Base model Apple M2 MacBook Pro SSD Up To 50% slower than M1 MacBook Pro SSD | Half the NAND chips, half the speed

[HenrySalayne]

11 minutes ago, leadeater said:

A good SATA SSD is not trash, yet you are calling an SSD 3 times faster trash simply because it's slower than the previous iteration/generation. It's worse, not terrible

I disagree. A SATA SSD is limited by the interface. A NVME SSD should be limited by the interface. I would call a PCIe 4.0 SSD not even getting close to the 3.0 limits of 4 GB/s a trash tier SSD as well, even so it might be faster than any SATA SSD on the market. 

And it was argued in great length that Apple switched to a integrated flash controller solely for performance and power efficiency reasons. Now we have something that is slower than the competition and - even worse - slower than the 19 month older predecessor. "Trash tier" carries a certain sniderness but it's not unsuited in this particular case. At least in my opinion.

[HenrySalayne]

15 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

That's not how any of this works. The one that makes a claim has to come up with some sort of backing, not the other way round.

And ebay is a bad indicator, and btw also a lot of new machines sell through there, got nothing to do with the used market.

He did. I mean you came up with the "I don't believe you and I have no evidence to back up my opinion".

Like I said, the used market could draw a distorted picture, but it's probably the best approximation you could get.

BTW; in my own experience, businesses tend to throw around huge amounts of Macs with the base config unless they actually have to meet specific criteria. The Macbook Air base config will most likely be the most prolific model in the entire line-up.

[leadeater]

19 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

A SATA SSD is limited by the interface

So, this means nothing at all

 

19 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

A NVME SSD should be limited by the interface.

An NVMe is almost never limited by the interface. EXTREMELY few, close to zero are.

 

19 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

I would call a PCIe 4.0 SSD not even getting close to the 3.0 limits of 4 GB/s a trash tier SSD as well, even so it might be faster than any SATA SSD on the market. 

Then you don't know what you are talking about because my SATA 850 Pro SSDs can outperform many, many, NVMe SSDs where it matters, outside the spec sheet and ridiculous sequential I/O operations and queue depths you will NEVER do.

 

Here is a Samsung 980 Pro:

https://www.storagereview.com/review/samsung-980-pro-pcie-4-0-nvme-ssd-review

 

QD1T1 is far far closer to what people, even high end professional workloads, will actually be doing. Notice how in a professional storage review what is assessed is latency because that is literally the only thing the matters and that is dependent on I/O workload profile. So unless you actually test and compare what you are actually doing spec sheets and Black Magic/Crystal Disk Mark etc is actually a useless comparison.

 

 

Quote

In 64K sequential writes, we again saw the new Samsung drive with significantly better results compared to the other PCIe Gen4 drives. Here, peak performance hit around the 27K IOPS mark (1.7GB/s) at 583.1µs (before falling off slightly at the end), which was essentially double the speed of the next best drive.

 

Oh no, by your own parameters the 980 Pro is trash 

[LAwLz]

11 minutes ago, leadeater said:

So unless you actually test and compare what you are actually doing spec sheets and Black Magic/Crystal Disk Mark etc is actually a useless comparison.

I have been trying to tell people like @HenrySalayne and @Blademaster91 this several times all throughout the test but they never respond to it*, probably because they don't understand how tests of storage performance should be performed or because they don't want to know. That the Youtuber Max seems equally ignorant on the matter doesn't help either since he is, for some reason, seen as an authoritative figure to these people.

I have even linked them to tests showing the Samsung 980 Pro, one of the best, if not the best, consumer SSD on the market getting 1.1GB/s speeds in Anandtech's SSD benchmark suite.

 

For all we know, BlackMagic's test might be testing low queue depth and drives like the Samsung 980 Pro might even be slower.

We just don't know, and yet people are so hell bent on making the M2 MacBook Pro seem bad that they resort to generalizing the entire product line based on a single SKU, in a single test, when we don't even know what other drives perform like in the same test.

 

 

But nope... We will forever be stuck in this conversation because some people are determined to say the M2 MacBook Pro is a shit product because of one SKU doing one test, and anyone who brings up anything different, such as pointing out there are other SKUs, other workloads where the results are different (like in the gaming test where the M2 outperforms the M1 by about 100%), is just an Apple fanboy.

 

 

I give up. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

 

 

*Blademaster91 did kind of respond to it by shifting the conversation away from speed into other vague stuff like just saying the 980 Pro is better anyway because it has multiple NAND dies without any further explanation.

[HenrySalayne]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

QD1T1 is far far closer to what people, even high end professional workloads, will actually be doing. Notice how in a professional storage review what is assessed is latency because that is literally the only thing the matters and that is dependent on I/O workload profile. So unless you actually test and compare what you are actually doing spec sheets and Crystal Disk Mark is actually a useless comparison.

Considering everything else is identical, wouldn't reducing the NAND packages by half also reduce the IOPS more or less by half?

Sadly, all we have is the sequential tests, nobody seems to be testing IOPS on Mac.

As Mac OS is rather aggressively memory swapping and performance is noticeably reduced while multi-tasking, deducting that the SSD is the culprit isn't too far fetched IMHO.

[rikitikitavi]

4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

Also this truth bomb from Gruber:

https://overcast.fm/+B7NCzpmhg/1:53:50

I believe Gruber tried to remember a proverb that was smth like this:

”The monkey that got on the top always gets his ass inspected by others hanging below him”

[igormp]

On 7/1/2022 at 7:49 PM, Blademaster91 said:

The only premium PC laptops I've seen that still come with 8GB ram are Microsoft Surface laptops or 2in1's, and that isn't any better imo.

And for regular users I think the Macbook air is a better deal if they have to go with a Mac.

 

On 7/1/2022 at 7:49 PM, Blademaster91 said:

I agree they should know better, although this laptop is in the "pro" lineup, 8GB and 256GB storage isn't enough for editing, or Photoshop while having a browser open with more than a few tabs.

A "pro" could be just doing excell all day long, or just in calls with investors/clients on the go, or even just remoting into an actual powerful remote server to get their job done.

 

On 7/1/2022 at 7:49 PM, Blademaster91 said:

I would think the 256GB of storage would be more acceptable if it were user replaceable, but ofc not so only 256GB really limits what you can do with it.

 

IMO going for a higher end model on the 13" doesn't make much sense, going to 16GB and 1TB makes it a $1900 laptop, you may as well go for the 14" for the faster SoC with a fan, better screen, and more ports.

I agree with you. If I were to buy such device knowing that it isn't upgradeable, I'd try to go with a better model. And if I'm going to spend more anyways, why not make the jump to the 14"-actual-pro model?

 

But that us, for other people it likely makes sense, otherwise Apple wouldn't do a refresh of this model.

[Rauten]

On 7/2/2022 at 12:18 AM, LAwLz said:

Tell your users to stop saving important documents locally and start using Office 365, or save files on a remote file server.

If you aren't doing that then you are arguably "doing IT wrong".

Users should not have hundreds of gigabytes of files stored locally. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

Done, done, and done. The company already had such a system in place years before I joined, and signed up the entire corporation to OneDrive for Business shortly after I joined. It is enforced and mandatory for all users.

It does help somewhat, but many users still need 512GBs not to choke their storage to death.

[AlTech]

18 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

 

And they’re not getting a bad experience. 

 

They’re getting the laptop experience of a lifetime compared to a Wintel laptop that hits the brakes the moment it’s unplugged. (this down here is the 16GB/512GB but a lot of the video applies to the M2 in general, especially the unplugged performance, the GPU and the superior battery life)

 

 

Also this truth bomb from Gruber:

https://overcast.fm/+B7NCzpmhg/1:53:50

 

You either don’t care about such a geeky drama about I/O or you care but it’s the least of your problems if the 200$ upgrade is a deal breaker. 

For $1299 not getting a bad experience is insulting. I expect to not get a bad experience from a $300 to $400 laptop. A $1000+ laptop is meant to be a premium laptop that gives you a great experience, arguably even an awesome experience.

[saltycaramel]

8 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

For $1299 not getting a bad experience is insulting. I expect to not get a bad experience from a $300 to $400 laptop. A $1000+ laptop is meant to be a premium laptop that gives you a great experience, arguably even an awesome experience.

 

This line of reasoning and obtuse juggling with words (obviously I meant they’re not getting a bad experience AND they’re getting the exact opposite, as implied by the rest of my post) is insulting to my intelligence. 

 

Bad forum experience, 2/10, would not interact again.

[Dracarris]

53 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

A $1000+ laptop is meant to be a premium laptop that gives you a great experience, arguably even an awesome experience.

anything below 1k$ is a budget laptop, around 1k is where you get decent machines that will actually last. The premium segment starts at 2k. The fact that Apple gives you all their premium features (screen, battery, trackpad, speakers, general build quality) across the whole stack is a nice bonus.

 

You don't even get a "premium" desktop PC for 1k$ and the form factor and integrated screen/peripherals of a laptop always inflates the price in comparison to a matching PC.

[mecarry30]

7 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

For $1299 not getting a bad experience is insulting. I expect to not get a bad experience from a $300 to $400 laptop. A $1000+ laptop is meant to be a premium laptop that gives you a great experience, arguably even an awesome experience.

So would you make the same complaints about the plastic gaming laptops at that price range, with horrible trackpads, speakers, and battery life?

[AlTech]

1 hour ago, mecarry30 said:

So would you make the same complaints about the plastic gaming laptops at that price range, with horrible trackpads, speakers, and battery life?

Gaming laptops normally have terrible speakera, bad battery life, and horrible trackpads.

 

If terrible speakers on a gaming laptop bother you then you have bigger problems than a gaming laptop being a gaming laptop.

 

Similar but not exactly the same for the Battery life and trackpad arguments. If a bad trackpad on a gaming laptop bothers you then perhaps a gaming laptop isn't for you. Same for mediocre battery life.

[Blademaster91]

8 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

For $1299 not getting a bad experience is insulting. I expect to not get a bad experience from a $300 to $400 laptop. A $1000+ laptop is meant to be a premium laptop that gives you a great experience, arguably even an awesome experience.

I would expect to at least get the same experience as the previous laptop model at a premium price, but that isn't the case with slower storage.

1 hour ago, mecarry30 said:

So would you make the same complaints about the plastic gaming laptops at that price range, with horrible trackpads, speakers, and battery life?

That would depend on the usage, but in the price range I would rather get a gaming laptop as they have much better price to performance than business laptops do, laptops like an Asus Zephyrus G15, Lenovo Legion 5, or a Gigabyte Aorus 5 are good options and I would use one for work.

Gaming laptop trackpads are fine,I would still want a mouse for doing any work, laptop speakers are still laptop speakers, and gaming laptops with AMD Ryzen cpu's have decent battery life.

[HenrySalayne]

12 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

laptop speakers are still laptop speakers

 The Macbooks have decent "Netflix & chill" speakers, but compared to even cheap bluetooth speakers, they still have a long way to go.

 

[igormp]

44 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Gaming laptops normally have terrible speakera, bad battery life, and horrible trackpads.

 

If terrible speakers on a gaming laptop bother you then you have bigger problems than a gaming laptop being a gaming laptop.

 

Similar but not exactly the same for the Battery life and trackpad arguments. If a bad trackpad on a gaming laptop bothers you then perhaps a gaming laptop isn't for you. Same for mediocre battery life.

So you're ok with having a mediocre experience for over $1k if it's a gaming laptop? weird.

 

31 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

I would expect to at least get the same experience as the previous laptop model at a premium price, but that isn't the case with slower storage.

I doubt the experience is any worse in practice, with most benchmarks out there showing it's faster than the previous M1. The only case I can imagine it being important is if you try to copy over 50gb of files for some reason, which would saturate the SLC cache of both models anyway, and represents 1/5th of the total disk size.

 

36 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

That would depend on the usage, but in the price range I would rather get a gaming laptop as they have much better price to performance than business laptops do, laptops like an Asus Zephyrus G15, Lenovo Legion 5, or a Gigabyte Aorus 5 are good options and I would use one for work.

Gaming laptop trackpads are fine,I would still want a mouse for doing any work, laptop speakers are still laptop speakers, and gaming laptops with AMD Ryzen cpu's have decent battery life.

Good for you, but most people out there don't want 15"+ laptops when on the go, nor do want to care about a mouse. Decent battery life is not something that I'd accept for a work machine, I'd rather have a 8 hours+ battery life with good trackpad so I can actually work on the go without sparkling lights or a useless gaming GPU.

 

Not to mention that it's not only a matter of price to performance, the extra cost in business laptops comes from their support. Good luck having the same level of support of a thinkpad/macbook with your zephyrus or legion 5.

 

It's sounds weird to me how you're trying to justify the idiotic price for gaming laptops with lower build quality and support, but complain about a specific macbook SKU just because it has a "slower" drive (which I didn't find any actual good disk benchmarks for, just some simple bursty tests with that black magic software).

[mecarry30]

2 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Gaming laptops normally have terrible speakera, bad battery life, and horrible trackpads.

 

If terrible speakers on a gaming laptop bother you then you have bigger problems than a gaming laptop being a gaming laptop.

 

Similar but not exactly the same for the Battery life and trackpad arguments. If a bad trackpad on a gaming laptop bothers you then perhaps a gaming laptop isn't for you. Same for mediocre battery life.

Didn't you say that "A $1000+ laptop is meant to be a premium laptop that gives you a great experience, arguably even an awesome experience."?

So just because the industry has normalized these aspects of gaming laptops, it's fine? The cost to switch to better materials would not be much at all - at most a couple dollars, and it would be at minimum cents.

 

 

[mecarry30]

2 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

That would depend on the usage, but in the price range I would rather get a gaming laptop as they have much better price to performance than business laptops do, laptops like an Asus Zephyrus G15, Lenovo Legion 5, or a Gigabyte Aorus 5 are good options and I would use one for work.

Gaming laptop trackpads are fine,I would still want a mouse for doing any work, laptop speakers are still laptop speakers, and gaming laptops with AMD Ryzen cpu's have decent battery life.

Saying that they're just "fine" for a $1000+ machine wouldn't really provide a premium experience now, would it?

The mouse one is subjective, and afaik there aren't any gaming laptops bar perhaps the zephyrus lineup which actually have good battery life. Doesn't really sound like a premium experience when on a laptop you need to be connected to power all the time...

[RedRound2]

8 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

 The Macbooks have decent "Netflix & chill" speakers, but compared to even cheap bluetooth speakers, they still have a long way to go.

 

Says a person who likely never experienced a MacBook speaker. And I'm sorry, but having good speakers is better than having to carry around external Bluetooth speaker, so your own argument credits Apple. And I can have a great time watching movies with my MBA compared to my Zephyrus G15, as the MBA speakers are way better despite smaller screen size

 

What kind of mental gymnastics do you all play in your head to just twist and turn so much to just get into "I hate Apple narrative" As I said in my initial post, its pathetic and devoid of any logic. 

 

There's also Blademaster going on saying about how a Gaming laptop is better when a gaming laptop lacks in actual real quality of life features and support of the MBP line. Again pathetic.

[hishnash]

23 minutes ago, RedRound2 said:

Says a person who likely never experienced a MacBook speaker. And I'm sorry, but having good speakers is better than having to carry around external Bluetooth speaker, so your own argument credits Apple. And I can have a great time watching movies with my MBA compared to my Zephyrus G15, as the MBA speakers are way better despite smaller screen size

 

I cant speak for the 13" MBP but the speakers on the 16 MBP are way way better than an portable Bluetooth speaker I have head.

[Blademaster91]

8 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

 The Macbooks have decent "Netflix & chill" speakers, but compared to even cheap bluetooth speakers, they still have a long way to go.

 

I don't mind laptop speakers for watching a youtube video, but if I'm going to watch a movie I'd rather use headphones.

[Blademaster91]

6 hours ago, mecarry30 said:

Saying that they're just "fine" for a $1000+ machine wouldn't really provide a premium experience now, would it?

Except people are saying a 1GB/s SSD is "fine" on a $1,000+ machine, not really a premium experience.

6 hours ago, mecarry30 said:

The mouse one is subjective, and afaik there aren't any gaming laptops bar perhaps the zephyrus lineup which actually have good battery life. Doesn't really sound like a premium experience when on a laptop you need to be connected to power all the time...

The mouse is subjective, which I why I said depending on usage, and so are speakers and battery life, not everyone has to be away from a wall outlet all the time. I would rather sacrifice some battery life for a laptop with a replaceable SSD and RAM.

40 minutes ago, RedRound2 said:

Says a person who likely never experienced a MacBook speaker. And I'm sorry, but having good speakers is better than having to carry around external Bluetooth speaker, so your own argument credits Apple. And I can have a great time watching movies with my MBA compared to my Zephyrus G15, as the MBA speakers are way better despite smaller screen size

 

What kind of mental gymnastics do you all play in your head to just twist and turn so much to just get into "I hate Apple narrative" As I said in my initial post, its pathetic and devoid of any logic. 

 

There's also Blademaster going on saying about how a Gaming laptop is better when a gaming laptop lacks in actual real quality of life features and support of the MBP line. Again pathetic.

Is it so difficult to carry IEM's or headphones? And I'd rather enjoy a movie on a larger screen with something better than laptop speakers.

Interesting you're trying to claim people are twisting anything when you're twisting subjective preferences into your everything sucks except apple bias.

[HenrySalayne]

1 hour ago, RedRound2 said:

Says a person who likely never experienced a MacBook speaker. And I'm sorry, but having good speakers is better than having to carry around external Bluetooth speaker, so your own argument credits Apple. And I can have a great time watching movies with my MBA compared to my Zephyrus G15, as the MBA speakers are way better despite smaller screen size

 

What kind of mental gymnastics do you all play in your head to just twist and turn so much to just get into "I hate Apple narrative" As I said in my initial post, its pathetic and devoid of any logic. 

Mate, get your rage under control. I didn't say anything negative about Apple, yet you still react like I insulted your mother. You're acting more and more like a religious fanatic.

 

I just said: most other speakers > Macbook speakers > most (not all) other laptop speakers

But:

If you really care for sound quality, you should get a bluetooth speaker or some headphones; if you don't care for sound quality, all other laptops are also sufficient to produce something you can listen to. It's certainly nice to have good speakers in a notebook, but the one-eyed is only a king in the city of the blind. It's a really important distinction that good speakers and good laptop speakers are two different categories.

 

[mecarry30]

1 hour ago, Blademaster91 said:

Except people are saying a 1GB/s SSD is "fine" on a $1,000+ machine, not really a premium experience.

The mouse is subjective, which I why I said depending on usage, and so are speakers and battery life, not everyone has to be away from a wall outlet all the time. I would rather sacrifice some battery life for a laptop with a replaceable SSD and RAM.

A 1 GB/s SSD is much faster than any HDD, and will not compromise on the experience in any way unless you're doing something which requirs a lot of bandwidth - which would also require more storage space, and 256 isn't enough for that. So then people who are actually doing work on this specific machine would go for the bigger size because it wouldn't make sense to go for such a small capacity in the first place.

 

The mouse is subjective - battery life is most definitely not, given that these are laptops we're talking about. It is one of the most important parts given that it's meant to be portable, and if you're going to be close to a wall outlet then there is 0 reason to go for a laptop - and don't bring up edge case scenarios where you might have to travel once in a while or something, because those are exactly that - edge case scenarios.

I don't understand how battery life and replaceable storage/memory are connected at all, but it sounds like you'd like a desktop anyways, so

[saltycaramel]

I have the latest 16” MBP and no (portable, no sh!t sherlock a pair of KEF LS50 are better) bluetooth speaker could be better than the perfectly stereo-separated audio you get if you’re in the sitting-in-front-of-the-laptop-using-it position. And no amount of “Crab rave” tests thru a mic can convey it. Gotta be experienced to be believed, and you gotta be at the main user sitting position (in my experience it works well both on lap and on a desk). As usual some people here make assumptions and talk in absolutes about stuff they have no clue about. (like the battery life of these Macs, no matter the model, being on a completely different league)

 

Now if you want to truly get your mind blown, beyond stereo-separated, try some spatial audio native (not simulated) music tracks in Apple Music or some Dolby Atmos Apple TV+ content (or your MKVs via Infuse).

 

Equating all of this to portable bluetooth speakers is at best naive. Plus you have to carry the freaking bluetooth speaker around.