“They’ll fix it in the next version” may be a cliche, but it seems to have applied to the SSD issue found in the M2 MacBook Air.
On Wednesday, repair outfit iFixit posted a video teardown of the base model of Apple’s newly-released 13-inch MacBook Air with the M3 chip and 256GB of storage. The company addressed the controversial SSD issue, as this configuration is equipped with two 128GB flash storage chips. This change results in significantly faster SSD speeds than the equivalent MacBook Air with the M2 chip, which has a single 256GB storage chip, as the SSD can read and write from the two chips simultaneously.
Per YouTube channel Max Tech, which ran Blackmagic’s Speed Test tool with a 5GB file size test on both the M2 and M3 models of the 13-inch MacBook Air with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, the channel noted that the SSD in the M3 model achieved up to 33 percent faster write speeds and up to 82 faster read speeds compared to the SSD in the M2 model.
When the M2 MacBook Air was released last year, users applauded the notebook but criticized its SSD configuration, which resulted in slower SSD speeds that may have been unlikely to have been noticed by the average user working on common day-to-day tasks but could significantly slow higher-end work such as graphics and video editing. The base model M3 MacBook Air’s SSD speeds are now roughly equivalent to the base model M1 MacBook Air again, which should offer some relief to power users.
If you’ve had a chance to pick up the new M3 MacBook Air notebook, please let us know about your experience in the comments.