The new 14-inch MacBook Pro is already one of the hottest items of 2023 thanks to the new Apple M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, but if new reports are to be believed, that fancy new silicon could come with a pretty nasty trade-off: a slower SSD.
UK-based tech channel Zone of Tech reported on the significantly slower SSD in the new 14-inch MacBook Pro compared to the previous SSD. MacBook Pro 14-inch 2021.
NOTICE: We’ve just discovered that the base 14″ M2 Pro MacBook Pro (512GB) is significantly slower than the previous 14″ M1 Pro model. Apple will probably reuse single SSD modules (like the base 256GB M2 Air and MacBook Pro M2). More tests to come. pic.twitter.com/3kMiHVDxaFJanuary 24, 2023
After Zone of Tech posted on Twitter (opens in a new tab), 9to5Mac confirmed (opens in a new tab) that it sees the same thing in its MacBook Pro and has posted pictures of the SSD inside the MacBook itself, this photo seems to show a single SSD NAND chip, instead of the two NAND chips in the MacBook M1 Air and M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Professional Model.
While the capacity of a single SSD and a dual-chip SSD is the same — 256GB — dividing the SSD into two separate chips allows you to more efficiently read and write to any given space on the SSD.
According to 9to5Mac’s Blackmagic Disk Speet Test — which we haven’t independently verified — the new Apple M2 with M2 Pro and 512GB SSD scored 3,154.4 MB/s writes and 2,973.4 MB/s reads, behind the MacBook Pro 2021, achieved 3,950.8 MB/s write and 4900.3 MB/s read in the same test.
This prompted 9to5Mac to open up the MacBook Pro to find the culprit, then it actually found a new, less efficient SSD configuration using two 256GB NAND SSD chips running together instead of four. 128 GB is used in the 2021 MacBook Pro 14 inch.
Like Tom’s Hardware note, this alone is enough to slow down disk access, which will be reflected in new reports and it also states that the 256GB configuration of the new M2 Mac mini suffers a similar SSD performance drop .
But does anyone really notice – or care?
We haven’t verified SSD “degradation” ourselves, but that would make sense. Apple has come under fire for raising the price of the MacBook Air in 2022, so there’s bound to be pressure to keep prices in line with previous models. In fact, I welcome that, given that price inflation everywhere has put a real strain on people’s finances over the past year.
If Apple had to go from four NAND SSD chips to two to save a bit more money, it’s honestly worth the trade-off—yes, even for a high-end MacBook Pro device. Read/write speeds on the new 14-inch MacBook Pro according to these reports are still very fast, fast enough that no one will notice that there is any kind of slowness.
Only when you put the latest MacBook Pro over its predecessor can you see the difference and even then you need to use the drive speed utility that less than 5% of users even have know to exist. And unless you’re upgrading to the new 2023 MacBook Pro from the 2021 MacBook Pro (which we do not recommend), you’ll never even know there’s a problem.
It’s also worth pointing out that the SSD in the MacBook isn’t even the best SSD out there. in my Review Samsung 990 Pronot available for any MacBook, I get sequential read speeds of 7,465.49 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 6,887.68 MB/s, while random reads/writes are 5,467 .60 MB/s and 4104.87 MB/s, respectively.
This is far beyond what the 2021 MacBook Pro is best capable of, and the 990 Pro is a PCIe 4.0 SSD. When PCIe 5.0 SSDs started to become mainstream, even Best MacBook Pro won’t be able to keep up with these SSD speeds. And that doesn’t matter, because in the end, raw performance isn’t really why people go out and buy a MacBook Pro device. They buy them for ease of use, compatibility, and style (it’s controversialbut I digress).
Do you want to spend hundreds of dollars more on a new MacBook Pro for a faster SSD?
Now, some would argue that if you spend that much money you won’t experience any performance degradation, but after all the supply chain problems have pushed up the prices of consumer goods worldwide. , there is simply no way you could have gotten the same thing you got last time for the same price.
If you want top performance across the board, now you’ll have to pay extra for that privilege. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but we both know that this has happened a lot after the last few years and Apple has decided not to make changes to the SSD and just decided to upgrade the price of the SSD. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is $400 across the board, which would be something people would rightly complain about.
Meanwhile, Apple has essentially managed to produce a laptop that’s 20% to 30% faster in all the workloads that MacBook Pro users need, so MacBook Pro buyers don’t have to. so it feels like this is something they are being cheated on. . There are many things about Apple’s recent launch that are not legally acceptable (such as offering a money in exchange for a MacBook Pro 2021), but this is not really the case.
