Just looking for a second opinion. I bought the Macbook Air M2 (8GB ram/256) for £839, refurbish from John Lewis, its grade A, new it cost £1,119.00 but looks like new. But after talking with some friends they advise me that the SSD its very slow and that afects the performance of the laptop. I did some research, and in fact the m1 is quicker. But does it really makes a huge difference, because i actually prefer the screen on the M2. How can Apple mess with something like this?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Should i return my Macbook Air M2 and go for the M1
- Thread starter redswap
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
That would be stupid and your friends are misinformed, the M2 is a better machine than the M1. Unless you spend a significant amount of your time transferring large files the M2 is faster and as a machine is nicer to use.
It isn’t that the SSD is very slow is just that is slower then the SSD in the M1 air.
unless sitting there running disk benchmarks however you won’t notice the difference In actual use.
the ssd in the m2 is still fast enough
unless sitting there running disk benchmarks however you won’t notice the difference In actual use.
the ssd in the m2 is still fast enough
The SSD is half the speed of M1 Air. Noticeable mostly when copying large files and/or loading games.
You can opt for 512gb version and get the same SDD that was in the base M1.
No, the SSD is very slow. Even my 4-year old MBP has a faster SSD. It’s a joke selling such SSD’s in 2022.
But it was a good move by Apple as the 16gb/512 model was the one that had the highest delivery time during launch while the base M2 MBA could be picked up the same day. So Apple made a killing selling upgrades.
So I won’t be surprised if Apple will do the same with the M3 MBA by nerfing the base model, so more people are likely to buy overpriced upgrades to fix the machine.
Last edited:
People above talking about the SSD are clueless and just repeating clickbait. In use you will notice zero difference unless transferring large files, and everything else about the M2 is faster. Even moreso than the 14" Pro for most tasks actually, but like the SSD thing nobody would actually notice that in use unless specifically doing tests to look for it.
Yes, running benchmarks you can see a difference, BUT during your own real world usage, would you really see a difference? I think most people would be hard pressed to actually notice a difference.
What is more disconcerting is whether you can live with 256GB? If you're ok with that, then this is a great deal and I wouldn't sweat the performance difference.
If the machine is quick enough for anything you do and your real world experience doesn’t suffer, forget about internet noise.
I concur. Some people, especially reviewers, get so wrapped up in specs , AKA measurbation, while ignoring teh real world impact. Yes, if you are doing heavy video or photo editing, for example, and transferring large files, you will see a performance hit. Then again, if your workflow involves that and the extra 30 seconds or so a transfer may take is a problem, you probably need more than an M2 Air as a daily driver.
As you point out, that is an edge case and most people would be well served by either an M1 or M2 as their main machine.
I had an M1 MBA but got the 14"MBP when it came out to replace it; and while it is a bit better at running a VM and when I am doing some heavy duty Excel work, the speed difference on a day to day basis is inconsequential. The real selling point was the extra ports and SD slot.
Good advice
Thank you guys for all your input. Definitly i didnt notice any issue on the laptop performance. Im not a video or graphical designer, so for all the rest is in fact perfect. Merry christmas to evryone.
I agree. I wouldn’t expect a stripped down MacBook Air M2 with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD to be very useful for much more than casual use. If he is happy with it, then great. Otherwise I would suggest a model with a larger SSD because a 256GB SSD will fill up quite fast. Once that SSD reaches less than 100GB available, the whole MacBook Air will slow to a crawl, especially with just 8GB RAM. So a 256GB SSD means you only have about 150GB of storage space (which includes all the system files) before it slows to a snail’s pace! At the very least he should consider getting a good USB-C gen 2 external SSD with at least 2TB storage capacity.
Say what? 100GB free out of 256GB is perfectly fine. Measurable slowdowns are uncommon until SSDs are nearly 100% full. Even then, it's generally only writes which suffer, reads should still be full performance, and well engineered SSDs won't even suffer much of a write performance hit.
I think you're a player in a regrettably common online game: someone says something slightly silly on a random forum, other people repeat it and amplify it in the retelling, and pretty soon we have people earnestly telling each other to buy 4x as much SSD as they actually need or they'll surely be stuck in performance hell.
I would not recommend a 2TB external SSD to the OP unless they actually have a use for 2TB of storage that is less convenient to use than the internal drive.
Never chose performance over screen quality! I'd always go for the better screen, regardless of the computer behind it. It's the saddest thing to see those ultra-fast Mac Studios hooked up to ****** monitors.
It's only the smallest version of the M2 MBA, which has half the SSD read/write speeds, because it is build with only a single 256GB SSD chip. I'd try to contact John Lewis and offer them a few more pounds, if they swap your refurbished 256GB M2 for a refurbished 512GB M2.
Really 1500MBps is very slow.
figure from black magic speed test on review site for the 5Gig file transfer.
just because something is not as fast as something else it doesn’t make it very slow.
as OP has come back saying then hasn’t noticed any performance issues so clearly is fast enough for what using for. I’m
In 2022, you can buy Samsung 1TB SSD's for $130 that is 5 times faster. Stop shilling for Apple really. It's slow as ****.
Last edited:
In 2022 a normal laptop user doesn’t notice, care about, or even have awareness of hard drive speeds. Samsung actually does need a lot of people shilling for them though since they are a third rate device maker.
Please show us an external Samsung SSD that gets anywhere close to 7500 MB/sec on a Mac.
Last edited:
Yes return it immediately, based on the advice of complete strangers and friends whom have heard things on the internet. Because your non stated use case will be impacted severely if you don't do it now.
This is plain wrong.
I personally would not get a 256GB machine but I wouldn't presume to tell others not to without more info about their usage and budget.
Nowadays most files are stored online. 256GB is actually good enough. I store most in iCloud and OneDrive (1TB, came with Office 365) and though I have external hard drives, stopped using them altogether. Basic configuration is enough. Since you store files online, internal SSD speed doesn't matter much because I don't copy 60GB files everyday. In fact, I don't copy them at all.
I seriously suggest you learn the difference between ”slow” and “is not as quick as”
I have to agree. iCloud for personal files, my company’s instance of OneDrive for work files, and my local external drive for Time Machine backups. The things that take up the space on all my stuff are apps, namely games and editing apps, and the files that go with them. I largely stay away from apps and services that don’t have APIs for one or both of those services.