Considering buying a new MacBook Pro? Don’t cheap out on the SSD — here’s why.
If you’re considering picking up one of the newly-released MacBook Pro M2 models, watch out: it looks like Apple has cut some corners (presumably in the name of keeping manufacturing costs down) when it comes to the SSD found in the entry-level iterations of the new laptop.
As spotted by @ZONEofTECH (opens in new tab) on Twitter, the 512GB drive found in the base configuration of the 2023 MacBook Pro is significantly slower than the SSD used in the previous M1-powered model. It’s a fairly major drop; over 400MB/s slower writes and almost 1,400MB/s slower reads.
This Tweet was later corroborated by 9To5Mac (opens in new tab), who ran their own tests and received similar results. Unlike @ZONEofTECH, though, 9To5Mac went one step beyond and cracked open their M2 MacBook Pro to take a closer look at the storage on the motherboard itself.
What they found confirmed @ZONEofTECH’s suspicions: the 512GB M2 MacBook Pro uses fewer NAND modules than its predecessor, resulting in slower performance. Modern integrated SSDs commonly utilize multiple NAND chips for storage; the 512GB of storage in the M1 MacBook Pro was distributed across four 128GB chips (previously confirmed in a teardown by hardware repair site iFixit (opens in new tab)), while it looks like the new model only has two NAND chips — presumably 256GB each.
