We benchmarked the base M2 MacBook Air’s storage and (surprise!) it’s slow

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

The M2 MacBook Pro is slower than the M1 MacBook Pro due to the configuration of the storage models in the computer. The base M2 MacBook Air has the same storage configuration as the Pro, so we wondered if it would suffer from the same issue. We have finally gotten our hands on the base model, which has a whopping 512 gigabytes of storage and 8 gigabytes of memory.

According to the results of the Disk Speed Test app, the base model of the M2 MacBook Air has write speeds that are generally 15 to 30 percent slower than those of the 512GB model Apple sent to review.

Since the base Air only has a single chip, the M1 and M2 models have two, which can allow for nearly double the speed.

I wouldn't say the speeds from this base MacBook Air are bad, but they are not the kind of speeds you can get on a laptop that is a bit more powerful. When it comes to write speeds, the base model is a bit slower than the MacBook Pro, but it's read speeds are much worse. To pick a Windows machine out of a hat, Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2 lost to the base Air on write but was demolished on read. For general usage, read speeds are more important than other factors.

We didn't have an M1 Air with 512GB to test, but the 512GB model we have on hand is faster than the base M2 model on both read and write.

In his review of the M2 Air, Dan Seifert explained that slower storage speeds can impact a number of tasks, including file transfers, and can also slow down overall performance.

Will these specific differences affect you? When it comes to everyday performance, people the Air is marketed to won't see a life-changing difference between the 512 and 512 gigabyte models. I did not need to dip into swap memory or run two 4K videos over 25 open Chrome tabs. The boot time was the same as before, I turned the two devices on side by side. When it came to opening any of the apps I usually use, I didn't see a difference.

This could be a deal-breaker for the MacBook Pro's target audience. We recommend that you buy a MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro or Max chip instead of an Air if you have a heavier workload.

Some people will care about these results. The price of the eight-core M2 MacBook Air will go from $1,199 to $1399. The base M2 Air costs the same as the M1 MacBook Air, but you can get 8 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabytes of storage. My real-world comparisons have shown that M2 machines are better for running games than they are for other tasks that a casual user might do.

We reached out to Apple and haven't gotten a response yet. When we inquired about the different storage configurations for our review of the device, the company's spokeswoman gave the following statement.

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.