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New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

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Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

#61

Post by PascLeRasc »

oarsinsync wrote: post #56
bleomycin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest bummer of these machines is apples lack of vp9 hardware decoding in macos, it makes 4k youtube unwatchable. For high motion content (mountain biking videos) 4k is the only way to watch even on a tiny laptop screen due to youtube’s horrific compression. Its an absurd limitation considering the hardware has full support for it! I know it sounds insane but I returned mine for a quad core 13” mbp just to brut…

Not the perfect solution, but I think changing your user-agent to iOS makes youtube deliver x264 instead of vp9

This Chrome extension will do it in a cleaner way: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihd...

Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

#62

Post by djsumdog »

tjoff wrote: post #47
cgriswald wrote: post #6

> 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$100, and the education discount brings it down to $999, making it the most affordable modern MacBook laptop ever (the outdated MacBook Air does not count).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…

Actually lowered the price... it's not like hardware ever becomes cheaper with time? I guess apple have improved recent years but previously this was quite apparent. "Wow, new much faster model costs the same as the old one!" Yeah, that's because the old one is insanely overpriced - unless you bought it on launch day. Conveniently that's the only day of the lifetime it is ever compared to the competition.

There was a time around 2016 when DDR prices went through the roof and didn't go down for quite some time. There were a lot of market factors: Samsung's massive Note recall meant they needed a lot of memory for their own devices, plus they had contractual burdens to meat for people who had already paid for RAM, so everyone else got screwed on chips (Samsung, Micron and SK make the majority of memory, and their pipelines all had shortages).

We even saw priced for old DDR3 chips go up as well as people were trying to reuse older board for non-CPU intensive stuff.

So tech prices don't always go down. They usually do, but sometimes market demands cause shortages and even non-vintage/collectable old tech can go up in price.

Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

#63

Post by 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?

Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

#64

Post by saagarjha »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #58
lukifer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on a 2018 MacBook Air, the only model has F-keys and Touch ID, and I love it. Once you get used to sudo using your fingerprint, it's hard to go back. :)

I had sudo setup to use fingerprint, but at some point it quit working... config files are still correct. Not sure what happened :(

Are you using iTerm2? There's a new feature that interferes with the Touch ID PAM module working for sudo.

Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

#65

Post by Marsymars »

who_what_why wrote: post #13

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.

I don't think that's a fair characterization - I won't be getting a MBP regardless of the amount of I/O I do, because I very much dislike the Touch Bar.

Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

#66

Post by 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.

Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

#67

Post by 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.

Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

#68

Post by rarecoil »

jerf wrote: post #67

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 obs…

> 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.

Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

#69

Post by wil421 »

uwuhn wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

#70

Post by pier25 »

penagwin wrote: post #41
uwuhn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unless you have a datalink over 1Gbps (and iCloud can actually saturate that link) the SSD isn't going to bottleneck it either way.

actually 1GBps
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