Base Model MacBook Air With M2 Chip Has Slower SSD Speeds In Benchmarks (macrumors.com) 45
According to The Verge's review of the new MacBook Air with the M2 chip, the $1,199 base model equipped with 256GB of storage has a single NAND chip, which will lead to slower SSD speeds in benchmark testing. MacRumors reports: The dilemma arises from the fact that Apple switched to using a single 256GB flash storage chip instead of two 128GB chips in the base models of the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Configurations equipped with 512GB of storage or more are equipped with multiple NAND chips, allowing for faster speeds in parallel. In a statement issued to The Verge, Apple said that while benchmarks of the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro with 256GB of storage "may show a difference" compared to previous-generation models, real-world performance is "even faster":
"Thanks to the performance increases of M2, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip. These new systems use a new higher density NAND that delivers 256GB storage using a single chip. While benchmarks of the 256GB SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2 based systems for real world activities are even faster." It's unclear if Apple's statement refers explicitly to real-world SSD performance or overall system performance.
"Thanks to the performance increases of M2, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip. These new systems use a new higher density NAND that delivers 256GB storage using a single chip. While benchmarks of the 256GB SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2 based systems for real world activities are even faster." It's unclear if Apple's statement refers explicitly to real-world SSD performance or overall system performance.
Way not to present any details. (Score:5, Informative)
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But Apple kind of calls it fakes news and says this new model is even faster for "for real world activities"!
Re: Way not to present any details. (Score:2)
It is great as placemat, or even wall tiles. Aluminum wall tiles are badass.
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Anyways I just want to point out that it's an embarrassment to Apple that they sell anything with a puny 256 GB SSD at all, let alone for $1200. On amazon a 512 GB Samsung SSD costs $54. It's tempting to say anybody paying $1200 for a 256 GB laptop almost certainly doesn't care anyways and just wants any old laptop with a white apple on it so who cares.
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1. The Apple logo on modern laptops is silver, not white.
2. If you want more than 256GB, other options are available. It is silly to complain you have an option you don't want when you still have the options you do want. Not everyone has the same priorities as you.
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It costs an extra $200 for an extra 256 GB of storage. You could also opt to pay $300 extra to get 10 core GPU model which by default comes with 512 GB of storage. $200 is enough to buy a 1 TB Samsung 980 Pro SSD which is a very high end SSD, complete with controller. There's no reason why an extra 256GB of storage should be a a $200 upgrade.
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The problem with Apple is that they charge a lot of money to add extra storage, and you have to buy the storage from Apple because it's all soldered in and non-upgradable.
The easy solution, of course, is to not buy a laptop with a piece of fruit on the lid.
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It's because slower SSD speed delayed the post of this dupe, otherwise it would have been posted the next day or something.
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That is indeed the case, essentially they moved from using 128GB flash chips to 256GB flash chips, so now the 256GB model is only single channel.
That wouldn't be so bad if it was possible to upgrade the machine with your own parts. Unfortunately it isn't, so you have to buy the spec you want up front because the SSD and RAM are fixed. Thunderbolt does allow for the installation of a fast external SSD, but there is nothing you can do about the RAM. The base model is only 8GB.
meh (Score:2, Flamebait)
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sure, if it's 22 Slashdot tabs, no problems :)
now try 22 YouTube tabs!
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Just to make sure, you do count the memory used by all your browser "helper processes" as well?
Currently, my main firefox process use 384MB but with helper processes, it uses about 2GB.
Please confirm that you are taking helper processes into consideration. Nowadays, both chrome and firefox fork many of them when you start either one. Helper processes even have many unrelated and different names so they aren't obviously caused by your browser if you aren't aware of them!
Back in the days, there was only one p
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FYI:
#946528 is PID of main firefox process, this list all child processes with % of memory usage.
ps ax -o pid,ppid,pgid,comm,%cpu,%mem | grep 946528
946528 1291 497185 firefox 1.5 9.2
946579 946528 497185 Socket Process 0.0 0.5
946632 946528 497185 Privileged Cont 0.0 2.4
946686 946528 497185 WebExtensions 0.2 6.1
946748 946528 497185 Isolated Web Co 0.0 4.6
946749 946528 497185 Isolated Web Co 0.0 3.8
947137 946528 497
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It's a non-trivial task to figure out how much RAM something is actually using in linux. What you get is all of its anonymous mapped pages + heap, which is an overestimation of the actual memory used.
Imagine:
you have a tmpfs entry-
Who gets charged for the memory usage?
Or, 2 processes load a
In reality, the system only has it in memory once, it's simply mapped into both processes.
Who gets
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Granted, it only gives you ball park figures. I could get into how much is swapped to zRAM which also consumes memory , is that .so library really fully shared, etc.
For the percentages, the device I was on has 4GB RAM, I can't even open many tabs in chrome and firefox at the same time. A few is OK. No other load whatsoever on the device, only web browsers, I checked by logging into the machine from another one through SSH while the GUI was frozen.
No CPU usage, only very slow when zRAM has exhausted and swap
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If it isn't, it should be configured to use some zRAM swap out of the box, otherwise, somebody will write a blog post about using it.
I use it on all low RAM devices and it helps a lot with responsiveness.
I even exclusively use zRAM on a 256GB RAM proxmox server hosting virtual machines, no SSD or hard drive swapping at all.
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Thanks for the info! Very informative!
Cheers,
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Depends on the use case. A lot of college students buy them because they are a known quantity, the local school store sells the 8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD models for a discount, and they have a decent resale value. Because of it coming with just 8 GB, coupled with the fact that Web browsers take up a lot of RAM, the OS winds up having to flush a lot of the RAM to disk often. With 1450 MB/sec, as opposed to 2800-3000 MB a sec from a M1 Mac Pro, what might take a second to flush a full 2 GB Chrome tab to disk is now doubled, which will definitely impact responsiveness. The fact that it takes twice as long to flush RAM to disk will be noticed, since the Mac will be doing a lot of swapping.
Even worse is the fact that there are a lot of factors that will amplify wear on the SSD. One chip instead of two means the SSD wears out twice as fast. 256 gigs of disk isn't much space, so the relatively small amount of free space will be used a lot more for wear leveling. Add to that the constant swapping of the OS, and it makes me wonder how long the SSD will live.
M1/M2 Macs, put iBoot on the internal drive. This means that if the internal drive fails, the Mac is useless, and will not be able to boot to an external drive.
I used to worry about SSD/Flash wearout (still do a little); but, like "election fraud", you have ask yourself: "Where's the Evidence?"
Ok, Apple has been using soldered SSD/Flash for local mass storage in Mobile Devices since at least 2003 or so (starting with iPod Shuffles), and in Macs since at least 2017. Where are all the scary "wearout" stories? They just don't seem to exist, at least not in any noticeable trend, even for the oldest Devices.
This is why Apple even tolerates benchmark sites (Score:3)
You know Apple would love to have absolute control over the Reality Distortion Field, but there are some claims even they won't make for justifiable legal reasons -- like claiming performance of a specific part they know they might have to change. But they're all too happy to let the third-party review site do it for them, while remaining silent about the possibility of a part change. "We didn't say it, you did."
Hey guys, did you know? (Score:3)
Hey, did you know that Base 13-Inch MacBook Pro With M2 Chip Has Significantly Slower SSD Speeds [slashdot.org]
I sincerely hope the so called editors are not actually getting paid, because I'm not sure what "job" they are doing. Certainly, it doesn't involve actually reading this site.
Re: Hey guys, did you know? (Score:2)
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Do you know the difference between Macbook Pro and Macbook Air? I love a good editor bashing as much as the next guy but you look like quite a fool.
for the price apple charges for storage they shoul (Score:3)
for the price apple charges for storage they should have dual chip or better in all systems.
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There's no more expensive source of flash bytes than an Apple product, period.
With their premium, they shouldn't have shoved this in under the radar. The engineers who did this were well aware that their previously parallel reads and writes would now be serial, and that there would be a performance cost. This was known most or all of the way up the chain.
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Partly.
The actual premium price is you have to move up to a more expensive Apple to upgrade your MacBook CPU and maintain the same disk speed.
Crazy like a fox.
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To be fair i agree.
It's worth considering the difference roughly on my M1 mini the internal drive is twice the speed of the one on the Air 256GB Model, However the Samsung 1 TB T7 drive which lives attached to my M1 mini is about 4x slower than the internal drive or about half the speed if attached to the Air. The speed of a Sata interface is slower than the Samsung which is way faster than any mechanical HDD.
So I don't think you can say the SSD in the Air sucks , it's just not as fast as it could be
Thank heavens the Verge is on top of it! (Score:3)
https://apple.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
Oh, wait. I didn't notice this one was the "Air" and not the "Pro"... I'm sure there's a vital difference that makes this not old news.
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Yes the new news here is that Apple didn't learn from the criticism of the Pro. At the time the Apple defenders were saying "oh it's just temporary, I'm sure Apple will change their BoM silently to fix the issue".
Well here we are, issue not only fixed, but also present in another product line.
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Yes the new news here is that Apple didn't learn from the criticism of the Pro. At the time the Apple defenders were saying "oh it's just temporary, I'm sure Apple will change their BoM silently to fix the issue".
Well here we are, issue not only fixed, but also present in another product line.
I mean, they've had weeks to change the controllers on thousands of laptops. What are those Foxconn workers even doing! /s
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Sure, there enough room in ambiguity there for it to be purposefully misinterpreted by someone, to which I salute you; but I'm pretty sure even the densest person alive, halfway through typing what you typed and realizing that nothing you had typed had anything to do with the core of the computer, would have instantly understood that they were providing a level of pedantry that impressed no one.
YouTuber Max Tech talked issues 2 weeks ago (Score:2)
The same story after the same story ... (Score:1)
In four years: "Thanks to the performance increases of M4, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M3 chip."
In six years: "Thanks to the performance increases of M5, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared
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Yeah, and the M5 is known to be homicidal, until being talked into committing suicide. So those should really be a laugh. Hopefully the Shat is still around by then. He's getting up there in years.