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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

#91

Post by tylerhou »

jotm wrote: post #88
rarecoil wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I bought one as an upgrade disk because IMO they are easier to install. I don't need to worry about mounting, routing a cable, etc.

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

#92

Post by ksec »

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…

I am guessing for high motion content you mean 60fps video?

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

#93

Post by untog »

threeseed wrote: post #89
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…

Google could support H.264 or H.265. The only reason they don't is because they want to push their format.

I wouldn't say it's the only reason. H264/5 are not royalty-free codecs. YouTube is a powerful tool Google can use to push a royalty-free codec, much like Apple used the iPhone to push people off Flash. It's one of few areas I agree with Google being heavy handed.

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

#94

Post by School-Cotton »

ksec wrote: post #92
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…

I am guessing for high motion content you mean 60fps video?

No, they mean content where things are moving a lot. (Imagine how fast the picture is changing on a mountain biker’s GoPro...)

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

#95

Post by Mikeb85 »

Honestly, SSD speeds barely matter for most workloads. For your typical task, everything gets loaded into RAM, so the user will notice what, a 40% increase in loading time once that session, and at 1.3gbps, that likely means half a second extra.

Honestly, for a typical user, the typical amount of RAM and SSD speeds is more than enough.

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

#96

Post by School-Cotton »

threeseed wrote: post #89
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…

Google could support H.264 or H.265. The only reason they don't is because they want to push their format.

They could, but they don’t, so what is your point? It still means that watching YouTube on the Mac device in question is a crappy experience.

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

#97

Post by ksec »

mrpippy wrote: post #63

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…

>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?

It is very common, if not the norm to have SSD slower at lowest end capacity. Having 2 Chip shown in the tear down doesn't mean it has the same channels inside those package. My guess is that it is Dual Channel per package, and it is only running at 3 Channels on the 128GB SSD.

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

#98

Post by awinder »

asark wrote: post #29
_ph_ wrote: post #4

Apple might have chosen cheeper SSDs to lower prices - which in principle think is a good idea on the entry level laptop, even cheap SSDs are plenty fast - why are they still charging insane prices for their SSD upgrades? Current market prices for SSD are between 150 and 300€/tb. For SSD upgrades in the MB Air, Apple is charging 240€ for each upgrade step. That means prices between 1920€/tb (128->256g) and 480€/tb (5…

Apple's prices used to be non-insane. Marked up, yes, but not nuts. Wasn't even that long ago. You'd have people post stuff about "look I can get a PC that's just as good for 40% as much, what a ripoff!" but it'd always turn out they were choosing worse parts. These days, though, between price hikes, mediocre to poor base memory amounts and disc sizes, and massive markup on upgrades, it's not true anymore. Their pric…

Apple's had this model for over a decade at least where the base models are fairly priced but you can really make the thing uncompetitively priced through outrageous ram/storage upgrade pricing. That's exactly where things go off the rails -- in fact, it's pretty apparent to me that Apple is normalizing profit margins over expected upgrade volumes (so that entry level machine sells at lower than the profit margin apple wants, and they make it up by making ram/ssd upgrade carry higher profit margins).

For the life of me, I can't / won't understand why Apple does this. It's a needlessly obtuse move on their part. It's the kind of thing that makes you start soldering ram & ssd to the motherboard in order to protect your biz pricing model; wouldn't it be easier to re-evaluate that biz model?

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

#99

Post by ruffrey »

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 use the function keys and escape key - a lot. The lack of even haptic feedback on the touchbar makes it a big downgrade. Having a touchbar just isn't an option.
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