At igamesnews, we tend to recommend that customers don’t buy the entry-level configuration of any Mac. It generally doesn’t have enough storage for most people, even people who rely heavily on iCloud or other cloud storage will likely run into space constraints down the line.
But there’s another reason you might want to avoid the entry-level configurations of Apple’s latest Mac mini and MacBook Pro, which went on sale Tuesday. While the new $599 Mac mini M2 is a great computer at a great price, it hides a nasty secret we’ve seen before: a slower SSD. MacRumors reports that machine benchmarks show the 256GB SSD to be up to 50% slower than the 256GB SSD in the M1 model it replaces.
The reason for the slowdown is the same as the 256GB SSD in the 13-inch MacBook Pro M2 and MacBook Air M2: Apple uses a single NAND chip in the SSD, while the M1 Macs they replaced used two NAND chips. YouTuber Brandon Geekabit has confirmed that Apple uses a NAND chip in its teardown of the M2 Mac mini.
A single chip may be fine for Apple engineers who are short on space, but when it comes to SSD storage, there is a general principle that affects performance: an SSD uses multiple channels in parallel to read/write data on the NAND chips of an SSD. The more tokens in play, the more channels available, and the more channels available, the better the performance.
Somewhat surprisingly, new base MacBook Pro configurations are also affected, despite the presence of a 512GB SSD. cores, the SSD is made up of two 256 GB NAND chips, which is half of what is found in the 512 GB SSD of the M1 Pro model. And due to fewer chips, the 512GB MacBook Pro M2 Pro has slower SSD performance than its predecessor. We suspect the entry-level 16-inch MacBook Pro, which also has a 512GB SSD, also has the same performance issues.
While we can understand the decision to use fewer chips in lower-end Macs, the new MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 and should be the ultimate in performance. Most users who buy one want the fastest speeds in all aspects of their machine. In the top-end model we tested, disk speeds were as expected, with write scores that topped the M1 Pro and M2.
After four models, it’s clear that Apple has decided that the speed sacrifice is just something customers will have to live with when it comes to the cheapest configuration of its Macs. Admittedly, most users won’t feel the difference in daily use and will only notice the slowdown when using software that needs to read files from the SSD frequently, but we still recommend using it. Get at least a 1TB SSD so there are enough data channels in use to make the speed difference unnoticeable.
