to see base storage go up because I’m the type who needs more, but I understand most people are not like me. Even as a power user, my Mac has about 550GB of stuff on it with half of it taken up by my iCloud Photo Library. I typically get the 1TB versions.
Here’s an amusing story (well, at least to me). I gave my wife my 1TB 2018 iPad Pro a while back, but the port broke and she gave it back to me. When I looked at it, I noticed she was using less than 40GB out of that 1TB. That bar that showed how much was being used looked funny with a tiny little blue sliver in a huge white bar. That struck me that most people are not power users and just don’t need much. She had no music, no movies, hardly any documents. That’s also why most people consider this issue a non-issue. Those who are concerned about it aren’t base unit buyers anyway. The first thought that occurred to me was, “what a waste”. 512GB would be like that for most people. My wife is now using a 64GB iPad Air 5, btw, and she notices absolutely no difference between that and her iPad Pro, not even the lack of ProMotion, except the fingerprint sensor versus Face ID.
Has anyone torn down a recently manufactured 256GB M1 Air (or recent M1 MacBook Pro 13") to see what the chip situation is in terms of the storage on those?
If there is a 128GB chip shortage, it seems weird they're giving the faster dual chip setups to the old models...
If there is a 128GB chip shortage, it seems weird they're giving the faster dual chip setups to the old models...
That’s wrong, they do! The only difference is that the braided cable is only available in white/silver with the 14”/16” Pros.
Valid points
I just want to say I really miss the thinner designs with full feature sets.
I really hope there is an air with six speakers, mini led, promotion etc.
Your baseline is very different than my mother who is running on a 6 year old 13" MBP. I highly doubt she will notice any issues with regards to swap but I grant you that no two users are identical and so to some degree this is always going to be a subjective consideration.
Did we not already know this (single SSD) weeks ago, or am I imagining things? And did we really need a video (and a previous post) to "confirm" that the M2 MBA ships with an M2 processor in it?
I am ok with them to keep the previous MBA M1 and open up a new higher end MBA with the M2. But why, oh why they haven’t done what they did with the higher end MBP and stick a MiniLED display with it. I mean, they could even do it with the iPad Pro 12,9” … why not with the MBA M2?
O see no reason for anyone with an M1 to upgrade as it is.
O see no reason for anyone with an M1 to upgrade as it is.
The bigger issue that nobody is talking about is NAND durability. We all know the single-chip solution here is inexcusably slower than the previous generation, but by removing that second chip you also increase the wear and tear on the remaining chip- every single bit of data must go through that chip instead of being split across two of them. If the NAND is SLC or maybe even MLC, it's probably not that big of a deal. If it's TLC or... ugh... QLC, then there could be some issues with SSDs failing down the line.
There usually isn’t much reason to upgrade your laptop less than two years after getting the previous one.
Why do you assume it is low end?
The speed of throughput is dependent on the total number of NAND chips accessed in parallel. In each Package there are large number of chips. So yes, the speed of throughput is reduced, but the NAND technology itself continues to move forward. This is in latency of chip to host speeds as well as the reliability of the chip over long cycles. Just because I have a one lane road instead of a two lane road doesn't make the road less bad in quality.
This doesn't make a lot of sense - SSD's memory systems are comprised of chips where each chip has multiple NAND chips inside. There isn't one single NAND chip die today that can reach 256GB (more like Gb).
As each generation changes, the die size capacity will increase per chip. NAND controllers have logic to help with wear such as wear-leveling which will even distribute the total amount of read write cycles across the chip as it manages the total amount of cycles as well as ECC. Having 2 chips vs 1 chip doesn't change the NAND reliability of the device if the total system storage size is the same. Both chips would be used in a unison (data stripe) resulting
in equivalent wear as the controller is distributing the cycles (but you have half the size per chip - think of it as one bottle vs two smaller bottles). The only different between having one chip vs two chips is that are increasing your chances of board issues as additional component is added to your board. Let's say this was a two package system, it would most likely create the similar systematic issues regardless.
Also most NAND controllers can use a mix of SLC and (TLC/QLC). There are moments where a customer could over provision the number of storage to offset reliability but I don't see that happening in a consumer part - maybe enterprise related.
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You are right. MR is covering stuff that has already been hammered into a pretzel.
The M2 Macbook Air, also known as the ”Tim Cook Special”.
The supply chain guy 😡
Steve Jobs would never allow this
The supply chain guy 😡
Steve Jobs would never allow this
Heat is a flow. If you consume less power in the CPU because you're throttling when the few grams of silicon are at a lower temperature, you'll have a cooler chassis when that heat flows out to more grams of aluminum.
Given the direction this conversation is going, I'll simply assume you have no evidence that there's any sort of thermal insulation in the M2 Air.
MaxTech doesn’t get review units nor do they get invited to anything by Apple. They actually buy all this stuff themselves to make money with their clickbait crap. Is it a fact that it’s slower, yes, will the average user ever notice or even care, NO!
I know and they don’t care, like I said, the channel is likely extremely profitable to need to wear the velvet Apple
handcuffs just to be able to get a review unit for a week or travel to an Apple event at your own expense.
And where do you get the information that backs up this claim? The vast majority of MacBook buyers, I'm betting, are going to go at leat 512 or 1TB. And those who do get 256 gigs are not likely to even notice a problem. How fast do you need it to be when you have only 200 gigs of space to fill anyway?
I’m a shareholder and my MBP is from 2013. I’ll wait another year for M3 using 3nm chips
It can't be "literally [your] point" when you're not reading what I wrote. The SSDs are neither color matched nor braided. The SSDs and the cables / headphone jacks come from very different production lines, likely in very different factories. It's entirely possible that there is plenty of excess capacity for cables right now, and yet no excess capacity for SSDs.
And now there is none unless you are a collector.
Compare that to the leap from the old MBP design to the new one.
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Well put.
Some people believe they live in a world where companies are well-oiled machines, an executive makes a decision, and lo, it was done. A happy world, of flawless execution, where fingers are snapped, and results happen.
In the real world, where things actually get done, external circumstances change. Humans mess up. Factories catch fire. ISO boxes fall off the boat. Mistakes are made. In this world, it's just a daily rolling cluster f**k of trying to get any good results at all whilst staying in a relationship and keeping the kids, dog, or hamster fed and watered.
Internet forums are particularly attractive to people in the first group. As they have lots of time, and no friends.
People in the second group not so much. But occasionally we get a day off, so we can join the lolz.
TBH though, my guess would have been on managing fewer SKUs in the supply chain. I didn't look it up, but I guess the 256 GB chip is also used twice in the 512 GB edition, which means less need to balance order volumes at a time of volatility. But I'm just an idiot on the internet, making wild guesses. No way of knowing, and AAPL aren't going to tell us.