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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

I'm about due to upgrade my 2017 Air, and it'll be to a 13" M2 Air. I would have done it already, but every time I price it out and see that they want to charge me $300 for 256 gigs of storage, I get a little offended and close the tab. As with every Apple purchase I make, it'll just come down to necessity, after the old one finally breaks. I'll hold my nose and pay the Apple tax, knowing that they think of me as a sucker, and they're probably right.

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What may not be widely known is that going from 256GB -> 512GB on M2-based machines also gives the SSD a huge speed bump, because 512GB is made up of 2x256GB chips with dual channels. Apple uses a single chip for 256GB configurations as a cost saving measure :(

For some use cases, you're even better off upgrading the base model M2 Air to 512GB vs upgrading the RAM from 8 to 16GB for a similar cost. This is because swapping suddenly becomes twice as fast.

…your description makes it sound like an upgrade, when actually the 256 configuration is just incompetent, a failure (or sabotage?) compared to the m1 models that worked properly without the expensive “upgrade”

    a failure (or sabotage?) compared to the m1 models that 
    worked properly without the expensive “upgrade”

I don't know the specifics, but the "lowest-capacity model has reduced performance because there's only a single chip instead of multiple chips being used in parallel" has been the case with SSDs for just about as long as they've been around and it is definitely not an Apple-specific thing.

My understanding is this: when the lowest-capacity model is only using a single chip, it's because the manufacturer is no longer making smaller sizes. For example, Apple's supplier(s) may not even be making 128GB NAND chips any more or may be discontinuing them soon, so they don't even have the option of using 128GB+128GB instead of 256GB.

I wouldn’t say “incompetent” if it still outperforms most x86 laptops you get for the same price.

Think of it as having one SSD fitted on the low end and two on all other models.

One caveat! You must buy the M2 Pro (14" or larger, non-air) model to get 2 external screens.

We bought the wrong model to start with (13" M2 regular) and spent a week messing around with ours trying to get it to work with our 2 external displays when we rang Apple and they explained the difference between M2 Regular and M2 Pro. If you were buying one for yourself and budget was of no value, note the 13" and 14" are virtually the same physical size, and yet the design and technical capabilities of the 14" model are far and beyond ...

I wrote off the 13" as a loss and paid the difference myself, and now use it as a laptop at home :) Old design, yes, but it was such a nice piece of kit, no way I was gonna send it back to Apple!

I believe multiple screens are possible, even on the M1 MBA, you just need a docking station. Officially some don't support multiple screens, but there are mainstream solutions to this in the form of docking stations, just not sure why Apple doesn't even so much as hint that it's possible. It's a really unclear process!

It's possible only if you use a DisplayLink dock which requires using very specific dongles and installing specific third-party drivers. Our company already has 10-ish Dell Monitors with USB-C docks integrated, also Thunderbolt Dell docks, and neither of these work. There is no workaround.

If someone sells all that in one box, that’s still an easy solution.

Yep you get an extra 25% GPU and an extra 256 gigs of storage for 300$.

Dammit price discrimination. I realize buying the cheaper option frequently is the better option with Apple prices but they really know how to price in storage anxiety.

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