It seems Apple is an expert at doing things halfway, or at least not finishing them right. Every launch of the company comes with a problem at the hardware level and this is no exception. The company presented the new MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon M2 chips with a very slow SSD.
Apple announced a long time ago that they would stop using Intel processors and just use their own processors. To do this, they use the ARM architecture, the same as used in the smartphone. The company’s problem seems to be developing powerful chips that perform like those from Intel and AMD.
Apple Silicon M2 processor slows down SSDs
The ace solid-state storage drives or SSDs, have become the queens of the market. They offer us much higher read and write speeds than mechanical hard drives (HDD). But in addition, they are more resistant because they have no moving parts and consume less. There are so many benefits that even consoles have started adopting them.
Apple systems have long used solid-state drives, which makes sense if you want to give the user the best performance. The issue appears to be on newer MacBook Pros with the Apple Silicon M2 chip. It would seem that this processor would cause performance problems with the SSD disk.
With curiosity, Apple in the presentation of these laptops you never mentioned SSDs. But some Apple specialists would already have these MacBook Pros based on the M2 chip. They have found in performance tests that SSD read and write speeds are significantly slower than systems based on the M1 chip.
The data published by MaxTech is from the MacBook Pro 13 256 GB:
| MacBook Pro 13 (M1 chip and 256 GB SSD) | MacBook Pro 13 (M2 chip and 256 GB SSD) | |
|---|---|---|
| reading speed | 2900 MB/s | 1446 MB/s (-50%) |
| write speed | 2215 MB/s | 1463 MB/s (-30%) |
What stands out is that the the problem only appears on the laptop with the 256 GB SSD, this does not happen with the 512 GB laptop. This made the analyst suspicious, who decided to disassemble the laptop. That’s when the surprise and the explanation of the problem came.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2 processor has a The 256 GB SSD only has one memory chip of this capacity. Last year’s models, with the M1 chip also 256GB in capacity, each had two 128GB chips.
This shouldn’t be a problem, in principle.
Initially, using a single memory chip shouldn’t be too much of a problem. It looks like the MacBook controller is designed to parallelize writing and reading. We extract this theory from the fact that the issue does not appear in the 512GB MacBook Pro which also uses the M2 chip.
This problem looks more like a cost saving on Apple’s part than anything else. To avoid designing two systems or making a specific controller for this laptop, they used the same one for all. Something that would cause the Apple laptop with less capacity to perform worse.
Despite everything, we have about 10 times more reading speed than with an HDD and twice more than with a SATA SSD. This does not mean that there is a rather curious design problem, which fans of the brand will surely not care about.
