Oliver Haslam·

2019 MacBook Air Refresh Has 35% Slower SSD R/W Speeds Than 2018 Model

A new report Consomac confirms that the new SSD in Apple’s 2019 MacBook Air refresh is slower than that from the 2018 machine. But why would the company purposely reduce performance in an iterative update? The answer, it seems, lies in pricing.

The main point of the refresh was to reduce the price by $100 to $1099, and it seems that was in part managed by reducing the speed of the internal SSD. According to Consomac’s tests using the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test app, the 2019 MacBook Air is capable of 1.3 GB/s read and 1 GB/s write speeds.

Compare that with the 2018 MacBook Air and things get very interesting. It was able to read data at 2 GB/s and write it at 0.9 GB/s. That means that while the write speeds are almost identical, read speeds are considerably slower by around 35%.

From this, it’s fairly easy to come to the conclusion that Apple is using cheaper, less performant SSDs in the new MacBook Air in order to help reduce the price. It’s debatable whether most MacBook Air users will notice the change in speed. Yet they’ll all notice the $100 saving. And at 1.3 GB/s, there is no suggestion that the new MacBook Air is slow. It’s just slower than before.

We wouldn’t let this put us off picking up the 2019 MacBook Air, nor recommend it to people. But for those looking for specs and storage speed above all else, this isn’t great news at all. Then again, those people are already looking at the MacBook Pro anyway.

(Source: Consomac [Google Translate])

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