The first reviews of the new MacBook Air with the M2 chips are beginning to show up, at least one review notes that the base model of the new Air has slower SSD speeds in benchmark testing, thanks to the single NAND chip that makes up the laptops 256GB of SSD storage.
The Verge reports that the $1,199 base model equipped with 256GB of storage has a single NAND chip. While this causes slower speeds in benchmark testing, real-world performance may vary.
Apple switched to using a single 256GB flash storage chip instead of two 128GB chips in the base models of the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Configurations equipped with 512GB of storage or more are equipped with multiple NAND chips, allowing for faster speeds in parallel.
An Apple spokesperson told The Verge that while benchmarks of the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro with 256GB of storage “may show a difference” compared to previous-generation models, real-world performance is “even faster”:
Thanks to the performance increases of M2, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip. These new systems use a new higher density NAND that delivers 256GB storage using a single chip. While benchmarks of the 256GB SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2 based systems for real world activities are even faster.