Base M3 MacBook Air with Significantly Faster SSD Speeds

What’s going on here?

Apple has introduced the M3 MacBook Air, featuring enhancements like faster performance, Wi-Fi 6E compatibility, and the ability to connect to dual external displays. A significant upgrade has been made to the SSD speeds in the base model, addressing a previous issue where the base M2 MacBook Air with 256GB of storage had slower SSD speeds due to a single storage chip design. The M3 MacBook Air returns to using two 128GB storage chips, leading to faster data transfer rates. Here’s where the news was first announced.

What does this mean?

The use of two 128GB NAND chips in the base model M3 MacBook Air allows for parallel processing, greatly enhancing the SSD’s read and write speeds. Test results from Max Tech show that the new model can achieve write speeds of 2108 MB/s and read speeds of 2880 MB/s. This is a significant improvement over the M2 model, with write speeds around 33% faster and read speeds approximately 82% faster, matching or even surpassing the M1 MacBook Air’s performance. Gregory McFadden’s Twitter post sparked the interest.

Why should I care?

The enhancement in SSD speeds for the M3 MacBook Air base model means users will experience faster boot times, quicker file transfers, and generally more efficient performance when accessing data on the device. This upgrade directly addresses the slower SSD speed concerns that users had with the M2 MacBook Air, making the new model a compelling choice for those in need of fast, reliable storage, especially considering the improvement puts its performance on par with or better than the M1 MacBook Air models. Details were further explored in this breakdown by Max Tech.

For more information, check out the original article here.