Which is fine for the entry-level model. Is it true for the more expensive model? The article doesn't say.
> With that as the background, Apple was bound to make a sacrifice or two to reached the aggressive price point and it did so with the SSD. Most people will take that over it removing something like Touch ID or another feature they'd use on a daily basis. It's also worth pointing out that given it is an entry-level point product, most users who pick up the new notebook likely won't notice the difference at all.
I'm not sure that most people would, given the choice, have gone that route. There are plenty of Apple features (including Touch ID) that Apple thinks people want, but I'm not convinced that most people definitely want them. The last sentence is the only one that counts: most people won't notice.
It's light, easy to use, plenty fast for anything I do on a regular basis, and the Retina display is excellent.
Unless I have reason not to trust it, Touch ID is the perfect way to log in when you:
1. want to have your computer lock after a short period of inactivity and
2. tend to use long passwords that you don't want to type in all the time.
The popular dust complaints aside, a brand new machine has immediate problems for someone whose palms tend to touch the newly enlarged Force Touch trackpad during typing, a hand position I got used to with my Macbook Air 2013. Typing on the new design will cause repeated keystrokes, delayed or missing keystrokes, and instant cursor shifts during typing that make it so I need to approach the keyboard in the same way one would properly play a piano in order to get any meaningful work done. Great if you're a trained pianist, terrible if you want to get actual work done from a coffee shop where you don't have a stand or external keyboard on hand.
Apple knows they messed up with the butterfly mechanism and seem to be fixing that in the next design. In the meantime, there are a few things they could do now through software to alleviate these issues:
1. The ability to remap the Force Touch trackpad tracking area in Settings. Being able to remove 10mm from each side would fix my cursor shift issue. People currently use tape to solve this... on a $4000+ machine.
2. Ability to set a numeric value for Force Touch sensitivity as opposed to 3 constant values with a much higher threshold than is currently being used as "high".
I know Apple is all about limiting options for a customer's own good, however, these software changes would go a long way in helping people debrick an expensive laptop who don't happen to fit whatever hand size their QA team of classically trained pianists have.
Coming from a 2014 MBP 13 I definitely didn't notice the slower SSD speed -- editing raw camera files in Lightroom is really fast and the display is phenomenal.
I guess apple have improved recent years but previously this was quite apparent. "Wow, new much faster model costs the same as the old one!" Yeah, that's because the old one is insanely overpriced - unless you bought it on launch day. Conveniently that's the only day of the lifetime it is ever compared to the competition.
We even saw priced for old DDR3 chips go up as well as people were trying to reuse older board for non-CPU intensive stuff.
So tech prices don't always go down. They usually do, but sometimes market demands cause shortages and even non-vintage/collectable old tech can go up in price.
It wasn't until Apple started putting PCIe SSDs in their computers that they became performant enough for stress-free everyday use (in my opinion). Just going from a spinning hard drive to a SATA SSD took my 2012 Mac mini from agonizing to acceptable. I've played around with newer Macs with PCIe storage, and the difference is night and day. They finally feel like real Unix workstations with nearly instant response to user input, and almost no spinning beachballs to be found.
For me personally, Touch ID makes sense on a phone, because I can do it with a single hand. For a laptop, I'm going to have my fingers on the home row anyway, and typing in even a complicated password is fast.
Better specs for cheaper...
This is probably aimed at people from outside the Apple customer base and comparability.
The T2 chip is an Apple ARM SoC running Darwin/XNU (basically a cut-down iOS). It connects to the Intel system using a variety of buses.
From a storage perspective, the T2 is the storage controller. It sits between raw NAND flash and the Intel system (connecting to the Intel with PCIe/NVMe). The T2 transparently encrypts all data stored on the NAND, using the factory-burned-in key.
Given this architecture, how would read speeds drop by 35% from one model to the next? I'm not sure--my first guess was that fewer NAND chips were being used, but teardowns show that both 2018 and 2019 models were using two chips. So same controller, same number of chips. Maybe the NAND is just slower? Or the T2 has less RAM, so it can cache less?
NAND flash is almost always packaged with a stack of several dies in each BGA package. Individual dies are typically 256Gb (32GB) or larger, and most manufacturers will stack up to 8 or 16 dies per package. So an SSD with two packages can easily vary from 128GB (2 packages x 2 dies per package x 256Gb per die) to 2TB (2 packages x 16 dies per package x 512Gb per die).
It's also possible for a single BGA package to have the NAND organized on one or more channels. Drives using larger form factors (eg. enterprise SSDs using 2.5"/15mm dual-PCB) will typically have each package connecting to only one of the SSD controller's channels, and often have multiple packages per channel. Consumer SSDs that need to minimize PCB footprint take the opposite approach, using eg. two packages connecting to two channels each to fully populate a low-end 4-channel SSD controller.
I don't know Apple's recent history of NAND choices, but it's possible they've switched from MLC (two bit per cell) to TLC (three bit per cell) NAND flash, which sacrifices performance for density and cost. They have probably moved to 3D NAND with a higher layer count, which can be a mixed bag for performance especially when the controller is not also upgraded. If they've moved to a higher per-die capacity for drives with the same total capacity, then a significant performance drop for lower-capacity models is expected.
It is very common, if not the norm to have SSD slower at lowest end capacity. Having 2 Chip shown in the tear down doesn't mean it has the same channels inside those package. My guess is that it is Dual Channel per package, and it is only running at 3 Channels on the 128GB SSD.
It's probably however the first time, I can remember at least, where Apple downgraded a newer model in such an unequivocal way.
I mean newer CPU's have had different multicore/single core tradeoffs, the inclusion of a dedicated GPU have been removed in base models etc, and the endless discussion of ports (rip SD card slot etc) but I don't think we have ever seen something like this?
Also of note: the maximum SSD capacity dropped as well. Formerly the Air could be spec'd up to 1.5 TB, now 1 TB is the max.
Especially now that there is "the cloud" (and external hard drives)
It wasn't that long ago that we were using 7200rpm HDs which capped at around 110MB/s for large files.
Or better Dell/HP/System76 with upgradable 32GB RAM.
Hardware of latest MBP aren't super reliable anymore, so I don't see any reason to pay premium price.
Further this sort of single-sample analysis of a vendor like Apple's products is always folly. Apply doesn't advertise specific SSD units, speeds, etc, and we know that they often vary them within a product, sometimes with multiple variants on the market at the same time with slightly varying performance.
Apple used to launch new phones/macs with these kinds of changes, and people used to buy them for these kinds of changes -- just a little bit thinner, just a little bit more battery. And suddenly people won't notice this. I am sure if it were the other way around, Apple would have claimed to have invented a new device and would have sold them as something new. And people would have gathered in queue to buy them.
And when you do the reverse, suddenly its okay.
What kind of Internet connection do you have?
I'm sure for almost all users of those machines, the SSD is more than fast enough for everything they want and big upgrade from HDD based Windows laptops many will be switching from (those were typical 3-4 years ago and even now are still around).
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pc...
Nominally, my personal system has something that can do 2GB/s, but in normal operation, as programs and OSes do their thing, the software is incapable of making requests quickly enough to come even close to saturating the bandwidth. I'm not sure if you dropped a part in there that maxed out at 512MB/s that I could even notice.
Amdahl's law codifies the observation that as you get closer and closer to 0 time taken for a particular subtask, you'll rapidly stop gaining actual performance due to all the other subtasks that didn't speed up. It seems like 1GB/s is likely to be as close to infinite in practice as 2GB/s is.
I've done exactly this. I tried to run an NVMe drive and a SATA drive back-to-back in the same laptop to see if I could notice any difference in my day to day workload. I couldn't, and because of that I bought a 2TB SATA SSD instead of 2TB NVMe. SATA usually still has better power consumption than most NVMe drives, and they're cheaper too.
He told me it was because they had dropped the price point on the SSDs. I'm curious if they were actually briefed on why they're cheaper and what to respond with when asked, or if he actually didn't know why Apple reduced the price (cheaper/worse SSDs).
These days, though, between price hikes, mediocre to poor base memory amounts and disc sizes, and massive markup on upgrades, it's not true anymore. Their prices are hugely inflated.
Other than that, it seems like a great laptop for its price. It's nice that the 'budget' models now have retina as well.
For the life of me, I can't / won't understand why Apple does this. It's a needlessly obtuse move on their part. It's the kind of thing that makes you start soldering ram & ssd to the motherboard in order to protect your biz pricing model; wouldn't it be easier to re-evaluate that biz model?
The next-highest price point was a 3Gbit/sec 1TB SSD for about $150.00.
Nvme drives really are massively faster than their SATA counterparts.
The answer to "why are they charging this much for so and so" is always "because a sufficient number of people are willing to pay it."
Or, presumably, using them in a miltitenant SAN or DBMS where the SSD’s pipeline is full of concurrent random IOPS to more than 15GB of hot data.
Honest question.
Edit: For the downvoters, it’s a real concern: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/11/06/mac-t2chip-linux/
Compiling requires a Pro due to the cores, so I/O won’t be your restriction due to the busy cores, and the small size of files and memory-cached directory structures.
Video encoding a 2-hour, 50GB Blu-Ray rip is restricted to the performance of the hwaccel available, which is guaranteed to be less than 1Gbps of input for any plausible output, and thus not I/O restricted either.
Any file size under 200M will be unaffected since it can be read from disk in one clock second on either old or new.
So, completely seriously, who will be using an Air and negatively impacted by this change, such that it’s newsworthy and frontpage-worthy?
Certainly not the students it’s targeted towards — unless they’re in data sciences, in which case they’ll need 2 minutes to process an entire drive full of data instead of 1 minute, having somehow overcome CPU and RAM limitations to do so.
I believe such cases are possible, but I’m having a hard time constructing plausible ones.
Incidentally, I got my mom the 2018 Air (to replace her 2010 13” MacBook Pro) and she loves it and she LOVES Touch ID. She uses her iPad for most things but occasionally needs a full computer and it’s been great for her.
If I had any reason for a <del>third</del> <del>fourth</del> fifth laptop (I do not), I’d consider one just as something to play on.
Most people I know with MacBook Airs don't actually use any peripherals.
On the other hand, I need 2 dongles and a USB SD card reader just to do my job with my 2018 MBP. I also need an external keyboard, which I never used to need, because it's literally painful to use the keyboard all day.
Honestly, for a typical user, the typical amount of RAM and SSD speeds is more than enough.
Oh no... Apple is providing better value. Let's be mad at them for good reasons like having a poor keyboard on a device designed around typing.
Wait, what's that? You can't? Oh. Well, if that matters to you, maybe you should buy a pro model that will let you customize components.
What's that? Oh. Well, let's be honest, who really cares about this stuff anyway? If you want something different from what Apple is offering, you're really just not part of their market anyway.
Unfortunately for Apple, my Mid-2012 MBP didn't last long enough for them to get their proverbial scat together and I'm running Linux on non-Apple hardware now.
Furthermore at my desk I use a vertical mouse with 5 buttons which is far, far better than any touchpad.
I'm so glad to never have to use an Apple UI or rent one of their devices ever again! It's such a user-hostile ecosystem, but I don't really blame their users for having such a bad case of Stockholm syndrome.
Most other manufacturers' hardware seems to consistently detect a movement as a drag action. Constantly detecting the wrong movement and drawing a box instead of moving the mouse pointer.
It could be Windows OS that's bad or macOS that's good or a mix of OS and hardware.
The Apple OS is nice but too restrictive for me. Windows I find is kludgy and bloated. Linux is nice if I can find the right distro.
Maybe that’s why the old cheesegrater Mac Pro had handles.
