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New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
- _ph_ 7y agoApple might have chosen cheeper SSDs to lower prices - which in principle think is a good idea on the entry level laptop, even cheap SSDs are plenty fast - why are they still charging insane prices for their SSD upgrades? Current market prices for SSD are between 150 and 300€/tb. For SSD upgrades in the MB Air, Apple is charging 240€ for each upgrade step. That means prices between 1920€/tb (128->256g) and 480€/tb (512g->1t). Even the price for the last step would consider an extremely healthy margin, but what about the other steps? And let's not talk about the 240€ for the 8g memory upgrade.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago>why are they still charging insane prices for their SSD upgrades? The answer to "why are they charging this much for so and so" is always "because a sufficient number of people are willing to pay it."
- jschwartzi 7y agoI just bought a 1TB NVMe PCIe SSD for $110.00 off Amazon. It's about 1Gbit/sec slower than the next price point but it's about 2 or 3 times as fast as my existing SATA SSD. The next-highest price point was a 3Gbit/sec 1TB SSD for about $150.00.
- imtringued 7y agoThose have gigabytes per second not bits. SATA 3 has 6gbit/s.
- josteink 7y agoIt’s 3GigaBYTES/s, not Gigabits/s. Nvme drives really are massively faster than their SATA counterparts.
- jschwartzi 7y agoOh shit. Well then that's cool.
- asark 7y agoApple's prices used to be non-insane. Marked up, yes, but not nuts. Wasn't even that long ago. You'd have people post stuff about "look I can get a PC that's just as good for 40% as much, what a ripoff!" but it'd always turn out they were choosing worse parts. These days, though, between price hikes, mediocre to poor base memory amounts and disc sizes, and massive markup on upgrades, it's not true anymore. Their prices are hugely inflated.
- danieldk 7y agoAlso interesting is that the SSD in the base model is still the same size as the SSD in the base model of the MacBook Air Mid 2013. Sure, the SSDs became faster, but it is quite insane that a model that is six years newer still comes with the same capacity (at roughly the same price). Other than that, it seems like a great laptop for its price. It's nice that the 'budget' models now have retina as well.
- wtallis 7y agoMinimum disk capacity requirements haven't really grown in quite a while. An OS plus a web browser still fits in 128GB with lots of room to spare. 128GB of flash now accounts for a much smaller portion of the machine's BOM, but the entry-level capacity itself still makes sense.
- bduerst 7y agoThe $1K aluminum monitor stand is symbolic in that regard, even though it's not even hardware.
- _ph_ 7y agoI hope it isn't software :). But yes, it is not even electronic.
- awinder 7y agoApple's had this model for over a decade at least where the base models are fairly priced but you can really make the thing uncompetitively priced through outrageous ram/storage upgrade pricing. That's exactly where things go off the rails -- in fact, it's pretty apparent to me that Apple is normalizing profit margins over expected upgrade volumes (so that entry level machine sells at lower than the profit margin apple wants, and they make it up by making ram/ssd upgrade carry higher profit margins). For the life of me, I can't / won't understand why Apple does this. It's a needlessly obtuse move on their part. It's the kind of thing that makes you start soldering ram & ssd to the motherboard in order to protect your biz pricing model; wouldn't it be easier to re-evaluate that biz model?
- uwuhn 7y agoI bought a new Macbook Air this weekend. I asked the sales associate who was helping me with my purchase why the new one was cheaper than the previous generation, which was still available in the store and being sold alongside the new ones. He told me it was because they had dropped the price point on the SSDs. I'm curious if they were actually briefed on why they're cheaper and what to respond with when asked, or if he actually didn't know why Apple reduced the price (cheaper/worse SSDs).
- wil421 7y agoThey were probably reiterating what they were told to say. The Geniuses or other technical minded employees might make their own assumptions but they will always say the Apple scripted response.
- rconti 7y agoI'm impressed they knew that much detail.
- JohnBooty 7y agoI'd be stunned if Apple told store employees much of anything that's not public, since anything juicy told to store employees would be guaranteed to leak nearly instantly via social media.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoClassic race to the bottom.
- benj111 7y agoNot really, gentle stroll from the top maybe.
- jerf 7y agoIs this even going to be noticeable at all out of benchmarks? Nominally, my personal system has something that can do 2GB/s, but in normal operation, as programs and OSes do their thing, the software is incapable of making requests quickly enough to come even close to saturating the bandwidth. I'm not sure if you dropped a part in there that maxed out at 512MB/s that I could even notice. Amdahl's law codifies the observation that as you get closer and closer to 0 time taken for a particular subtask, you'll rapidly stop gaining actual performance due to all the other subtasks that didn't speed up. It seems like 1GB/s is likely to be as close to infinite in practice as 2GB/s is.
- rarecoil 7y ago> I'm not sure if you dropped a part in there that maxed out at 512MB/s that I could even notice. I've done exactly this. I tried to run an NVMe drive and a SATA drive back-to-back in the same laptop to see if I could notice any difference in my day to day workload. I couldn't, and because of that I bought a 2TB SATA SSD instead of 2TB NVMe. SATA usually still has better power consumption than most NVMe drives, and they're cheaper too.
- jotm 7y agoYeah, NVMe is so fast, few people will ever need the speed. You'd have to, what, record raw video to fill it that fast? What other uses are there? Do OSes have optimisations to better use swap space?
- 7y ago
- cgriswald 7y ago> Before you go and start casting aspersions at Apple, the move makes a lot of sense. It'd be one thing if it did this and raised the price, but it actually lowered the price by $100, and the education discount brings it down to $999, making it the most affordable modern MacBook laptop ever (the outdated MacBook Air does not count). Which is fine for the entry-level model. Is it true for the more expensive model? The article doesn't say. > With that as the background, Apple was bound to make a sacrifice or two to reached the aggressive price point and it did so with the SSD. Most people will take that over it removing something like Touch ID or another feature they'd use on a daily basis. It's also worth pointing out that given it is an entry-level point product, most users who pick up the new notebook likely won't notice the difference at all. I'm not sure that most people would, given the choice, have gone that route. There are plenty of Apple features (including Touch ID) that Apple thinks people want, but I'm not convinced that most people definitely want them. The last sentence is the only one that counts: most people won't notice.
- _ph_ 7y agoAs I wrote below, slower SSD for lower prices is something I agree with, their SSD prices are just completely disconnected from the market.
- cpuguy83 7y agoTouch Bar, no... but Touch ID?
- cgriswald 7y agoLike I said, I'm not sure. The vast majority of people I know who have an Air or MBP have an older model without Touch ID. They might appreciate it if it is there, but they won't miss it in its absence. The only two people I know who've ever owned one that had it both returned it because they otherwise hated the device. For me personally, Touch ID makes sense on a phone, because I can do it with a single hand. For a laptop, I'm going to have my fingers on the home row anyway, and typing in even a complicated password is fast.
- 7y ago
- olliej 7y agoI wonder if there’s improved life expectancy of slower SSDs? (Serious question, not Apple fanboying here, any change in life expectancy is presumably incidental to reduction in price point)
- pkaye 7y agoSpeed of SSDs depend largely on number of NAND die and NAND technology. As they shrink the transistor size, they leak and interact more so it becomes a little less reliable (unless improve the error correction to compensate.) Smaller size means capacity per die increases so fewer NAND die to get target capacity. The main way to get performance on SSDs is to run the NAND die in parallel. With fewer dies, the performance drops. So you can increase the number of die and thus keep performance the same while increasing the capacity. But the likely went to first route to save money.
- olliej 7y agoOh yeah, like I said any changes in operational characteristics are incidental to the most important bit: reduction in cost.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoNo, it's the opposite. They're packing more bits into each NAND cell, which causes both the IO to be slower, and the drive less reliable.
- reilly3000 7y agoIt’s been real. After owning 6+ Mac laptops for the past 15 years I’m out.
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- microdrum 7y agoSame. Just bought first Windows laptop in 11 years: Thinkpad Carbon.
- throwaway3627 7y ago:/ Thinkpad T480 (T490 doesn't) has the ports, is light, durable, is user-serviceable and 10 hours of battery life with the bigger extended battery (which isn't very big). Great as a hackintosh. When other manufacturers blindly copy Apple (like removing the dual batteries of the T series), they lose future customers.
- accnumnplus1 7y ago250 nit. Fail.
- cgriswald 7y agoThat's interesting to me, because this is the first product they've offered in awhile that could have drawn me back. The return of actual function keys being the biggest draw. Unfortunately for Apple, my Mid-2012 MBP didn't last long enough for them to get their proverbial scat together and I'm running Linux on non-Apple hardware now.
- highace 7y agoYou'll be back for the trackpad alone.
- dghughes 7y agoI have to agree Apple makes a great trackpad. Most other manufacturers' hardware seems to consistently detect a movement as a drag action. Constantly detecting the wrong movement and drawing a box instead of moving the mouse pointer. It could be Windows OS that's bad or macOS that's good or a mix of OS and hardware. The Apple OS is nice but too restrictive for me. Windows I find is kludgy and bloated. Linux is nice if I can find the right distro.
- cm2187 7y agoWould be curious of whether this is before or after the cache. My understanding is that, for instance, newer Samsung QLC SSDs are slower but they include a very fast SLC cache, and in practice you spend your time in the cache unless you are copying >15GB files.
- derefr 7y ago> unless you are copying >15GB files. Or, presumably, using them in a miltitenant SAN or DBMS where the SSD’s pipeline is full of concurrent random IOPS to more than 15GB of hot data.
- wtallis 7y agoSLC caching is only used on consumer SSDs, and on most drives it is largely or exclusively a write cache. Consumer QLC drives are pretty much the only ones that prefer to retain data in the SLC cache to accelerate read performance, rather than flushing it during idle times to prepare for the next burst of writes.
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoGiven most people who will buy and use this device will spend more time waiting on JavaScript to load than on the SSD, I would say it is correct to assert nobody will notice.
- draw_down 7y agoI get such a kick out of watching you guys beat up on JavaScript. I mean really, what could be further from this topic, and yet here we are!
- who_what_why 7y ago1.3 GB/s vs 2 GB/s read. I think it's perfectly reasonable given most users aren't going to be doing high I/O, and if they did, they'd just get a MBP.
- uwuhn 7y agoI think the most common pain point with this is going to be an initial iCloud sync if your drive is full of stuff.
- grecy 7y agoAre you suggesting your SSD read speed will be a bottleneck when uploading huge amounts of data to the cloud? What kind of Internet connection do you have?
- ricardobeat 7y agoThats gigabytes per second. You’d need a 10Gbps+ internet connection to even start getting close to saturation.
- ken 7y agoThe MBA has Thunderbolt 3 ports good for "up to 40 Gb/s", so all you need is an external box to convert that to 10gig ethernet. Sonnet sells one: it weighs 3 lbs, has a 60W power adapter, and costs $500. It's the perfect accessory for your 2.75lb, 30W, $999 laptop!
- Marsymars 7y agoThose have been slowly coming down in price. You can get a bus-powered TB3 10G Ethernet adapter for $150 now.
- rsynnott 7y agoA 1.3GB drive would still saturate a 10Gbit link. Fortunately, there’s this: https://store.atto.com/order?ipa=211 https://store.atto.com/order?ipa=211 at a mere 2000$
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- filleokus 7y agoI like fast SSD's as much as everyone else, but it's not like those disks are a slouch. 1.3 GB/s is still plenty fast, especially for those who are in the market for the Macbook Air. It's probably however the first time, I can remember at least, where Apple downgraded a newer model in such an unequivocal way. I mean newer CPU's have had different multicore/single core tradeoffs, the inclusion of a dedicated GPU have been removed in base models etc, and the endless discussion of ports (rip SD card slot etc) but I don't think we have ever seen something like this?
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- lukifer 7y ago> where Apple downgraded a newer model in such an unequivocal way Also of note: the maximum SSD capacity dropped as well. Formerly the Air could be spec'd up to 1.5 TB, now 1 TB is the max.
- raverbashing 7y ago1TB is plenty for the MBAir cases Especially now that there is "the cloud" (and external hard drives)
- lostlogin 7y agoThe price for the 1.5 was truely ridiculous. It would be interesting to know how many they sold.
- jonknee 7y agoI wonder if they sold more 1.5TB MBAs or gold watches?
- lukifer 7y agoI went for the 1.5TB, despite the storage upgrade being more than the computer itself. That storage point is my bare minimum to keep existing personal files (plus headroom); I was happy to pay it, it's a great machine. :D
- rythie 7y agoIt's still very fast. Less than 2 minutes to read the entire drive of the base model. It's more than twice as fast as any SATA SSD. Similar to 2017 Macbook Air for read speed and much better write [1] I'm sure for almost all users of those machines, the SSD is more than fast enough for everything they want and big upgrade from HDD based Windows laptops many will be switching from (those were typical 3-4 years ago and even now are still around). https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pcs/laptops-and-netbooks/macbook-air-1300233/review/3 https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pc...
- ryanmercer 7y agoI imagine the vast majority of customers will never notice the difference as not everyone is buying these things to monkey with code or large video files.
- josteink 7y agoAre these new T2-based Macs usable with Linux yet? Honest question. Edit: For the downvoters, it’s a real concern: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/11/06/mac-t2chip-linux/ https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/11/06/mac-t2chip-linux/
- cultus 7y agoIt is not, and it won't be in the foreseeable future. https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202567 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202567
- wtallis 7y agoPatches have been posted to the linux-nvme mailing list adding support for 2018 and newer Apple NVMe. It looks like there are two main ways in which Apple's violating the spec, both of which can be reasonably handled by adding device-specific quirks to the driver. I expect these patches to be cleaned up and pass review in time to be shipping in stable kernels before the end of the year.
- mrpippy 7y agoIt's worth remembering that the storage architecture of T2-based Macs (like this MacBook Air) is very different from previous Macs and any PCs. The T2 chip is an Apple ARM SoC running Darwin/XNU (basically a cut-down iOS). It connects to the Intel system using a variety of buses. From a storage perspective, the T2 is the storage controller. It sits between raw NAND flash and the Intel system (connecting to the Intel with PCIe/NVMe). The T2 transparently encrypts all data stored on the NAND, using the factory-burned-in key. Given this architecture, how would read speeds drop by 35% from one model to the next? I'm not sure--my first guess was that fewer NAND chips were being used, but teardowns show that both 2018 and 2019 models were using two chips. So same controller, same number of chips. Maybe the NAND is just slower? Or the T2 has less RAM, so it can cache less?
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoIt might just be newer, higher density NAND. It's cheaper, but slower and less reliable.
- ksec 7y ago>Given this architecture, how would read speeds drop by 35% from one model to the next? I'm not sure--my first guess was that fewer NAND chips were being used, but teardowns show that both 2018 and 2019 models were using two chips. So same controller, same number of chips. Maybe the NAND is just slower? Or the T2 has less RAM, so it can cache less? It is very common, if not the norm to have SSD slower at lowest end capacity. Having 2 Chip shown in the tear down doesn't mean it has the same channels inside those package. My guess is that it is Dual Channel per package, and it is only running at 3 Channels on the 128GB SSD.
- wtallis 7y ago> Given this architecture, how would read speeds drop by 35% from one model to the next? I'm not sure--my first guess was that fewer NAND chips were being used, but teardowns show that both 2018 and 2019 models were using two chips. NAND flash is almost always packaged with a stack of several dies in each BGA package. Individual dies are typically 256Gb (32GB) or larger, and most manufacturers will stack up to 8 or 16 dies per package. So an SSD with two packages can easily vary from 128GB (2 packages x 2 dies per package x 256Gb per die) to 2TB (2 packages x 16 dies per package x 512Gb per die). It's also possible for a single BGA package to have the NAND organized on one or more channels. Drives using larger form factors (eg. enterprise SSDs using 2.5"/15mm dual-PCB) will typically have each package connecting to only one of the SSD controller's channels, and often have multiple packages per channel. Consumer SSDs that need to minimize PCB footprint take the opposite approach, using eg. two packages connecting to two channels each to fully populate a low-end 4-channel SSD controller. I don't know Apple's recent history of NAND choices, but it's possible they've switched from MLC (two bit per cell) to TLC (three bit per cell) NAND flash, which sacrifices performance for density and cost. They have probably moved to 3D NAND with a higher layer count, which can be a mixed bag for performance especially when the controller is not also upgraded. If they've moved to a higher per-die capacity for drives with the same total capacity, then a significant performance drop for lower-capacity models is expected.
- wwweston 7y agoWell, fortunately you can just swap it out with something faster if you don't like it. Wait, what's that? You can't? Oh. Well, if that matters to you, maybe you should buy a pro model that will let you customize components. What's that? Oh. Well, let's be honest, who really cares about this stuff anyway? If you want something different from what Apple is offering, you're really just not part of their market anyway.
- wedn3sday 7y agoMy philosophy has been for a long time that if you're doing anything thats even remotely taxing your laptop, you shouldnt be using a laptop for it.
- umanwizard 7y agoWhy?
- StrangeDoctor 7y agoParent is making the reasonable assumption that laptops are mainly dumb terminals with batteries, but takes an unreasonable step in stating that’s the only thing they are good for.
- rsynnott 7y ago... I’m not sure I like the idea of dragging a desktop around meeting rooms. Maybe that’s why the old cheesegrater Mac Pro had handles.
- Mikeb85 7y agoHonestly, SSD speeds barely matter for most workloads. For your typical task, everything gets loaded into RAM, so the user will notice what, a 40% increase in loading time once that session, and at 1.3gbps, that likely means half a second extra. Honestly, for a typical user, the typical amount of RAM and SSD speeds is more than enough.
- Razengan 7y agoYes. For a lower price than the 2018 model. Seems like manufactured outrage.
- TheOperator 7y agoWhen the best value option was always cracking the air open, putting the SSD on a shelf in case you ever needed to return it, and throwing in a new one. A cheap QLC drive is likely sufficient for any workload you would do on a MBA. Oh no... Apple is providing better value. Let's be mad at them for good reasons like having a poor keyboard on a device designed around typing.
- dexterdog 7y agoAnd in typical Apple fashion the price to get the SSD doubled from the laughingly small base of 128 to 256 ($188) is more than it would cost to but a drive 4 times that size.
- martinald 7y agoYou can get a 2TB SSD for that price these days. Apple charges $800 for that upgrade...
- filmgirlcw 7y agoI think this is fine. As other have said, if the price hadn’t changed and this happened, that would be annoying (even though the typical MBA customer won’t notice), but since the price has decreased, this is a fair trade-off. Incidentally, I got my mom the 2018 Air (to replace her 2010 13” MacBook Pro) and she loves it and she LOVES Touch ID. She uses her iPad for most things but occasionally needs a full computer and it’s been great for her. If I had any reason for a <del>third</del> <del>fourth</del> fifth laptop (I do not), I’d consider one just as something to play on.
- catacombs 7y agoAt this point, why bother buying a new MacBook?
- nazgulnarsil 7y agoSoldered on 128gb ssd. Expletives readily come to mind.
- floatingatoll 7y agoWhat real-word “more often than once a year” use case for a MacBook Air is affected by this change, that would not also require the CPU and RAM resources of a MacBook Pro to deliver in a human-acceptable time? Compiling requires a Pro due to the cores, so I/O won’t be your restriction due to the busy cores, and the small size of files and memory-cached directory structures. Video encoding a 2-hour, 50GB Blu-Ray rip is restricted to the performance of the hwaccel available, which is guaranteed to be less than 1Gbps of input for any plausible output, and thus not I/O restricted either. Any file size under 200M will be unaffected since it can be read from disk in one clock second on either old or new. So, completely seriously, who will be using an Air and negatively impacted by this change, such that it’s newsworthy and frontpage-worthy? Certainly not the students it’s targeted towards — unless they’re in data sciences, in which case they’ll need 2 minutes to process an entire drive full of data instead of 1 minute, having somehow overcome CPU and RAM limitations to do so. I believe such cases are possible, but I’m having a hard time constructing plausible ones.
- aurizon 7y agoThe 'Apple way', soon we will sell you a 35% faster upgrade...
- toomanybeersies 7y agoFor the intended user of a MacBook Air this isn't an issue at all, neither is the lack of peripheral ports. Most people I know with MacBook Airs don't actually use any peripherals. On the other hand, I need 2 dongles and a USB SD card reader just to do my job with my 2018 MBP. I also need an external keyboard, which I never used to need, because it's literally painful to use the keyboard all day.