When Apple launched the original M1 MacBook Air in 2020, the base model's 256GB SSD comprised two 128GB NAND modules working in parallel. This design afforded it very good performance. But when the M2 version arrived a year later, it was discovered Apple had switched to using just one NAND module instead, effectively cutting storage bandwidth in half for reasons unexplained. Now that the M3 version has launched, teardowns have revealed Apple has regained its sanity and returned to the much faster dual NAND chip approach, which offers almost double the performance of the single-chip solution.
Backing up a tiny bit, Apple switched to a single NAND chip for the M2 MacBook Air but also used it in the M2 MacBook Pro base model laptops, which seemed like a slap in the face to those users. Though fast memory can handle some light swapping when memory fills up, its performance fell off a cliff when system memory was full, making the base model with 8GB of memory a much slower machine than the equivalent M1 machine. Now it appears Apple has rectified this situation with the M3 base model of the MacBook Air, which still has 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage, but now with dual NAND chips.
YouTuber Max Tech performed a teardown of the new M3 Air to see if Apple was sticking to its guns on the SSD front, only to be pleasantly surprised to find two NAND modules. Benchmarks revealed the older M2 version was capable of around 1,700MB/s in sequential read and write speeds, with the M3 version hitting around 2,800MB/s in reads and 2,000MB/s in writes. Apple uses PCIe 3.0 SSDs for its Mac hardware instead of PCIe 4.0, but the difference in performance is significant and represents a rare reversal for the company.
Apple also upgraded the Wi-Fi on the M3 Air from version 6 to the newer 6e standard, which theoretically offers double the performance, according to benchmarks from Notebookcheck.net. In addition, Apple finally allowed two external displays to be utilized, which was a major pain point on the previous base model M-series chips—with the caveat that the lid has to be closed to make this happen. This is not really a change from when you had your laptop display and then just one external monitor—so two displays essentially—but it allows you to use two big monitors instead of one plus the tiny Air display.
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March 12, 2024 at 11:26PM
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Apple's Relents on M3 MacBook Air SSDs by Using Dual NAND Chips - ExtremeTech
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