New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
imore.com> 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$100, and the education discount brings it down to $999, making it the most affordable modern MacBook laptop ever (the outdated MacBook Air does not count).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.
I actually think the current MacBook Air configuration with Touch ID & Retina - $1100 - is basically exactly what I (and many people) want in a personal laptop.
It's light, easy to use, plenty fast for anything I do on a regular basis, and the Retina display is excellent.
Unless I have reason not to trust it, Touch ID is the perfect way to log in when you:
1. want to have your computer lock after a short period of inactivity and
2. tend to use long passwords that you don't want to type in all the time.
I'd agree with the exception of the utterly awful keyboard & trackpad design that appeared in 2016 that seemed to skip any meaningful QA process inside Apple.
The popular dust complaints aside, a brand new machine has immediate problems for someone whose palms tend to touch the newly enlarged Force Touch trackpad during typing, a hand position I got used to with my Macbook Air 2013. Typing on the new design will cause repeated keystrokes, delayed or missing keystrokes, and instant cursor shifts during typing that make it so I need to approach the keyboard in the same way one would properly play a piano in order to get any meaningful work done. Great if you're a trained pianist, terrible if you want to get actual work done from a coffee shop where you don't have a stand or external keyboard on hand.
Apple knows they messed up with the butterfly mechanism and seem to be fixing that in the next design. In the meantime, there are a few things they could do now through software to alleviate these issues:
1. The ability to remap the Force Touch trackpad tracking area in Settings. Being able to remove 10mm from each side would fix my cursor shift issue. People currently use tape to solve this... on a $4000+ machine.
2. Ability to set a numeric value for Force Touch sensitivity as opposed to 3 constant values with a much higher threshold than is currently being used as "high".
I know Apple is all about limiting options for a customer's own good, however, these software changes would go a long way in helping people debrick an expensive laptop who don't happen to fit whatever hand size their QA team of classically trained pianists have.
> The popular dust complaints aside, a brand new machine has immediate problems for someone whose palms tend to touch the newly enlarged Force Touch trackpad during typing
This has not been my experience. The errant contact dismissal in my 2017 MBP is so good that I never notice that my hands casually drape across swathes of touchpad geography.
So there has been a lot of complaints about the keyboard, but one thing they seemed to get right was protecting it from a coffee spill. A few weeks ago, I spilled coffee with milk over my laptop. Unsure what to do, I tilted it sideways covering every key with liquid; just imagine a pond over the keyboard. I ended up using a paper towel to absorb the liquid and then ran a damp paper towel across all the keys. The keyboard is still functional to this day!
I recall spilling coffee in the past and it would completely destroy the keyboard causing the need to replace the logic board. I'm sure if Apple dissembled my keyboard they would notice a gross stain under the plastic membrane now.
>> I'd agree with the exception of the utterly awful keyboard & trackpad design
Perhaps the purpose of which was to drive Touch ID adoption for those who "tend to use long passwords that you don't want to type in all the time". :-P
Yep. I just picked one up a couple weeks ago, it's my first non-MBP but seeing as I have a company-provided i7 MBP I didn't feel like I needed another powerhouse machine for side projects and occasional coding for fun. I love that I have no touch bar but I do have Touch ID.
Coming from a 2014 MBP 13 I definitely didn't notice the slower SSD speed -- editing raw camera files in Lightroom is really fast and the display is phenomenal.
The biggest bummer of these machines is apples lack of vp9 hardware decoding in macos, it makes 4k youtube unwatchable. For high motion content (mountain biking videos) 4k is the only way to watch even on a tiny laptop screen due to youtube’s horrific compression. Its an absurd limitation considering the hardware has full support for it! I know it sounds insane but I returned mine for a quad core 13” mbp just to brute force software decode playback of these videos.
Google could support H.264 or H.265.
The only reason they don't is because they want to push their format.
I wouldn't say it's the only reason. H264/5 are not royalty-free codecs. YouTube is a powerful tool Google can use to push a royalty-free codec, much like Apple used the iPhone to push people off Flash. It's one of few areas I agree with Google being heavy handed.
What, over and above the H.264 licensing that covers them for 1080p content?
It’s google doing what google always does: pushing a google controlled thing to become a “standard”.
It's an open source, royalty free codec. I'd much rather use that than one owned and licensed by a private organisation, no matter whether Google develops it or not.
It’s still patent encumbered, and if you happen to sue Google, because they do something shitty, you lose your patent grant.
How does that make H264 preferable?
It's not operated by a company with a penchant for abusing its 800 pound gorilla status?
Apple's MacBooks also got VP9 hardware decode support since several years, Apple could just enable it on the software side.
But they don't, so Safari users have to suffer.
Is it unreasonable of Google not to want to use a royalty free codec that's controlled by the MPAA?
They could, but they don’t, so what is your point? It still means that watching YouTube on the Mac device in question is a crappy experience.
Not the perfect solution, but I think changing your user-agent to iOS makes youtube deliver x264 instead of vp9
This Chrome extension will do it in a cleaner way: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihd...
Does anyone know of a similar Safari extension? Battery life remains a concern, and switching from vp9 to x264 is great, but then having to deploy Chrome instead feels like a 1 step forward, 2 steps backwards situation.
Using Brave or FF I can watch 4k no issues on my MacBook, though I wouldn't turn down lower power usage when doing so.
Do hardware decoders for vp9 even exist?
Any Intel GPU since Kaby Lake can decode VP9 in hardware. So can AMD since Raven Ridge[1] and Nvidia since GM206.
On Android, it has been mandated by CTS for several years already.
[1] Except Radeon VII, which is technically Vega.
There's accelerated decoding on at least some of the modern mobile platforms, and from all the major graphics providers on laptop/desktop.
I am guessing for high motion content you mean 60fps video?
No, they mean content where things are moving a lot. (Imagine how fast the picture is changing on a mountain biker’s GoPro...)
I don't see the relation of High Motion Video, ( Sports ) to Video Codec and Resolution. Why cant H.264 not be used? ( Which is the standard used world wide now for All Sporting Events )
For 4k video, H.265/VP9 have better quality at the same file size, or equivalent quality at a smaller file size. Bandwidth usage matters for keeping people on the website and viewing Google's ads, so Google wants to ensure a smooth streaming experience. And since YT compresses so heavily, uploading in 4k increase the quality at lower resolutions (it seems weird but a 4k video uploaded to YT and streamed at 1080p will look better than a 1080p video uploaded to YT and streamed at 1080p).
And as xnyan said, high motion video really destroys video quality on YT, this video really shows how bad it can get: https://youtu.be/r6Rp-uo6HmI
Thanks. So it really has to do with Google's / Youtube H.264 implementation rather than the codec in itself.
It's a huge topic and I'm not a professional, but tldr Google's implementation of h264 compression is not suitable for high motion video and the changes they would need to make in order to make it suitable are not worth it in view of the trade offs of size and other factors.
Why can't a $1K general purpose computer efficiently decode a royalty-free codec (hint - it may have something to do with the fact that apple has a major stake in a competing for-pay closed codec). I really do like apple, but I see apple as microsoft 2.0 in this.
>Why can't a $1K general purpose computer efficiently decode a royalty-free codec
Well the Codec is Royalty Free but not Patents Free. You only get to use it as long as you don't engage in patent litigations against Google.
And Apple does not have an major stake in H.265 or H.264 or every H.26x codec. It has a very minor stake, in the an Open Codec, not closed. Comparatively Speaking every H.26x Codec is more open than VPx and even the new AV1 Standard [1] . So this is far from WMV or RMVB.
I wonder if Google will support EVC / MPEG-5 as it is Royalty Free.
[1] https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2018/12/why-i-am-sceptical-abou...
I have a 2014 MBP 13 as well, any other differences (positive and negative) you noticed in switching to the new MBA?
The keyboard... I miss the chiclets. But it's lighter & smaller, TouchID is amazing, despite being a "downgrade" in model it's substantially faster for the things I do (raw photo editing, photoshop, web coding). Truetone is great, I don't feel a need for flux anymore. Also fewer bugs with iCloud - I could never get my airpods to show up in the sound menu on my mbp 13 but they work perfectly on the mba.
Truetone doesn’t work with external displays, unfortunately.
Keyboard is a big difference.
Just looked at the new specs. The obvious differences to my maxed out mba 2013 is double the ram (16gb) and double the ssd (1tb). Losing those few ports I have is a bit of a blow though (but that's long standing gripe with newer mba), and is the one thing holding me back from an upgrade, but the above upgrades are a definite sweetener in the deal.
That terrible keyboard is my only sticking point at the mo. Rumor has it that is getting addressed in the next revision but we will see. Hopefully my trusty 2013 MBA keeps chugging away until then :D
You can get the same from other companies at similar price. Just with a traditional fingerprint scanner rather than touch id (Same thing really), or a face unlock (which at least works when you have wet hands)
I may be a weirdo but I usually like to refrain touching my computer with wet hands.
Depends on the definition of wet. I can't use touchid for a bit after washing my hands. It doesn't matter how much I dry then. This makes using fingerprint unlock on any device really hard while cooking.
It may be the same thing from an end-user experience PoV, but it doesn't seem like any of the PC laptop manufacturers can offer equivalent security guarantees.
My experience with traditional fingerprint scanners on laptops is that they're extremely picky and won't work if you are a bit sweaty or the air is dry or the day of the week starts with a T or something. Having it fail to read your finger several times on a login pushes me back to regular passwords.
The enrollment process takes forever for each finger too.
Also, it doesn't work in Linux.
That is in many ways not true. I'm a happy user of a fingerprint scanner on Linux (for login and sudo). It actually took about the same time to enroll as touch id. How the scanner deals with moisture depends on the model so it's not all the same. Lenovo x1 for example it's in my experience just as bad as touchid on that scale.
If you have the magic to make the BCM5880 work on Linux I'd love to hear it, because that chip is behind every fingerprint sensor I've tried to set up thus far.
Actually lowered the price... it's not like hardware ever becomes cheaper with time?
I guess apple have improved recent years but previously this was quite apparent. "Wow, new much faster model costs the same as the old one!" Yeah, that's because the old one is insanely overpriced - unless you bought it on launch day. Conveniently that's the only day of the lifetime it is ever compared to the competition.
There was a time around 2016 when DDR prices went through the roof and didn't go down for quite some time. There were a lot of market factors: Samsung's massive Note recall meant they needed a lot of memory for their own devices, plus they had contractual burdens to meat for people who had already paid for RAM, so everyone else got screwed on chips (Samsung, Micron and SK make the majority of memory, and their pipelines all had shortages).
We even saw priced for old DDR3 chips go up as well as people were trying to reuse older board for non-CPU intensive stuff.
So tech prices don't always go down. They usually do, but sometimes market demands cause shortages and even non-vintage/collectable old tech can go up in price.
Cryptocurrency-driven demand for GPUs comes to mind as well...
Not to mention, 1.2GB/s is still far faster than a SATA SSD that would be in many slightly larger laptops; those tend to top out around 550MB/s. I also doubt one would feel the difference from 1.2GB/s to last year's 2.0GB/s unless they are constantly reading a ton of data, not a normal use case for a device designed to be one's secondary computer.
It wasn't until Apple started putting PCIe SSDs in their computers that they became performant enough for stress-free everyday use (in my opinion). Just going from a spinning hard drive to a SATA SSD took my 2012 Mac mini from agonizing to acceptable. I've played around with newer Macs with PCIe storage, and the difference is night and day. They finally feel like real Unix workstations with nearly instant response to user input, and almost no spinning beachballs to be found.
As I wrote below, slower SSD for lower prices is something I agree with, their SSD prices are just completely disconnected from the market.
Touch Bar, no... but Touch ID?
Like 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.
I'm on a 2018 MacBook Air, the only model has F-keys and Touch ID, and I love it. Once you get used to sudo using your fingerprint, it's hard to go back. :)
I had sudo setup to use fingerprint, but at some point it quit working... config files are still correct. Not sure what happened :(
ITerm2 support broke, you need to turn off "Allow sessions to survive"...
OMG thank you!
Are you using iTerm2? There's a new feature that interferes with the Touch ID PAM module working for sudo.
I think Touch ID on a laptop / desktop would make a lot of sense. I don't actually know any of my passwords.
I could see that, and I think using it for sudo (as in many sibling comments) makes a lot of sense even if that's not a common use case.
Perhaps ironically, I know my laptop/desktop passwords by touch. :)
For such a small price drop wouldn't it be better to buy a used 2018 then?
Better specs for cheaper...
They probably could have saved money by ditching the worthless touchbar.
The Air never had a touchbar.
I'm sure people used to paying Apple prices wouldn't mind those 100$.
This is probably aimed at people from outside the Apple customer base and comparability.
It'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?
> 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.
>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.
It might just be newer, higher density NAND. It's cheaper, but slower and less reliable.
I 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?
> 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.
The price for the 1.5 was truely ridiculous. It would be interesting to know how many they sold.
I 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
This is annoyingly common with all manufacturers, 512GB is my bare minimum but to get that you have to upgrade a heap of other components. The Surface Laptop 2 for instance doubles in price to get to 512GB, you have to upgrade form 8 to 16 GB of RAM and from an i5 to i7. 1TB is only offered in the platinum version.
Jesus why not put your files on an external hard drive or in the cloud?
Not the OP, but I found I had to do some digital spring cleaning once I realized 1TB of cloud/external storage wasn't enough for everything I was holding on to. I had useless data and archives going back to 2001, most of which I'd forgotten I even had. Long story short, after a few weeks of off-and-on cleaning, I got my mess down to around 200GB of data and archives, of which about 40GB is "must keep". That 40GB, mostly photos I don't want to lose, is backed up in iCloud (I have a 50GB plan) and is on my iPhone (128GB version) for quick access, as well as backed up on a flash drive and a SD card that I keep at work and my mom's house respectively. The rest lives on my spinning 3TB drive, which also houses about 1.5TB of Steam and GoG games so I don't have to re-download when I wipe and reinstall Windows on my gaming PC.
I could probably whittle that 200GB down to just over the 40GB "must keep" stuff, but I like having quick access to various operating system ISO and image files, Raspberry Pi images and backups, rips of my physical CDs, and various other project-related things. The bulk of what I deleted was forgotten detritus, left over crap from years of digital hoarding that served no purpose today. I'll probably purge again in a few years once all my hardware has changed and old OS and driver related stuff is once again obsolete.
If it’s photos that take up the space and you use photos.app it’s awful. I have no idea what the apple approved solution to this is.
I find that both iOS and the Mac handle large libraries badly. Mine is 110k approximately and it’s ugly. I had the library in a NAS and this was a great way of corrupting it.
Why would I want to carry around another device to dangle off the side, or worse, have to futz with tethering or spotty wi-fi or latency? I'd much rather have all my stuff (music in particular) consolidated and instantly on tap.
I wonder if they sold more 1.5TB MBAs or gold watches?
1TB is plenty for the MBAir cases
Especially now that there is "the cloud" (and external hard drives)
1.3 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.
I just upgraded my workstation from a SATA SSD (~500MB/s) to an M.2 NVMe (~3GB/s). For standard usage, there's really no noticeable difference. The extra IO and lower latency is amazing though for heavy tasks.
Not even heavy tasks. Even just installing packages and launching applications is just so much quicker after I upgraded my thinkpad to an NVME drive.
I don't think that's a fair characterization - I won't be getting a MBP regardless of the amount of I/O I do, because I very much dislike the Touch Bar.
What do you dislike about it?
I haven't really noticed mine.
I use the function keys and escape key - a lot. The lack of even haptic feedback on the touchbar makes it a big downgrade. Having a touchbar just isn't an option.
I use vim and my work-macbook has a touch bar. I haven't really noticed a difference in user experience between the touch-bar version and the physical esc-key on my personal macbook pro without a touch bar.
Before I actually used the touch bar version I also thought that it wouldn't be easy to use, but as I said, I haven't noticed a difference.
> I use vim and my work-macbook has a touch bar. I haven't really noticed a difference in user experience between the touch-bar version and the physical esc-key on my personal macbook pro without a touch bar.
Of course you don't. You use ctrl+[ or rebind caps lock to esc, and you don't use F-keys with vim. But outside of vim you might use the F-keys or Mac keys. I know I do. Cause I'm too shit with multitouch.
Thanks, but no I don't. I use the ESC key on the touchbar all the time.
IMO if you're hitting the escape key you're doing it wrong. Remap to caps lock!
I'm a fan of remapping F keys to the numrow as well. But my desktop keyboard is a 60% without F keys anyways. Less for the fingers to move when you use an fn row :)
I accidentally touch keys on it all the time, undoing text I've written, switching tabs while I'm typing, pressing escape and losing something, etc. I can't think of anything positive I've gotten out of it to be honest.
I just like the functionality and feel of actual buttons. It's like the difference between using the iPad software keyboard vs. an actual hardware keyboard to type on. The Touch Bar makes a row of my keyboard worse.
In VSCode, while debugging, I rest my fingers on F10/F11, for Step, Step Into, Step Out, Continue. Does that work with a Touch Bar mac?
Usually the beef is less than the fact that it exists and more to do with the loss of the Esc key.
1.3GBps is still super fast.
It wasn't that long ago that we were using 7200rpm HDs which capped at around 110MB/s for large files.
110MB/s was the super-best-case-scenario if you're doing sequential writes with exactly 1MB blocks, which almost never happened anyway.
> and if they did, they'd just get a MBP.
Or better Dell/HP/System76 with upgradable 32GB RAM.
Hardware of latest MBP aren't super reliable anymore, so I don't see any reason to pay premium price.
It's perfectly reasonable and wouldn't be noticed by the overwhelming majority of users. There is a point of diminishing returns for most uses, and this is far beyond it.
Further this sort of single-sample analysis of a vendor like Apple's products is always folly. Apply doesn't advertise specific SSD units, speeds, etc, and we know that they often vary them within a product, sometimes with multiple variants on the market at the same time with slightly varying performance.
> It's perfectly reasonable and wouldn't be noticed by the overwhelming majority of users.
Apple used to launch new phones/macs with these kinds of changes, and people used to buy them for these kinds of changes -- just a little bit thinner, just a little bit more battery. And suddenly people won't notice this. I am sure if it were the other way around, Apple would have claimed to have invented a new device and would have sold them as something new. And people would have gathered in queue to buy them.
And when you do the reverse, suddenly its okay.
There are certain things that Apple holds dear in many products, but there are many that are great and are just transparent. The iphone has virtually always had flash that is much faster than competing phones, for instance, but nary a word is mentioned about it.
In this case, the internal store went from "extremely fast -- far above most competitors" to, at least in this sample, "slightly less extremely fast -- still far above most competitors".
It's a giant nothingburger topped with a clickbait condiment.
At least next time Jony Ive will not say "fastest disk read ever"
Ive never talked about specs
I think the most common pain point with this is going to be an initial iCloud sync if your drive is full of stuff.
Are 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?
Thats gigabytes per second. You’d need a 10Gbps+ internet connection to even start getting close to saturation.
The 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, $999 laptop!
A 1.3GB drive would still saturate a 10Gbit link.
Fortunately, there’s this: https://store.atto.com/order?ipa=211 at a mere 2000$
Those have been slowly coming down in price. You can get a bus-powered TB3 10G Ethernet adapter for $150 now.
Only if you're an iCloud network administrator that plugged a 10gbps network cable at the data center.
Unless you have a datalink over 1Gbps (and iCloud can actually saturate that link) the SSD isn't going to bottleneck it either way.
actually 1GBps
Even better! So you'd basically need a 10Gbps connection. I highly doubt many macbook air users have a 10Gbps connection, and are connected with a thunderbolt -> ethernet. I also doubt you'll find many cloud providers that can saturate that anyway.
Not many people have a WAN link that will notice the difference.
It'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-pc...
Is 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.
> 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.
Which OS did you test this on? Every time I have used a Windows device with an NVMe drive the difference is immediately obvious, but on my Hackintosh and Linux boxes I haven't noticed any difference at all.
Arch Linux and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC. While it may be slower to use Windows, the difference hasn't been immediately obvious. I use Windows for gaming and browsing only and stay in Arch most of the time.
Yeah, 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?
I bought one as an upgrade disk because IMO they are easier to install. I don't need to worry about mounting, routing a cable, etc.
SATA SSDs also come in M.2 format.
I 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).
They 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.
I'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.
I'm impressed they knew that much detail.
Apple 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.
Apple'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.
Also 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.
Minimum 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.
Apple'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?
Yes, their upgrades had always been expensive, but at a price point, where would be willing to pay the markup for the convenience and simplicity. Today I fear, that the pricing is driving away a lot of users. I would be interested in a new laptop, but I am not going to pay 2000€ for an Air with 16/512. And that doesn't include mandatory Apple care. The company I work for basically has dropped Macs from the list of available machines.
$100 would be old-school Apple markup price for 8GB of memory at current prices (under $50 for good, fast laptop memory). Instead they want $200. It's nuts.
If their memory and disk upgrades were $100/step—which is still very high—I'd have probably already bought an Air to replace my 2014 Macbook Pro (the new Pros are now solidly out of my price range for a personal machine) but they're double that, so instead I've given them $0.
I am in the same boat. I don't need a laptop urgently, but would be willing to spend up to 1500 for the named configuration of 16/512g. As it is, the last Apple laptop I bought was the late 2008 Macbook. Which already had 4g of main memory for around 1200€.
There is also an elphant in the room: the keyboards. Until shown otherwise, I wouldn't trust their longlivity beyond the 4 years waranteed by Apple.
Auto manufacturers, Airlines, everyone does this.
The $1K aluminum monitor stand is symbolic in that regard, even though it's not even hardware.
I hope it isn't software :). But yes, it is not even electronic.
I 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.
It’s 3GigaBYTES/s, not Gigabits/s.
Nvme drives really are massively faster than their SATA counterparts.
Oh shit. Well then that's cool.
Those have gigabytes per second not bits. SATA 3 has 6gbit/s.
>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."
Would 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.
> 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.
SLC 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.
Are 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/
It is not, and it won't be in the foreseeable future.
Patches 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.
And 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.
You can get a 2TB SSD for that price these days. Apple charges $800 for that upgrade...
I 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)
Speed 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.
Oh yeah, like I said any changes in operational characteristics are incidental to the most important bit: reduction in cost.
No, 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.
Given 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.
What 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.
Soldered on 128gb ssd. Expletives readily come to mind.
I 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.
For 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.
Honestly, 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.
Yes. For a lower price than the 2018 model. Seems like manufactured outrage.
When 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.
I 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.
Well, 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.
At this point, why bother buying a new MacBook?
There's proper F-keys and Escape on this one!
And now they can say 'look, consumers reject our 'real F-keys' version, so there's clearly a preference for the new macbook pro with touchbar' and ignore all criticism.
Classic race to the bottom.
Not really, gentle stroll from the top maybe.
The 'Apple way', soon we will sell you a 35% faster upgrade...
It’s been real. After owning 6+ Mac laptops for the past 15 years I’m out.
That'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.
You'll be back for the trackpad alone.
Incorrect. I have every single touch gesture that I could possibly want on my Linux laptop (a lowly Acer E5 with Manjaro/Arch Linux and XFCE) and they work better and faster and with less annoyance than any Macbook I've ever used.
Furthermore at my desk I use a vertical mouse with 5 buttons which is far, far better than any touchpad.
I'm so glad to never have to use an Apple UI or rent one of their devices ever again! It's such a user-hostile ecosystem, but I don't really blame their users for having such a bad case of Stockholm syndrome.
I 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.
How is macOS restrictive?
Easy.
You can only install it on one brand of overpriced hardware. Does anyone really need to list another restriction to rightfully say that this OS is "too restricted"?
You can't tweak the system nearly as much as you can Linux or Windows. For instance, there is simply no access to certain APIs that Apple uses, such as changing NSScreen visibleFrame, which is why every replacement for the Dock fails with the same bug: Application windows show up behind the Dock replacement.
You can't even change the fucking mouse pointer color!!!!!!! from black to white or any other color that you desire...and there isn't even a third party tool that allows you to do this because of more hidden APIs.
Honestly, I could go on for days about all the restrictive qualities of macOS. I used to have a complete list somewhere, but I chose to simply stop using Macs (unless I have to compile something for iOS) instead of trying to convince others that it's a bad idea.
If you can bear to use it, great for you! Tons of people eat McDonald's too.
In the same line as Ford's 'you can have your car in any color you want as long as it's black', Apple isn't restrictive at all! ...as long as you want to do things the Apple Way™, and only such things as Apple has deigned to allow you to do. Start wandering from the common path much at all and you just straight run in to walls.
Can you give an example?
Sure, one from last week: I needed to connect to an iSCSI target from a client's Mac. This has been easy to do on any Windows machine since at least Windows 7.
OS X? No support without 3rd-party software.
I don’t feel that macOS not shipping with a particular feature can fairly be called an Apple-imposed restriction, especially if you can get that feature from third-party software.
There are plenty of things that you can’t do out-of-the-box on Windows but can on macOS, like SSH into remote machines.
SSH has been built in to Windows 10 since version 1709. FWIW. But even then, Putty and its ilk are free. The globalSAN initiator recommended for Macs is $89.
I don't disagree with that. Honestly I'm mostly desktop these days. I'm saving up a bit for a UHK, then will stick a Magic Trackpad 2 in the middle of it.
Seriously, they could have made NVME standard, charged more, and boasted about the incredible speed boost it provides. They could have even given it a cute name like NowDrive or something.
Same. Just bought first Windows laptop in 11 years: Thinkpad Carbon.
:/ 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.
250 nit. Fail.
My 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.
... 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.
Why?
Parent 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.