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The 2019 MacBook Air is said to use a slower SSD than its predecessor

By Ng Chong Seng - on 16 Jul 2019, 4:17pm

The 2019 MacBook Air is said to use a slower SSD than its predecessor

(Image: Apple.)

Last week, Apple refreshed its MacBook Air and gave it several upgrades, including a True Tone Retina display and a better keyboard.

But according to French site Consomac, there’s one downgrade: the 2019 MacBook Air appears to be using a slower SSD than the one found in the 2018 model it replaced.

Consomac’s conclusion came after it tested the 256GB version of the new MacBook Air with the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and found that the portable has write and read speeds of 1GB/s and 1.3GB/s respectively. Comparatively, its predecessor clocked 920MB/s and 2GB/s for the same tests. In short, the read speed is down 35%.

Consomac also tested the 128GB model and the performance was even slower—500MB/s for write and 1.3GB/s for read. However, this is said to be on a par with last year’s 128GB MacBook Air. Personally, I’m not surprised by the difference in speeds between the two capacities (be it the 2018 or 2019 lineup): smaller capacity SSDs are known to run slower than bigger capacity SSDs because the latter have more chips that can be accessed in parallel.

Anyway, the running theory is that Apple has switched to a slower SSD for the new MacBook Air to achieve the new base price of S$1,599 (down from S$1,789). Which I think is a very reasonable tradeoff: not everyone will notice the drop in speeds (to be clear, the current speeds are still fast), but everyone will appreciate the lower starting price.

Source: Consomac (via MacRumors).

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