
New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model - gbaygon
https://www.imore.com/new-2019-macbook-air-features-slower-ssd-2018-model
======
cgriswald
> 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 outdated MacBook Air does not count).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.

~~~
fjp
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.

~~~
tlobes
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.

~~~
ebg13
> _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.

------
mrpippy
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?

~~~
wtallis
> 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.

------
filleokus
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?

~~~
lukifer
> 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.

~~~
lostlogin
The price for the 1.5 was truely ridiculous. It would be interesting to know
how many they sold.

~~~
lukifer
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

~~~
symlinkk
Jesus why not put your files on an external hard drive or in the cloud?

~~~
morganvachon
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.

------
who_what_why
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.

~~~
uwuhn
I think the most common pain point with this is going to be an initial iCloud
sync if your drive is full of stuff.

~~~
ricardobeat
Thats giga _bytes_ per second. You’d need a 10Gbps+ internet connection to
even start getting close to saturation.

~~~
ken
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!

~~~
rsynnott
A 1.3GB drive would still saturate a 10Gbit link.

Fortunately, there’s this:
[https://store.atto.com/order?ipa=211](https://store.atto.com/order?ipa=211)
at a mere 2000$

------
rythie
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...](https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pcs/laptops-
and-netbooks/macbook-air-1300233/review/3)

------
jerf
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.

~~~
rarecoil
> 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.

~~~
VibrantClarity
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.

~~~
rarecoil
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.

------
uwuhn
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).

~~~
wil421
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.

------
_ph_
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.

~~~
asark
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.

~~~
awinder
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?

~~~
_ph_
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.

~~~
asark
$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.

~~~
_ph_
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.

------
cm2187
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.

~~~
derefr
> 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.

~~~
wtallis
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.

------
josteink
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/](https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/11/06/mac-t2chip-linux/)

~~~
cultus
It is not, and it won't be in the foreseeable future.

[https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202567](https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202567)

~~~
wtallis
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.

------
dexterdog
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.

~~~
martinald
You can get a 2TB SSD for that price these days. Apple charges $800 for that
upgrade...

------
olliej
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)

~~~
pkaye
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.

~~~
olliej
Oh yeah, like I said any changes in operational characteristics are incidental
to the most important bit: reduction in cost.

------
JustSomeNobody
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.

------
floatingatoll
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.

------
nazgulnarsil
Soldered on 128gb ssd. Expletives readily come to mind.

------
filmgirlcw
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.

------
toomanybeersies
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.

------
Mikeb85
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.

------
Razengan
Yes. For a lower price than the 2018 model. Seems like manufactured outrage.

~~~
TheOperator
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.

------
ryanmercer
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.

------
wwweston
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.

------
catacombs
At this point, why bother buying a new MacBook?

~~~
dpedu
There's proper F-keys and Escape on this one!

~~~
NikkiA
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.

------
ChuckNorris89
Classic race to the bottom.

~~~
benj111
Not really, gentle stroll from the top maybe.

------
aurizon
The 'Apple way', soon we will sell you a 35% faster upgrade...

------
reilly3000
It’s been real. After owning 6+ Mac laptops for the past 15 years I’m out.

~~~
highace
You'll be back for the trackpad alone.

~~~
dghughes
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.

~~~
umanwizard
How is macOS restrictive?

~~~
Baeocystin
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.

~~~
umanwizard
Can you give an example?

~~~
Baeocystin
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.

~~~
umanwizard
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.

~~~
Baeocystin
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.

------
wedn3sday
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.

~~~
umanwizard
Why?

~~~
StrangeDoctor
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.

