The price of low prices? MacBook Neo SSD is only one-eighth as fast as the Pro

[ Gearbest Technology News]Last week, Apple’s new MacBook Neo was officially unveiled with a breakthrough starting price of US$599, which attracted widespread market attention. However, according to a review by technology media The Verge, this new product, which focuses on high cost performance, has made some compromises in the speed of the solid state drive (SSD).

The review found through benchmark testing that the sustained read and write speed of MacBook Neo is up to 8 times slower than the new MacBook Pro equipped with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Although the review did not explicitly mention the specific testing tool, it is speculated that it may have used Blackmagic's Disk Speed ​​Test or AmorphousDiskMark.

According to data provided by The Verge, there are significant differences in the sustained read and write speeds of SSDs between different Mac models. The reading speed of MacBook Neo (A18 Pro/256GB) is 1735 MB/s and the writing speed is 1684 MB/s; the reading and writing speed of MacBook Air (M1/512GB) reaches 3422 MB/s and 3274 MB/s respectively; the MacBook Air (M5/1TB) further improves to 7049 MB/s and 7480 MB/s; the highest-end MacBook Pro (M5 Max/4TB) reached an astonishing 13.6 GB/s read and 17.8 GB/s write. It should be pointed out that the data for the M5 Max model comes from another MacBook Pro review by The Verge, and the storage capacity of each comparison model is different.

The most direct impact of slower SSD speeds is extended file transfer times. For example, transferring a large file of up to 100GB may take nearly a minute on MacBook Neo, while the latest MacBook Air only takes about 30 seconds, and the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro takes only 7 to 8 seconds. In addition, the speed of the SSD will also indirectly affect the overall performance of the system, because the startup of the application depends on the reading speed of the SSD. At the same time, when the 8GB memory of the notebook is fully occupied, the system will temporarily call the SSD space as virtual memory. In scenarios with heavy memory pressure, a slower SSD may become a performance bottleneck.

Despite the shortcomings in SSD speed, the first batch of MacBook Neo reviews generally believe that the overall performance of this notebook is still quite good. For most ordinary users considering buying a MacBook Neo, the read and write speed of the SSD is not the primary factor they pay attention to. In daily use, such as web browsing, document editing, audio and video entertainment, etc., this speed difference is almost unnoticeable.

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