The new MacBook Air, cheaper, includes an SSD about 35% slower than the 2018 model



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The MacBook Air Retina was refreshed last week with a new price and the addition of a True Tone screen. The update was minor, with the same processors as 2018, but a lower price of 100 USD: the 2019 MacBook Air starts at 1099 USD at Apple, with a student fee of 999 USD.

It turns out that one of the disadvantages of this latest revision is that the notebook has a SSD storage slower than the 2018 model.

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As tested by Consomac With the Blackmagic Disk Speed ​​Test, the 2019 MacBook Air can achieve read speeds of 1.3GB / s read and 1GB / s write.

The equivalent 256GB MacBook Air SSD can reach 2GB / s read and about 0.9GB / s write. As a result, the new SSD component used has a slightly higher write speed, but a read speed of 35%, from 2 GB / s to 1.3 GB / s. (The 128GB SSD option has slower write speeds of 0.5GB / s, but this drop has also been observed in the 128GB Air 2018.)

Benchmark via Consomac.

Presumably, the slower SSD is a cheaper component for Apple to integrate the machine and has helped the company achieve the $ 100 price drop and even more aggressive educational pricing for students.

In truth, this compromise was probably the right compromise to make. The lower price will make the machine more attractive, and disproportionately few MacBook Air users will notice slower SSD playback speeds in normal use. A 35% slower SSD does not automatically translate into an overall performance loss of 35%.

A 1.3 Gb / s SSD is still fast enough that most of the heavy air-based computing tasks are primarily CPU, GPU, or RAM-related constraints, making speed overhead additional SSD a little superfluous. Of course, it will be slower. But for the typical needs of laptops, it should be fine.

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