Apple talks about SSD performance of 13-inch MacBook Pro With M2

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At this month’s WWDC 2022 developer conference, Apple released a new generation of M2 chips. Among them, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Air equipped with M2 are configured with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage space for the entry-level model.

16-inch MacBook Pro 2022
According to previous reports, after testing, it was found that the SSD performance of the 13-inch MacBook Pro With M2 is slower than the last-gen, the read speed was cut in half, and the write speed also dropped by about 34%. After dismantling the M2 version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro, it was found that the 256GB solid-state drive has only one NAND flash memory chip, while the M1 version has two NAND flash memory chips. This difference can explain why the disk speed of the new product has dropped.

According to The Verge, Apple spokesperson Michelle Del Rio provided the following statement on the matter:

Thanks to the performance increases of M2, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip. These new systems use a new higher density NAND that delivers 256GB storage using a single chip. While benchmarks of the 256GB SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2 based systems for real world activities are even faster.

In the statement, Apple did not specifically mention whether the actual use refers to the performance of the solid-state drive or the overall performance of the MacBook model, let alone the reference standard. This vague statement has irritated many users, who believe that Apple has not justified its response to the slowdown of solid-state drives.

The slower SSD will affect daily use to a certain extent. When the physical memory is exhausted, the Mac will temporarily use the SSD as virtual memory. Considering that the memory capacity of 8GB is not large, there are many such opportunities. If the user’s application scenario has high-performance requirements for solid-state drives, it is best to buy the M2 version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Air with a storage space of 512GB or more.

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