Apple's SSD milking machine...

[PKTKS]

i will not post specific reviews and dozen rant posts...
Instead... just point the issue for fun...   

If you have not seen latest SSD fiasco (if that can be called fiasco)...
The new  machines have - HALF - speed for half a chip ..
with very same specs...  for just more U$400 tag price...

but U$ 400 for HALF  the specs...
I have not proper insults for that..

google for :   APPLE M1 x M2 SSD slow speeds...
anything like that

Paul

[DiTBho]

Can you use the internal SSD only to load the kernel, everything else is on an external SSD / HD?
This way, you can offer Apple a figured finger, buy the smallest and cheapest SSD, and use the money to buy a decent external drive.

I'm not sure if internal Apple SSDs are compatible with what you can find on the market, but I'm 100% sure that the one used in the Apple Studio line is proprietary, and even if you find two Apple SSDs made for the same Apple Studio model, you can't change it without Apple's permission.

[Kjelt]

Can you use the internal SSD only to load the kernel, everything else is on an external SSD / HD?
This way, you can offer Apple a figured finger, buy the smallest and cheapest SSD, and use the money to buy a decent external drive.

Yes you can but you miss the whole point.
The reason people buy these ludicrous over expensive laptops is because they are thin, lightweight and look sexy while drinking their stylish coffee.
Adding an external drive just destroys that whole look 

But indeed it was a stupid move from Apple, sent all reviewers the fast 1TB version so everyone is enthousiastic and then crippling the 256GB version by not installing two 128GB flash chips but a single 256GB flash chip, reducing access speeds with a factor of almost 2.

[PKTKS]

one more reason...

these snobby dudes boast that overpriced shit as some status cult gizmo 

could never figure that out really

My computers are tools..

Paul

[DiTBho]

Yes you can but you miss the whole point.

I bought an M1 laptop because other Arm laptops simply suck regarding ergonomically, screen quality, and battery.
I bought an M1 laptop because I like neither DaVinci nor Premiere, personally I prefer Finalcut, which runs very well on Apple Silicon.

I want Apple Hardware because it's the best option for what I need, but I don't want to waste money on their proprietary SSDs.

[DiTBho]

thin, lightweight and look sexy while drinking their stylish coffee.

I owned a Lenovo Carbon 2015. Not bad.

Check it out:
- it's thin!
- it's lightweight
- it has a nice keyboard
- it looks sexy when you put it on the table during an hack-meeting.
- it's Windows 10 certified
- it's also Linux-friendly with 97% peripherals really supported
- it comes with the same price of M1, a bit expensive but not so much

So what's wrong with it?  ... Well, it has x86-64 CPU, and the battery only gives you 9 Hours of continuous working.

The M1's one gives you 20 hours!

[coromonadalix]

thin, lightweight and look sexy while drinking their stylish coffee.

I owned a Lenovo Carbon 2015. Not bad.

Check it out:
- it's thin!
- it's lightweight
- it has a nice keyboard
- it looks sexy when you put it on the table during an hack-meeting.
- it's Windows 10 certified
- it's also Linux-friendly with 97% peripherals really supported
- it comes with the same price of M1, a bit expensive but not so much

So what's wrong with it?  ... Well, it has x86-64 CPU, and the battery only gives you 9 Hours of continuous working.

The M1's one gives you 20 hours!

Give me that one   i'm gonna be happy as hell   loll

[free_electron]

have you seen an LG Gram laptop ? talk about light.... and they can be expanded with additional SSD and memory ! has two nVME full length slots and removable DIMM memory
https://www.lg.com/us/laptops



if i ever need a new travelling laptop it'll be one of those.

[DiTBho]

Give me that one   I'm gonna be happy as hell   loll

Would you believe me if I told you I'd be happy to swap my M1 for an optical-KVM-laptop?

Long story, but ... it became my dream laptop (and it's not a laptop), ever since a couple of dudes and a girl with weird colored hair showed it to me at a hack-meeting! 

[bd139]

Oh not that again  . Yay 40 hours of battery life tethered to a fibre link. Just replace it with a mains cable 

As for the apple SSD shit show. That is indeed a shit show. Absolutely no excuse.

As for the other comments in here, I have to wonder if people are just bitter because they are expensive 

They are very much cheaper than the Acorn A420 I bought in 1989.

[thm_w]

I don't know where to find a good reference for price, but, 2x128GB is definitely more expensive than 1x256GB https://www.trendforce.com/price/flash
Of course, more expensive here we are talking about a few dollars, not a significant percentage of the machine cost.
Is this their own flash IC or one they buy?

In total, the M2’s SSD is 34 percent slower than the M1 regarding write speed, with read speed offering a 50 percent difference.
    M1 MacBook Pro: 2900 MB/s (read speed) and 2215 MB/s (write speed)
    M2 MacBook Pro: 1446 MB/s (read speed) and 1463 MB/s (write speed)

Interestingly, this downgrade only seems to be featured in the M2 MacBook Pro with lower storage, with higher storage options offering speeds very similar to the M1, according to YouTuber Aaron Zollo.

The slower speed seems to be related to the fact that the 13-inch MacBook Pro with 256GB of storage only features one NAND flash storage chip, while the previous generation offered two NAND chips with 128GB each.

[bd139]

Those are pretty slow as well. My 14” does 6980MB/s read and 5307MB/s write.

[mariush]

It would make sense in a way to only stock  256 GB and 512 GB flash dies and use them as needed.
If the manufacturing process is good enough, 128 GB chips would not be profitable and such chips would be mostly chips with faulty layers or a lot of disabled memory so they may not get consistent read/write speeds, or the chips would not use all the channels the controller supports..

Maybe they even optimize the controller inside the "chipset" to assume there's always at least 256 GB, that many "channels" in the die, that many "layers" , allowing for better strategies for wear leveling, write caching, ...

[bd139]

Perhaps there are supply problems so they had to cheap it out.

[Kjelt]

It would make sense in a way to only stock  256 GB and 512 GB flash dies and use them as needed. 

They could just place 2 256GB chips and software lock out the extra 256GB.
On the other hand Apple always have these strange memory steps.
Also for the new iPads it is 64GB or 256GB. Nothing in between, and they ask a whopping €160 extra for the difference (half the price of the iPad).

[bd139]

Yeah the 64Gb one is not worth buying either. Very frustrating.

[Someone]

As for the other comments in here, I have to wonder if people are just bitter because they are expensive 

Fake outrage, from a pile of people who never intended to or wanted to buy the product. Some feature/performance is worse on new product, ok, buy the old one if thats important to you? (they are much cheaper right now).

SSD bandwidth scaling with chip flash chip count has been a thing in SSDs for a long time, but but but APPLE!#@%^ WEGJGWESHJ^^ something something.... triggered.

[SilverSolder]

[...]
As for the other comments in here, I have to wonder if people are just bitter because they are expensive 
[...]

Not at all - one of the best Apple products is their shares!

[bd139]

As for the other comments in here, I have to wonder if people are just bitter because they are expensive 

Fake outrage, from a pile of people who never intended to or wanted to buy the product. Some feature/performance is worse on new product, ok, buy the old one if thats important to you? (they are much cheaper right now).

SSD bandwidth scaling with chip flash chip count has been a thing in SSDs for a long time, but but but APPLE!#@%^ WEGJGWESHJ^^ something something.... triggered.

There’s no fake outrage. Particularly in apple specific forums. Lots of people held off on buying the first generation ARM machines and were primed to purchase these. And they are inferior to the first generation machines.

My daughter for example was going to buy an M2 iMac when they come out. Now this is in doubt.

[bd139]

[...]
As for the other comments in here, I have to wonder if people are just bitter because they are expensive 
[...]

Not at all - one of the best Apple products is their shares!

That’s a good thing. You don’t want to invest in a tech company’s products who can’t afford to back them up with capital and interest.

[Someone]

As for the other comments in here, I have to wonder if people are just bitter because they are expensive 

Fake outrage, from a pile of people who never intended to or wanted to buy the product. Some feature/performance is worse on new product, ok, buy the old one if thats important to you? (they are much cheaper right now).

SSD bandwidth scaling with chip flash chip count has been a thing in SSDs for a long time, but but but APPLE!#@%^ WEGJGWESHJ^^ something something.... triggered.

There’s no fake outrage. Particularly in apple specific forums. Lots of people held off on buying the first generation ARM machines and were primed to purchase these. And they are inferior to the first generation machines.

My daughter for example was going to buy an M2 iMac when they come out. Now this is in doubt.

Sounds like you are in that group! What particular task is completely ruined by having a slower throughput SSD? (if buying the new one) or conversely, what task is ruined by having a slightly slower processor? (if buying the old one) Computers are way off into imaginary performance for the majority of users, disk throughput of that magnitude is way down on the things that impact performance for the vast majority of people (thinking 99.999% here), and if that really was the killer limit just buy the older one, or not the absolute smallest storage SKU.....  so many ways to avoid this imagined "dealbreaker" of yours. You're just adding to the FUD with more of the nonsense:

"I WANT EVERYTHING BETTER AND CHEAPER AND WONT BUY ANYTHING LESS", ok... don't buy it if it offends you so much? why the need to broadcast this ridiculously individual corner case detail to the world? It isn't some mandatory purchase, the choice is yours, if the value proposition isn't there then just move on.

Forums are full of people big on talk and shy on actually doing, "apple specific" forums are just the same as seen on here with people endlessly discussing test equipment they were never in the market to buy.

[bd139]

Sounds like you are in that group! What particular task is completely ruined by having a slower throughput SSD? (if buying the new one) or conversely, what task is ruined by having a slightly slower processor? (if buying the old one) Computers are way off into imaginary performance for the majority of users, disk throughput of that magnitude is way down on the things that impact performance for the vast majority of people (thinking 99.999% here), and if that really was the killer limit just buy the older one, or not the absolute smallest storage SKU.....  so many ways to avoid this imagined "dealbreaker" of yours. You're just adding to the FUD with more of the nonsense:

"I WANT EVERYTHING BETTER AND CHEAPER AND WONT BUY ANYTHING LESS", ok... don't buy it if it offends you so much? why the need to broadcast this ridiculously individual corner case detail to the world? It isn't some mandatory purchase, the choice is yours, if the value proposition isn't there then just move on.

Forums are full of people big on talk and shy on actually doing, "apple specific" forums are just the same as seen on here with people endlessly discussing test equipment they were never in the market to buy.

Well unlike a lot of people, we aren't buying these machines to have a wank over. They really do get the shit hammered out of them doing actual real work. In my case I'm running a full stack of compilers on it and doing RAW photo editing and 4k video editing on a regular basis. All of that is very SSD and CPU intensive.

If you compare turnarounds on my current compiler workload you will see what I mean:

Ryzen 3700X desktop: 54s
MacBook Air M1: 23s
MacBook Pro M1 Pro: 15s

Now do that 200 times a day and you see where it adds up when I get paid to complete jobs in set time windows.

In the case of the M2, a lot of people will be buying them for the video and image workflows because they are the most affordable pro-line portable computers out there which run the Apple platform specific tools that people want to run. Like Final Cut Pro etc. If you are currently running an M1 and you want that 20% gain and you buy a M2 and find it's not there then you're going to be pissed.

The point is if you get pissed now, it makes people aware of it, negatively affects sales at Apple and they will never make that mistake again. This leads to excellent priced and performance entry level machines, unlike the whole fucking PC market which is a shit show because there's such a diversity of trash and no way to get traction against it.

[Someone]

They really do get the shit hammered out of them doing actual real work. In my case I'm running a full stack of compilers on it and doing RAW photo editing and 4k video editing on a regular basis. All of that is very SSD and CPU intensive.

Its a 256GB SSD, that's not going to hold much more than 10's of seconds if the 1500MB/s vs 3000MB/s speed is "limiting". You're off in bullshit world. The task based testing for photo editing was AN ENORMOUS 15% SLOWER, STOP THE PRESSES!
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/27/m2-macbook-pro-256gb-ssd-real-world-tests/
If that sort of minor reduction in speed is an issue, pay up and get more storage and performance?

Now do that 200 times a day and you see where it adds up when I get paid to complete jobs in set time windows.

If the older model is faster, and time is important, you know, buy the older (cheaper and faster) model and profit?? or just get the extra storage.

You are exactly all talk chasing imaginary unicorns and blowing up a non issue into something it isn't, your use case is imaginary (smallest storage but demanding high throughput). Trivial to avoid the minor issue, but you keep justifying why it needs so much "airtime". Keep feeding the nonsense mill and I'll keep pointing out how you're just drumming up hating.

[bd139]

You picked the photo editing as a case where I specified 4k video...

I bought the M1 MacBook Pro so you are correct - I optimised for performance.

You're the one with the outrage 

[Someone]

You picked the photo editing as a case where I specified 4k video...

Lets see....

doing RAW photo editing and 4k video editing

You said photo editing and video editing. Do you have some example benchmarks or workloads in video that are impacted by that reduced throughput? They aren't going to be significant when video processing is usually GPU/CPU bound, disk bound video was a thing before 1000MB/s drives, 1500MB/s vs 3000MB/s isn't going to make significant differences. But you say its some problem (of your imagination).