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Looks like the MBP M2 Pro's have neutered SSDs on the base models like the MBA...
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Vadim from Max Tech YouTube here.
Remember when many of you guys scolded me for making a huge deal about M2 MacBook Pro/Air single NAND SSD issues?
Told you so.
Hahah just messin' with y'all. Guess we should've made a bigger deal about it.
Now we're stuck with "Pro" machines with slower SSDs.
Just tested the 16" M2 Pro model. Read speed is 2x slower compared to 16" M1 Pro.
Instead of 5 NAND chips on the Logic board, we now have just two.
Remember when many of you guys scolded me for making a huge deal about M2 MacBook Pro/Air single NAND SSD issues?
Told you so.
Hahah just messin' with y'all. Guess we should've made a bigger deal about it.
Now we're stuck with "Pro" machines with slower SSDs.
Just tested the 16" M2 Pro model. Read speed is 2x slower compared to 16" M1 Pro.
Instead of 5 NAND chips on the Logic board, we now have just two.
It's disappointing to hear. My 14" base model delivered a couple of hours ago and is still unopened in the shipping box. Not sure whether I should swap it for the 1TB model. Not sure whether I should care? 😆
Thanks for everything, Vadim & Max!
Appreciate all your hard work. That's pretty bad that we're getting half the performance on a $2500+ machine. Waiting to see if the M1Pro 14 black friday discounts happen again as those deals have since dried up where you can get the base M1Pro 14 for $1599.
Love your videos! Could you also show some real life workflows, where this difference in read/write speeds is noticeable to the end user? Or is this just a theoretical limit, which most people will never hit in their day to day use cases?
Love your in depth reviews ! Does this only happen with the 512 GB M2 Pro ? What about the 1 TB M2 Pro and M2 Max in the 16" ?
Don't want to speak for Vadim, but I'm pretty positive that the higher storage tiers 1TB+ all have enough chips to get full bandwidth.
Apple tends to improve a product to the point that it is noticeable, but doesn’t necessarily play in “spec games.” They never put a 4K display in a notebook, for instance. It’s largely pointless in a 16” screen or smaller. When Apple led the way on NVME etc. it was when SSD speeds were much lower. For that matter, they led the way in making SSDs mainstream. But the difference between 2,700 Mb/s and 3,500 Mb/s or even 6,000 Mb/s is much less noticeable than, say going from 250 Mb/s to 700 Mb/s was.
With room for 8 chips, they could probably populate them in lots of different ways. We know they are using 256GB and 1TB chips but what about 512GB chips? Hopefully they don’t start using 2 x 512GB. Currently, the 256GB chips are probably the sweet spot for cost. So it is probably unlikely they do that now.
I read and heard from other Youtubers a few years ago about this issue and that is why I bit the bullet and always go for the 1 TB whether I need one or not just for this one reason, faster read and write speeds.
This is really unfortunate that Apple insists on going down this path. Maintain the rage Vadim!
Based on what I have seen, Apple made a killing on upgrades for the M2 MacBook Air.
At some point, the base M2 MBA and 16GB/1TB model could be shipped within 1 day while the 16GB/512GB M2 MBA model was still suffering from long shipping times.
I also unfortunately contributed to the problem as I was originally going for the base M2 MBA, but was forced to buy expensive upgrades to make the machine normal.
So I kinda predicted this would happen for other models, but not for the 14" and 16" MacBook Pro. That is a surprise to me. Apple found a new way to make more money from us.
Neutered? what crap. I defy 99.9% of users to subjectively tell the difference between old and new, and for the remaining 0.1%, kindly pony up your money to pay for the extra chips in the old SSDs.
As I've said here before, my personal work computer, that pays my mortgage and bills, has a 10X differential between slowest (SATA) and fastest (980 Pro, PCIe 4.0) SSD's. The only time I can tell which one I'm working with is when I run a 2+ hour QA run, in which the 980 Pro finishes about 10 minutes faster than the SATA drives.
It's a non-issue IMO.
As I've said here before, my personal work computer, that pays my mortgage and bills, has a 10X differential between slowest (SATA) and fastest (980 Pro, PCIe 4.0) SSD's. The only time I can tell which one I'm working with is when I run a 2+ hour QA run, in which the 980 Pro finishes about 10 minutes faster than the SATA drives.
It's a non-issue IMO.
Knowing your channel, you're going to make a big deal out of sequential speeds because it's the biggest number.
In everyday tasks, random 4k read/write is much more important. And in the screenshot you just posted, random seems to be higher for M2 Pro. So it's an upgrade if anything.
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I really don’t understand this outrage.
there are a lot of hot takes from Linus I don’t agree with. But I still hold him to a higher standard than these "just click Run Test" YouTubers. And 8k raw footage as Linus says saturates at around 270 MB/s. So you are perfectly fine with even sata. As someone that still relies on my video production work with my 2010 Mac Pro thats on SATA 2 speeds, this is a very very VERY overblown issue. My gosh how did we get ANY work done before these SSDs existed? Yeah in 2010 you could do ZERO video production.
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I remember getting my first SSD in the 2000s. It was a revelation in performance improvement. Today, I've not noticed that my 7000mb/s SSD is any faster than my very first Intel SSD running at ~200mb/s in everyday tasks.
Sequential read/write is mostly a marketing number. Very few uses cases can saturate a modern SSD. I doubt anyone here has one.