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drecc

macrumors member
Nov 6, 2014
85
37
Actually not.

Keep in mind that what's halved is sequential transfers. Random speeds are closer and are much slower than sequential. Large sequential transfers are surprisingly rare, and when they do occur, transfer time often isn't the long pole in the tent anyway. If you have a process that takes say an hour on the older machine, it might take 10 minutes longer on the new. Even assuming pure sequential reading, it would take about a minute and a half to read the entire 256GB with the old SSD and 3 minutes with the new; so whatever you are doing that takes hours isn't just I/O unless it's a remarkably poorly written process.

Bottom line is that in real life you will be hard pressed to notice; and if you think you might be the exception, you are likely to be buying the larger SSD's anyway.
1656460821307.png

1656460838816.png


Source:

So in real-world tests, the slower sequential transfer really is making a huge difference because that's what happens when you swap memory between SSD and RAM.
 
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kschendel

macrumors 65816
Dec 9, 2014
1,292
565
View attachment 2024399
View attachment 2024400

Source:

So in real-world tests, the slower sequential transfer really is making a huge difference because that's what happens when you swap memory between SSD and RAM.
216 seconds vs 252 seconds, so roughly 20% slower. That's significant, sure. I don't know that I would call it huge, and it certainly isn't anywhere near 2x which is what the post I responded to was suggesting.

I guess that if you are going to buy a minimum configuration and run oversize loads on it, the slower SSD will make a difference. That's not a configuration choice that I would generally recommend.
 
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scatopie

macrumors member
Aug 19, 2013
67
49
In principle that's kinda crappy. In practice, the venn diagram between people who will actually notice those disk speeds and people who only need 256GB storage is going to be pretty small.
Unfortunately for Apple, I noticed and am not getting my wife an M2 MBA, and instead will get her a base M1 MBA for this reason lol. Save several hundred bucks, AND have faster performance!
 

UBS28

macrumors 68030
Oct 2, 2012
2,893
2,340
Unfortunately for Apple, I noticed and am not getting my wife an M2 MBA, and instead will get her a base M1 MBA for this reason lol. Save several hundred bucks, AND have faster performance!

Something tells me that Apple will add 2 x 128 GB in the M2 MBA base model after hearing everybody complain about the M2 MBP base model.
 
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scatopie

macrumors member
Aug 19, 2013
67
49
This is really sad... I thought with the transition to Apple Silicon, that Apple didn't want to give anymore bullets to their competitors, but this is quite a serious one. People can really lose confidence and start to become cautious with these kind of moves.

Luckily for Apple, storage performance is always under the shadow of Graphics and Computing performance, and people outside of the Apple communities like MacRumors won't really know.
For real. Pulling stunts like this really makes me skeptical of any claim they make now. I was gonna buy their M2 Air no questions asked, but now I am DEFINITELY NOT buying it until I see a review. What a terrible and underhanded thing to do to consumers, really makes you question the integrity of their products across all their lineups. Like, now we know there is some major flaw in each product category they sell so they can squeeze money out of us. Trust their products much less. Ugh, such a bad taste in my mouth just thinking about it.
 

MajorFubar

macrumors 68020
Oct 27, 2021
2,147
3,773
Lancashire UK
Disappointingly virtually no one outside the comparatively-tiny bubble who visit sites like this or watch Max Tech or Luke Miani videos will know that the 256GB versions of the M2 models are effectively gimped compared to their predecessors. There's no efficient method of out-shouting Apple's marketing team. Apple will be delighted by this.
 

unrigestered

Suspended
Jun 17, 2022
879
840
Something tells me that Apple will add 2 x 128 GB in the M2 MBA base model after hearing everybody complain about the M2 MBP base model.

not very likely, unless it was already planned several months in advance.
Now it would be way too late and production has long started.
Maybe in later revisions / production runs, but i don't see any great incentive for them to do so afterwards as it will help them even more to sell the more expensive options of their products
 
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QuietOC

macrumors member
Mar 29, 2022
45
12
Unfortunately for Apple, I noticed and am not getting my wife an M2 MBA, and instead will get her a base M1 MBA for this reason lol. Save several hundred bucks, AND have faster performance!
Apple is likely putting the same storage configuration in current M1 MBA production.
 

UBS28

macrumors 68030
Oct 2, 2012
2,893
2,340
Apple is likely putting the same storage configuration in current M1 MBA production.

That would suck as I’m now thinking about getting a super cheap base M1 MBA from resellers (way cheaper than from Apple directly).
 

fooobar

macrumors member
Mar 21, 2019
49
85
The only people I know who bought a touchbar mac didn't know what an F key or a touchbar was. If anyone chose that turd I wonder about their mental health.

so liking the touchbar is related to one's mental health now? 😆

honestly, I see WAAAY more anti-touchbar vitriole on these forums than I do people speaking up to defend the touchbar (even though many people actually like it). in fact, whenever someone has the audacity to mention that they like the touchbar here, their statement is almost always defensive by default & is usually prefaced with something along the lines of "I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I like the touchbar..."

the fact that so many forum posters here keep saying they don't understand why or believe the MBP 13" should even exist anymore speaks volumes about the disconnect between their opinions and the reality that the MBP13 is still incredibly popular (2nd best selling laptop, by Apple's own statement - even with the crazy touchbar!).

the cool thing about having options is that you don't have to like all of them, and you're free to buy or ignore whatever you want. if a product is truly universally unpopular, Apple will stop making & selling it since they're a business and not a charity. since they bothered to update the MBP13 to M2, it's obviously not as unpopular as the forum posts here might lead one to believe. 🙂
 
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kschendel

macrumors 65816
Dec 9, 2014
1,292
565
For real. Pulling stunts like this really makes me skeptical of any claim they make now. I was gonna buy their M2 Air no questions asked, but now I am DEFINITELY NOT buying it until I see a review. What a terrible and underhanded thing to do to consumers, really makes you question the integrity of their products across all their lineups. Like, now we know there is some major flaw in each product category they sell so they can squeeze money out of us. Trust their products much less. Ugh, such a bad taste in my mouth just thinking about it.

My goodness. Such angst.

As it happens, the fact that you can run a workload that exceeds available RAM with any sort of performance at all is a gift, as far as I'm concerned. It hasn't been that way since paging became reasonably common, decades ago; much of the research in the first couple decades of virtual memory basically boiled down to "how can we make things suck a little bit less when you run short of memory." Even today, with fast SSD, CPU's that are fast enough to do swap compression effectively, and storage that's many times faster than hard drives of yore, running out of physical memory is a recipe for performance disaster on most hardware and most operating systems. I would strongly advise that if you regularly run workloads that need X GB of memory, you should buy a machine with at least X GB of physical RAM. (Or, up the storage a notch so that you're running the faster SSD.)

I don't fault Apple for not telling people that if you abuse the base configuration with workloads it's not designed for, things might go 25% slower than before.
 

golu14

macrumors regular
Jun 17, 2012
129
14
Delhi, India
Maybe i am mistaken but apple was giving $20 off on additional storage and ram in my country from the education store. Now its $20 off on ram but storage went up to normal non-education price..can anyone confirm who remembers for sure
 
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scatopie

macrumors member
Aug 19, 2013
67
49
My goodness. Such angst.

As it happens, the fact that you can run a workload that exceeds available RAM with any sort of performance at all is a gift, as far as I'm concerned. It hasn't been that way since paging became reasonably common, decades ago; much of the research in the first couple decades of virtual memory basically boiled down to "how can we make things suck a little bit less when you run short of memory." Even today, with fast SSD, CPU's that are fast enough to do swap compression effectively, and storage that's many times faster than hard drives of yore, running out of physical memory is a recipe for performance disaster on most hardware and most operating systems. I would strongly advise that if you regularly run workloads that need X GB of memory, you should buy a machine with at least X GB of physical RAM. (Or, up the storage a notch so that you're running the faster SSD.)

I don't fault Apple for not telling people that if you abuse the base configuration with workloads it's not designed for, things might go 25% slower than before.
Wow, okay. We're talking SSD speeds here. I'm paying $1.X k+ for a newer model machine of the same lineup that has half the file transfer speeds of an older generation machine that is also cheaper. You can tell me how me and my wife will be using our Apple products wrong all day, but definitely isn't going to convince me to give Apple more money for a worse product, lol. You do you, my friend 👍
 

Danfango

macrumors 65816
Jan 4, 2022
1,294
5,779
London, UK
so liking the touchbar is related to one's mental health now? 😆

honestly, I see WAAAY more anti-touchbar vitriole on these forums than I do people speaking up to defend the touchbar (even though many people actually like it). in fact, whenever someone has the audacity to mention that they like the touchbar here, their statement is almost always defensive by default & is usually prefaced with something along the lines of "I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I like the touchbar..."

the fact that so many forum posters here keep saying they don't understand why or believe the MBP 13" should even exist anymore speaks volumes about the disconnect between their opinions and the reality that the MBP13 is still incredibly popular (2nd best selling laptop, by Apple's own statement - even with the crazy touchbar!).

the cool thing about having options is that you don't have to like all of them, and you're free to buy or ignore whatever you want. if a product is truly universally unpopular, Apple will stop making & selling it since they're a business and not a charity. since they bothered to update the MBP13 to M2, it's obviously not as unpopular as the forum posts here might lead one to believe. 🙂

Honestly my disdain for the touchbar comes from bought one of the infernal things and had to live with it for a year. it is just the WORST feature ever on a laptop. It makes it almost impossible to use anything which requires accuracy where the keys used to be.

On some days I literally wanted to chisel the steaming pile out of the keyboard with my bare finger nails and dab at it with my bloody stumps and pretend there were actually keys there. Then maniacally bash my head on it until I was unconscious.

That's how much I loved it.

So yes, the touchbar is related to mental health :)
 
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DrCC

macrumors 6502
Nov 21, 2021
255
178
Canada
I love how every reviewer is saying the base 256GB read speeds are an abomination. No... That would be buying a recent years iMac with a spinner drive 🤣
I still use a secondary Windows machine with a Cruical 2TB SATA SSD in it. I think the max I can get out of it is around 500 Mbps read and write. And it feels very snappy. I doubt any average user will notice a difference between 1400 and 2800; speed wise, even the 256 SSD option is enough for average computing, especially when paired with an M2.

However, if you are a "Pro User" and you are buying the MBP 13" and with only 256GB SSD, then you are either not a true Pro user or you should be looking at the MBP 14".

P.S. The less people buy the 256GB option, the quicker it dies and Apple moves up to 512GB base storage.
 
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fooobar

macrumors member
Mar 21, 2019
49
85
Honestly my disdain for the touchbar comes from bought one of the infernal things and had to live with it for a year. it is just the WORST feature ever on a laptop. It makes it almost impossible to use anything which requires accuracy where the keys used to be.

On some days I literally wanted to chisel the steaming pile out of the keyboard with my bare finger nails and dab at it with my bloody stumps and pretend there were actually keys there. Then maniacally bash my head on it until I was unconscious.

That's how much I loved it.

So yes, the touchbar is related to mental health :)

haha! well since you explain it that way i can see why you'd be concerned for your mental health... 😜

outta curiosity, which use cases requiring accuracy with the touchbar frustrated you so much? was it screen brightness & sound volume? cuz the touchbar can be modified with BTT to multi-finger swipe ANYWHERE on the touchbar to control those (so zero accuracy needed)...
 

Danfango

macrumors 65816
Jan 4, 2022
1,294
5,779
London, UK
haha! well since you explain it that way i can see why you'd be concerned for your mental health... 😜

outta curiosity, which use cases requiring accuracy with the touchbar frustrated you so much? was it screen brightness & sound volume? cuz the touchbar can be modified with BTT to multi-finger swipe ANYWHERE on the touchbar to control those (so zero accuracy needed)...
Well I do a lot of text editing with vim remotely and you have to hit the escape key a lot. Which is difficult when it’s not tactile.
 

MayaUser

macrumors 68040
Nov 22, 2021
3,088
7,046
So even the 512SSD is slower compared to the M1...but clearly not that much, the difference isnt notable
But the 256ssd itself is slower and also lack the dual nand chips
 
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Bodie CI5

macrumors 6502
Apr 22, 2014
255
144
So even the 512SSD is slower compared to the M1...but clearly not that much, the difference isnt notable
But the 256ssd itself is slower and also lack the dual nand chips
Still, it’s slower.

What will those who have been saying to buy the 512 version be saying now? It’s disappointing to see that Apple has taken a leaf out of MS‘s book.
 

fooobar

macrumors member
Mar 21, 2019
49
85
Well I do a lot of text editing with vim remotely and you have to hit the escape key a lot. Which is difficult when it’s not tactile.

ok, that's a very legitimate point which I agree with 100% (was an avid vi/vim user myself) - however, that means you had one of the older touchbar models before they added a physical escape key back to the keyboard. kinda dumb they ever thought a virtual ESC key would be a good idea, but at least they corrected it later on... 😮
 
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