Base 13-Inch MacBook Pro with M2 Chip Has Significantly Slower SSD Speeds | Hacker News Reader

Base 13-Inch MacBook Pro with M2 Chip Has Significantly Slower SSD Speeds

macrumors.com

49 pointsDiesel55556 comments

> The base model's slower SSD speeds were not mentioned in many (any?) embargoed reviews of the notebook, as it appears that Apple provided many reviewers with a 1TB configuration for testing.

Not cool, Apple.

For me, the question is: What will the MBAs have? Will the 512 MBAs have better performance, like the 512 MBP does? Or will they neuter all the MBAs to make them comparatively less attractive than the high-end (and very expensive) MBPs?

Modern Apple MacBook SSD performance has always seemed wayyy slower compared to Windows or Linux paired a typical Samsung Evo drive.

Waiting 30s for a 500MB app to copy into the Applications directory is the usual, whereas those Samsung SSDs can do 3,500MB/s.

What gives?

Every m1 pro/max spec has a faster SSD on paper than 3500MB/s, I would have to know more about the implementation details to understand why it took awhile to move an app into applications.

Apple has always always cut corners on disk drives. Cheap hard drives from Hitachi were why so many people had catastrophic drive failures with their Macs back in the 2000s. Though we are long past that particularly bad problem, which was the main reason why I avoided owning a Mac for the longest time, they seem to be using slows SSDs today for the same reason, which is to reduce costs.

What I don't get is why they have to be that slow.

Apps are actually directories so it might be slowed down by copying lots of small files.

I thought SSDs can do boatloads of iops..

The prior base model spread the load over two 128 Gig Flash chips on separate channels. Sounds like they had trouble sourcing enough of those and had to use a single 256 Gig chip instead. I haven't seen a teardown yet, but it's the only thing that makes sense.

Up until recently, Apple had been fairly immune to the supply troubles other vendors have been suffering from, since they lock in components on a long term contract.

I guess the pandemic supply chain problems lasted longer than their component contracts did.

This appears to be limited to the 256GB drive:

> ran the Disk Speed Test app on the 512GB model and the SSD's read/write speeds were similar to all M1 models

At least for me what exactly base model meant / the fact that any SSD upgrade would eliminate this issue wasn’t clear from the title.

I am planing on getting a new Macbook soon and this finding does help me decide. I am a bit disappointed at Apple not releasing the M2 (and their pro/max versions) for the 14/16" models. Since it almost feels like buying them now will cause me to have an obsolete model in 6-12 months...

While at it... Now that the M-series has been out for a while. Does anyone have an opinion on if it would have been better to stick with Intel? I miss being able to select an i7/i9 for my Mac.

M series is an unmitigated win. M1 Macs can chew through compiles at rates comparable to my Ryzen desktop, while consuming very little power and not even heating up enough to make the fans spin.

Apple is two or three CPU generations ahead of the rest of the industry. It's an objective fact that the most performant personal computing equipment in the world is made by Apple, and its power consumption is such that Apple laptops beat PC laptops on battery life by a factpr of 1.5-2 or more.

I'm now on i7-12700H. I get close to 5900X performance for a single run (compiling Rust code), with the caveat that the computer slows down during compilation (compared to the Ryzen where I don't notice any difference) and subsequent consecutive runs are slower.

The laptop/configuration: XPS 17", i7-12700H, 32Gb of RAM, 1TB, and 4K touch-screen (never thought I'd like that).

Heat/Battery life: The computer might get hot, but I don't feel any heat, might have to do with the carbon fiber instead of metal. The battery life is 10-12 hours for normal use and 6-7 hours for software development. Not Apple's territory but it's a pretty good range.

Other advantages: Touch Screen / 4K (I find myself constantly using it, works out of the box with Sway/Linux), Dual SSD with Raid-1 (fake RAID), works out of the box with Linux, no drivers issues (though have disabled the Nvidia GPU), great and huge trackpad and keyboard, small laptop size/weight relative to screen size,quite customizable and configurable boot settings and finally a nice minimal design,

Finally, running this

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output bs=64k count=100k; rm -f /tmp/output > 6710886400 bytes (6.7 GB, 6.2 GiB) copied, 1.32435 s, 5.1 GB/s

Sounds like a nice rig, too bad Dell build quality and customer service are both sketchy AF.

I love the Apple hardware, the only other manufacturer who is close is Huawei, and it's nigh impossible to get these in the USA anymore.

Yep. Being able to get Apple support wherever you are in the planet is a big plus. You don't need to buy from a local retailer, as long as you have an Apple product you are covered. That being said, I had a 2018-MBP that its battery failed just one year after the warranty and Apple response was to replace all the motherboard/keyboard at a price close to a new one. So...

Also, I think the professional Dell series has a much better build quality than the regular one's. This one is, at least, quite decent.

I didn't know about the Pro series. Still don't wanna give them any money but thank you for sharing the info!

Will keep this in mind next time my wife's i7-u8xxx takes a dump on me with random errors :)

I've always found Dell's ProSupport to be much better than Apple's - Apple just tell us to take the unit into a store while Dell will have an engineer out to site the next day to repair the computer.

> Apple is two or three CPU generations ahead of the rest of the industry. It's an objective fact that the most performant personal computing equipment in the world is made by Apple

This is sort of like how Apple made the best small music player: exclusivity agreement with the enabling makers of small hard-drives so no other companies could use them in music players. Not exactly high engineering from Apple, just savvy business.

In this case it is timed exclusivity with TSMC on the latest process nodes. Apple do do the chip layout design, I'm talking only about the process part of the chip.

I wanted a dedicated mp3 player below $200 that does not suck in 2022 and I ended up getting iPod Video and upgrading battery and replacing HDD with SD card. They got both business and product right that time

Didn't the iPod get discontinued by Apple recently? RIP.

Now our best bet will be that cheapie iPhone.

They mention iPod video, that’s a legacy device with a 30 pin connector, a click wheel and a hard disk. Not the iPod touch.

My MacBook Pro M1 (original M1, not Pro, not Max) compiles WebKit at about the same speed as the last MacBook Pro with Intel Core i9. Sure, the M1 pumps out significantly less heat than the i9, but from reading all the posts cheering how the M1 makes them more productive, I can't help but be a little disappointed, as I expect a bigger jump in performance than this.

(and for the record, the M1 has 8 threads while the i9 has 16, counting hyperthreads. Not sure if that has anything to do with C++ compilation performance)

In this comparison though, your entry level CPU (the M1) is holding its ground against a top of the line CPU performance-wise and beating it on power and thermals. To me that feels like a HUGE improvement, it's like an i3 performing the same as an i9.

No, that is nonsense. Apple only sells $1000+ devices and unsurprisingly none feature an "entry level" CPU. Just like a gaming laptop maker might only sell i7 and i9 models. Nobody would call an i7 "entry level" just because it is the cheaper of the two.

Ok then, entry level on Apple's scale. The i9 MBP's were the previous generation of "top of the line" CPU's offered, and the M1 is the "bottom of the line". An i9 MBP would start at around $3500-4000AUD whereas you can get an M1 Air for ~$1100AUD.

If I was to pay the same for an Apple Silicone MBP as I did for a previous gen i9, I would be getting an M1 Max which absolutely demolishes laptop i9's and has none of the thermal issues.

I used a Macbook Pro 13 (Intel i7) for a little more than a year. And after that I have been using an identical Macbook Pro 13 (ARM M1). The only differences I have noticed are:

- the ARM laptop never gets hot to the touch

- fan spin up is extremely rare on this, compared to Intel, where it would go full throttle on a video call or if I connect a 1440p monitor

- the battery life is at least 6-7x on this

These are amazing improvements and I will wholeheartedly recommend this over the Intel Macbooks. However, one thing I haven't noticed is any difference in performance. I admit my usage does not include webkit compilations. I use browsers with lots of open tabs, google meet calls, slack, VS code with python projects. Both laptops have served well, but they haven't blown me away with speed. My Ryzen 5 desktop feels lightning fast by comparison.

I have a base 2017 MBP, and I'm currently testing out a base 2022 M2 MBP. There's no doubt it's much quieter — the CPU temp is ~30°C instead of 50-70°C. But it also seems quite a bit faster. I am a prosumer type user (I have hundreds of tabs open, but don't compile code often), and the difference is noticeable.

For me, the biggest issue with the Intel MBP was that it got hot so the CPU was throttled all the time. But seeing how cool the M2 runs, I have zero concern that it will ever slow down with my workload. It will always be as fast as the Intel MBP was on its best day. Plus, tons more battery life. I do hate the Touchbar though, and the 2 port setup...

I have an M1 in my personal laptop, and a previous-gen i7 in my work MBP and the difference is night and day.

The i7 is hot, loud, and can barely last 4 hours on battery (and it has a brand new battery in it). With a 4k monitor hooked up there's also a noticeable amount of lag when doing stuff like moving windows around, and opening my various apps after a reboot takes ~3 minutes before my computer is useable again. The RRP of this device was around $3800AUD for i7/16GB/512GB.

On the other hand, the M1 doesn't make a sound and lasts ~12-16hrs on battery. Even playing a 3d game on it for hours, it's inaudible and only warm to the touch (and gets very acceptable performance). Starting up all my apps takes maybe 20 seconds or so and while doing that there's no lag or hitching. The RRP of this was $2799AUD for M1/16GB/1TB.

The 13" M1 MBP with touchbar didn't make a lot of sense then, now the M2 version even less so, I don't know why anyone would consider this model.

The M2 Pro/Max will be released later, nothing surprising here.

And no I don't think anyone misses having to choose between an overheating and throttled 6 or 8-core i7/i9.

Personally I love the touchbar. I got a M1 with the touchbar and some extra RAM/SSD and it's my main machine, but if I had have been in the market for purchasing one now instead of 6 months ago I definitely would have gone for the 13" Pro still. It has other advantages over the Air as well like active cooling (useful in some edge cases) and better battery life.

Having said that, I feel like I'm definitely in a tiny minority here.

As some would say, it's the decoy model that nobody wants. Drives upsells for apple.

Edit: almost nobody

I mean it's not like they don't have the M2 Pro/Max chips for funsies, they haven't finished production of it yet.

Just be patient… M2’s of various capabilities will be rolled out across Apple’s lineup soon enough.

It would have been better for Apple to switch between Intel and AMD whenever one is better than the other, than to go with the M-series, for the market and the end-user.

Most of the performance advantage of the M-series comes from exclusivity on the latest nodes; a significant part of the rest could have been done by asking Intel/AMD to put RAM in the package.

Asking wouldn’t have been enough. They also would have to do it, for a fairly small fraction of the CPUs they build (Apple sells about 30 million systems a year in a total market of 340 million (https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-pc-market-Q4-2021), and that excludes CPUs running in data centers).

I’m not sure adding “and, by the way, we’ll switch manufacturers at will if we can get faster gear elsewhere” will help there.

That is not true. AMD and Intel both routinely make custom chips with far more of a modification than on-package RAM for far smaller orders. See for example supercomputers where they will make custom SKUs for barely a million units.

Switching manufacturers when they get faster gear is a normal practice.

I’m currently using an old 2015 MBP for personal use (with a badly delaminating screen), and I really want to upgrade, but I’ve been put off by the extreme shipping delays when ordering from Apple directly. You can’t get a 14”/16” for over a month.

If I’m not getting it until late august, I’m just going to keep waiting for M2 Max.

10 mins with a baking soda paste will remove the antireflective coating.

Honest question: Why would you want/need to remove the antireflective coating?

Because chunks of it start coming up from wear and tear and the only thing worse than not having anti reflective coating is having bits and pieces of your display reflective and the rest of it nonreflective.

Took a bit longer than 10 minutes but baking soda paste definitely did the trick. Thanks for this comment. All I do on this laptop is surf the web and send texts on iMessage so you just bought me a lot of time before I need to upgrade.

>Does anyone have an opinion on if it would have been better to stick with Intel? Not even close.

I don't see having an obsolete model as being a huge issue because I don't see anything major Apple has in the pipeline. The actual performance improvements are modest and a major design or addition of new functionality isn't expected. The m2 Pro probably will exist mostly because of having to deal with Zen4/Raptor lake competition. When the laptop comes out, Apple is likely to charge a premium over the m1 model and continue to offer the m1 model.

I would probably just buy if I needed a laptop, and wait if I didn't.

Another nail in the coffin, I guess! Who in 2022 would release a laptop with a single USB port?! Who except Apple, of course!

I have a 2017 base MBP, which also has 2 USB-C ports. On that machine, I think it is fair to characterize it as having a single port, since you have to plug it in all the time.

On the M1 and M2 machines, however, this is not quite as fair a characterization. After all, the battery life is ~2x that of the Intel MBPs. So you can definitely plug in your iPhone into one port and an external HD into the other and do a backup without worrying about the MBP running out of juice.

Still, I think it's pretty silly that the new MBA has MagSafe + 2x USB-C and the base MBP is still scraping by with just the USB-C. Even the original Touchbar MBPs had more connectivity than that! (The base MBP didn't have the TB, blessedly, so it was only the 4-port machines that had this 'upgrade'.)

Speaking about M1 laptop here, yes, the port selection is poor, however the laptop is so good that I will choose it any moment over my Lenovo with many ports. YMMV I guess.

What's that thing called when a kidnapping victim falls in love with their captor?

*G* sorry, only kidding. The alternatives are really that bad.. it'd actually be kind of amusing except this is my real life.

>What's that thing called when a kidnapping victim falls in love with their captor?

It's called pseudoscience:

Namnyak et al. (2008) A research group led by Namnyak has found that although there is a lot of media coverage of Stockholm syndrome, there has not been a lot of research into the phenomenon. What little research has been done is often contradictory and does not always agree on what Stockholm syndrome is. The term has grown beyond kidnappings to all definitions of abuse. There is no clear definition of symptoms to diagnose the syndrome.[35]

FBI law enforcement bulletin (1999) A 1998 report by the FBI containing over 1,200 hostage incidents found that only 8% of kidnapping victims showed signs of Stockholm syndrome. When victims who showed negative and positive feelings toward the law enforcement personnel are excluded, the percentage decreases to 5%. A survey of 600 police agencies in 1989, performed by the FBI and the University of Vermont, found not a single case when emotional involvement between the victim and the kidnapper interfered with or jeopardized an assault. In short, this database provides empirical support that the Stockholm syndrome remains a rare occurrence. The sensational nature of dramatic cases causes the public to perceive this phenomenon as the rule rather than the exception. The bulletin concludes that, although depicted in fiction and film and often referred to by the news media, the phenomenon actually occurs rarely. Therefore, crisis negotiators should place the Stockholm syndrome in proper perspective.[7]

In what ways (aside from battery life) is the M1 better than a comparable spec Windows Laptop?

Perhaps you're used to MacOS, but functionally, day-to-day there are not many practical differences with Windows unless there is some specific Mac only app you need.

Otherwise I would say Mac laptops are not especially good value, if you just look at the specs at face value.

I recently built a PC for ~$750 with an i7, 16GB ram, 1TB SSD and 3060 ti GPU. Something similar on Mac would cost maybe 3x more.

I've used Windows almost exclusively until the end of 2021, when I replaced it with Macbook Air with M1 processor, so I am very aware of Windows vs. MacOS situation. To be honest, I like windows management on Windows better than MacOS, I also like much better compatibility with e.g. legacy printers on Windows 10. Also updates are faster and with much less problems on Windows (I'd never thoght I'd write that).

The above being said, I bought the Mac it exclusively because of hardware. I am aware that you can build much better desktop PC for the money, but I need laptop for my use cases, I don't own any desktop computer and don't plan to.

Going deeper, I only paid around 960 USD for 16/512 configuration (in Europe), and for that kind of money I got great performance, great battery life, very good screen, excellent trackpad and usable keyboard. It's very thin, runs very cool and for the first time I can use laptop more like phone/tablet - only charging it when the battery gets low. Oh, and I have ZERO problems with battery drain during sleep, which on Windows is currently broken (connected standby).

What I also got is mediocre selection of ports and I am not sure how durable the machine is compared to Thinkpad, so I kinda baby it all the time.

YMMV, I personally don't care who uses what but since you asked, above are my points.

Apple and like dozens of others...

Who actually apart from Apple is selling laptops with only one USB port? A dozen you say?

By "only one" you mean one usb-c + a second that's also used for power?

So, like e.g. the Dell XPS 13 9300 or the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio.

(They have 1 other port on top of the M2 MBP, technically, but it's SD card slot - I doubt you had that in mind as what's misisng from the MBP).

Heck, there's also a port-free contender Craob X: https://craob.com/

And don't forget that you can always not buy the machine!

In a few hours some suck-up on medium will write a "and here's why this is a good thing" article

It's an introductory model. Just like the first 13" M1. Lower cost components and less features.

It takes time to ramp up a new CPU. It takes time to promote new CPUs with new features.

It takes time for Apple to walk the marketing they want in order to direct folks to the kinds of machines they want to make.

Does NO ONE have any patience?

The base model costs 1600€. Why should anybody have any patience when they're paying that much for a laptop?

I had the same thought the other day when I found out that the base 14" Macbook Pro only has 8 cores. Imagine paying $2,000 for a laptop with 16 gigs of memory, and the CPU is by-and-large the same as a $1,000 product...

The $1000 product has 8gb of ram, the $1400 air is the one with the equivalent ram and memory specs.

Look at the m1 Mac vs the m1 air, and the m1 MacBook Pro vs the m1 studio. The m1 air comes at a $300 premium, the m1 MacBook Pro comes at a $900 premium. Incidentally meaning that the m1 pro 8 core chip is not coming at a price premium over the m1 air 8 core chip.

I think the idea a webcam, a screen, a trackpad, a battery, a case, and a keyboard is worth $900 is what's eyebrow raising about Apple's pricing but at the end of the day professional users are price insensitive and Apple understands that. The other issue is that integrated SSD and memory, for any brand not just Apple is a bit of a racket compared to buying some workstation laptop with so-dimm slots and an NVME slot.

Spot on, Apple has always been a bit of a ripoff, erm, I mean "premium apple tax".

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