If you’re someone with a heavier workload (who very well may notice a difference), we generally recommend that you buy a MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro or Max chip instead of an Air.

And I didn’t see much of a difference when it came to opening any of the apps I normally use, including Chrome, Safari, Messages, Photos, Activity Monitor, Slack, Music, etc.įor the MacBook Pro’s target audience, though, a limitation like this could be a deal-breaker. Boot time was also pretty identical - I turned the two devices on side by side a number of times. I ran two 4K YouTube videos over 25 open Chrome tabs for 30 minutes on both machines without either needing to dip into swap memory. That said, will these particular differences impact you? People the Air is marketed to will likely not see a life-changing contrast between the 256GB and 512GB models when it comes to everyday performance. This is not an unexpected result since the base Air only includes a single NAND chip, while the M1 models and 512GB (and up) M2 models have two, which can allow for nearly twice as fast speeds.Īs Verge editor Dan Seifert explains in his review of the M2 Air, slower storage speeds can impact a number of tasks, including file transfers, and can also slow down overall performance since Macs use SSD space as temporary memory (swap memory) when their onboard RAM is used up. Going by the results we’re seeing in Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test app, the base model of the M2 MacBook Air has write speeds that are generally 15 to 30 percent slower than those of the 512GB model Apple sent The Verge to review - and read speeds that can be 40 to 50 percent slower. Well, we’ve finally gotten our hands on a base model (including 256GB of storage and 8GB of memory) and the answer is: yes, it does. Apple confirmed to The Verge that the base M2 MacBook Air has the same storage configuration as the Pro, so, naturally, we’ve been wondering if it would suffer from the same issue. Previously, a number of reviewers have reported that Apple’s entry-level M2 MacBook Pro’s SSD is significantly slower than that of the M1 MacBook Pro due to the configuration of the storage models in the computer.

Apple mac screenshot of bad hard drive