Last week, Apple unveiled the new MacBook Air with M3 chip and other improvements, which has been officially on sale since Friday. While the design of the compact laptop has hardly changed, the most interesting innovations are under the hood. There is an improvement to report in the area of SSDs, as even the basic version finally uses two memory chips again and thus achieves higher speeds.
MacBook Air M3: Now also with high speed in the basic version
Let’s go back to the controversy surrounding the MacBook Air and Pro with the M2 chip. No, I’m not talking about the quality problems with the paintwork, but the SSD. A good two years ago, the manufacturer opted for a single memory chip in the basic configuration with 256 GB of SSD memory.
The result was significantly weaker storage performance compared to the MacBook Air M1. Of course, the issue was blown up in the media, but the speed of the memory was definitely a slap in the face.
However, the Cupertino-based company has apparently learned from its mistakes in the new edition of the MacBook Air M3, as tech YouTuber MaxTech and others have discovered in his teardown video.
He took the new notebook apart and compared it with the M2 MacBook Air. The YouTuber discovered that there are now two NAND chips under the aluminum chassis again, whereas there was only one in the predecessor – there were only two from 512 GB memory.
In the benchmark comparison that MaxTech shows in the video, this results in almost double the speed of the SSD memory when reading data, as well as a 33 percent higher speed when writing. At the same time, file transfer from external storage solutions also benefits from this, which is also around 33 percent faster with the MacBook Air M3.
However, the slower memory of the predecessor model also had a noticeable impact on the performance of computing-intensive tasks such as image or video editing.
Ultimately, the Apple MacBook Air M3 is once again on a par with the MacBook Air M1, even in its basic configuration, which is basically a good thing. How practicable a notebook with so little storage space is these days is, of course, another matter entirely.
Especially as Apple is paying handsomely for the upgrade from 256 GB to 512 GB. 230 euros will be charged if you want to replace the 256 GB SSD with a 512 GB storage solution. an additional 920 euros for 2 TB of storage space.
