What you need to know
- Apple has recently launched its 13-inch MacBook Pro that includes an M2 processor.
- The base model of the laptop offers significantly slower SSD performance than the MacBook Pro M1.
- The read and write speeds of the M2 MacBook Pro lag even further behind the best Windows laptops and even computers with slower PCIe3 storage.
Apple recently launched its 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2 engine. Device reviews have been somewhat contradictory. The positive reviews focus on the excellent battery life of the new MacBook Pro and its impressive single-core performance. Most of the negative reviews raise concerns about how the new MacBook Pro will be differentiated from the upcoming MacBook Air, which also includes an M2 processor. There is, however, another concern about Apple’s latest laptop, its surprisingly slow SSD.
YouTuber Created Tech broke a 13-inch MacBook Pro to find out why the device has such slow read and write speeds. He found that the base model of the device only has a single NAND flash storage chip. In contrast, the base model of the M1 MacBook Pro had two NAND flash storage chips.
This is one of those cases where two is better than one. A device with two NAND chips, such as the MacBook Pro M1, can handle more bandwidth because the chips can run in parallel. Created Tech analyzes this with the lanes of a road. The MacBook Pro M2 with just one NAND chip effectively creates a bottleneck.
The concept of using two tandem NAND chips is similar in concept to RAID 0 on Windows, though not exactly the same.
Max Yurvey of Max Tech shared the SSD benchmarks of the M2 MacBook Pro and compared it to its predecessor in an extensive video. Yurvey also found that the base model of the laptop only had a single NAND flash storage chip.
M1 MacBook ProM2 MacBook ProSSD read speed2,900 MB / s1,446 MB / sSSD write speed2,215 MB / s1,463 MB / s
According to MacRumors, the high-end models of the M2 MacBook Pro, such as the 512GB storage version, have SSD speeds similar to those of the M1 MacBook Pro. As the point of sale pointed out, buyers would have to spend at least $ 1,499 to get the same SSD speeds as those seen in the previous generation MacBook Pro.
In particular, the devices sent to reviewers under embargo appear to have been high-end models with two NAND chips.
All this is only on the side of Apple. Compared to the best Windows laptops, and to be honest, even some average Windows computers, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro pales in comparison.
This drop in SSD performance is pretty spectacular on the new 13-inch MacBook Pro. The PCIe4 SSDs of 2022 Windows laptops are on a different level. Even for PCIe3, MBP performance is low-end, as Laptop Go 2 is faster. pic.twitter.com/O3KdBGaM1N28 June 2022
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The read and write speeds of the MacBook Pro M2 are well below high-end Windows computers such as the ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED and the MSI GE76 Raider. This is to be expected, as these Windows computers have PCIe4 SSDs. But Apple’s new laptop also compares badly to the Surface Laptop Go 2, which has a PCIe3 SSD like the M2 MacBook Pro.
Apple’s use of a single NAND chip is rare, to take a word from our executive editor Daniel Rubino. While the MacBook Pro M2 improves on its predecessor in some areas, a step back in terms of SSD is a strange option.
Slower SSD speeds can negatively affect the overall performance of the device, as well as hamper workflows that require transferring content to an external drive.