Recently, Apple has released new models of its computers, which are based on its own components and in particular on the new M2 and M2 Pro chips. However, it seems that they have a problem in the cheaper models of Mac Minis and MacBooks of this year. Specifically, a bottleneck that makes them worse than previous models and that This would also affect the 2023 MacBook Pro.
If there’s one thing we hate with our whole being, it’s the artificial limitations of the hardware, these appear when the manufacturer makes a feature cut in one of the components in order to justify the higher price of a superior model. Well, that’s what Apple has done in the cheapest MacBooks they’ve launched in these first weeks of 2023 and more specifically on one crucial point, that of storage.
2023 MacBook Pro SSD is slower
And it’s not something that is said, but the information comes from several sites specializing in Apple computers that have been able to test the SSD of the MacBook Pro 2023 and have been able to verify performance that is worse than that of the models that they replace. Especially in transfer speed and data access speed. More specifically, this reduction in benefits would affect models with 512GB configuration capacity on your SSD drive.
We learned that from the Zone of Tech Twitter Account from where the two benchmarks were obtained, those with the highest figures being those of the MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. The explanation for the phenomenon? Apple reportedly cut costs by adding fewer chips for the SSD. This not only results in less bandwidth, but also fewer available channels and, therefore, less performance in this respect.
We have to assume that the 2021 MacBook Pro with a 512GB SSD uses four NAND Flash chips of 128GB each, instead. its updated version has been reduced to two 256 GB chips in parallel. So, although the storage capacity has not decreased, the access to the unit has and therefore the lower speed in the 2023 MacBooks. Finally, the same problem, also to a greater extent, concerns the most systems modest with a single 256 GB drive also suffer
A problem that is not exclusive to Apple
We have no doubt that there are laptop manufacturers out there who are going to take the same step as Apple with their MacBooks and here we need to make one thing clear. A very common marketing trap is to sell the SSD based on its ability to store data in combination with the type of PCI Express bus it uses. However, the reality is that performance also comes from the number of NAND Flash chips, as more of them combined can give not only faster access, but also greater bandwidth. Remember that space in a laptop is limited and saves money on system components that will be produced in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions for some models. So there are financial incentives for reductions like this.
