By Joe Rossignol
Today, repair website iFixit released a teardown video of a base model 13-inch MacBook Air with an M3 chip and 256GB of internal storage, and it shows that this configuration has two 128GB flash memory chips. This change results in significantly faster SSD speeds compared to the equivalent MacBook Air with the M2 chip, which has a single 256GB storage chip, since the SSD can read and write data from two chips simultaneously.
YouTube channel Max Tech launched Blackmagic Disk Speed Test tool testing 5GB file size on M2 and M3 '13 models generations. inch MacBook Air with 256GB of internal storage and 8GB of RAM, and they found that the SSD in the M3 model provided up to 33% faster write speeds and up to 82% faster read speeds compared to the SSD in the M2 model.
Apple's decision to move to a single 256GB chip for the base model M2 MacBook Air has been controversial, although the SSD's slower speeds are unlikely to be noticeable to the average user working on normal day-to-day tasks. Fortunately, the SSD speed of the base M3 MacBook Air is now roughly equal to that of the base M1 MacBook Air, so customers no longer need to worry about this potential limitation.
Apple is still selling the 13-inch MacBook Air M2 with 256GB of internal storage for $999, so customers who need maximum SSD performance should avoid this model.
Aside from this SSD-related change, the teardown reveals that the M3 MacBook Air models have virtually the same internal design as the M2 models. The video shows battery cells with adhesive tabs, the motherboard, trackpad and more.
Update: iFixit CEO Kyle Vince revealed that the base model 15-inch MacBook Air with the chip The M3 and 256GB of internal memory also has two 128GB memory chips.
Related review: MacBook Air Tags: iFixit, Teardown Buyer's Guide: 13-inch MacBook Air (Buy Now), 15-inch MacBook Air (Buy Now) Forum on topic: MacBook Air[ 105 comments ]
