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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

#81

Post by givinguflac »

bleomycin wrote: post #53
Domenic_S wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I just picked one up a couple weeks ago, it's my first non-MBP but seeing as I have a company-provided i7 MBP I didn't feel like I needed another powerhouse machine for side projects and occasional coding for fun. I love that I have no touch bar but I do have Touch ID. Coming from a 2014 MBP 13 I definitely didn't notice the slower SSD speed -- editing raw camera files in Lightroom is really fast and the display…

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…

Using Brave or FF I can watch 4k no issues on my MacBook, though I wouldn't turn down lower power usage when doing so.

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

#82

Post by rconti »

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…

I'm impressed they knew that much detail.

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

#83

Post by Marsymars »

skyyler wrote: post #77
Marsymars wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you dislike about it? I haven't really noticed mine.

I just like the functionality and feel of actual buttons. It's like the difference between using the iPad software keyboard vs. an actual hardware keyboard to type on. The Touch Bar makes a row of my keyboard worse.

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

#84

Post by obliviousonions »

leetbulb wrote: post #50
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 just upgraded my workstation from a SATA SSD (~500MB/s) to an M.2 NVMe (~3GB/s). For standard usage, there's really no noticeable difference. The extra IO and lower latency is amazing though for heavy tasks.

Not even heavy tasks. Even just installing packages and launching applications is just so much quicker after I upgraded my thinkpad to an NVME drive.

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

#85

Post by dghughes »

highace wrote: post #35
reilly3000 wrote: post #8

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

You'll be back for the trackpad alone.

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.

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

#86

Post by xenospn »

pier25 wrote: post #76
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.

1.3GBps is still super fast. It wasn't that long ago that we were using 7200rpm HDs which capped at around 110MB/s for large files.

110MB/s was the super-best-case-scenario if you're doing sequential writes with exactly 1MB blocks, which almost never happened anyway.

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

#88

Post by jotm »

rarecoil wrote: post #68
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 t…

Yeah, NVMe is so fast, few people will ever need the speed. You'd have to, what, record raw video to fill it that fast? What other uses are there? Do OSes have optimisations to better use swap space?

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

#89

Post by threeseed »

bleomycin wrote: post #53
Domenic_S wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I just picked one up a couple weeks ago, it's my first non-MBP but seeing as I have a company-provided i7 MBP I didn't feel like I needed another powerhouse machine for side projects and occasional coding for fun. I love that I have no touch bar but I do have Touch ID. Coming from a 2014 MBP 13 I definitely didn't notice the slower SSD speed -- editing raw camera files in Lightroom is really fast and the display…

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…

Google could support H.264 or H.265.

The only reason they don't is because they want to push their format.

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

#90

Post by KSS42 »

natrik wrote: post #55
Domenic_S wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I just picked one up a couple weeks ago, it's my first non-MBP but seeing as I have a company-provided i7 MBP I didn't feel like I needed another powerhouse machine for side projects and occasional coding for fun. I love that I have no touch bar but I do have Touch ID. Coming from a 2014 MBP 13 I definitely didn't notice the slower SSD speed -- editing raw camera files in Lightroom is really fast and the display…

I have a 2014 MBP 13 as well, any other differences (positive and negative) you noticed in switching to the new MBA?

Keyboard is a big difference.
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