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Comment by iasay | Hacker News Reader

Time will tell what this issue is but the person reporting it is leveraging controversy to get clicks here. I suspect manufacturing issue.

The SSD performance problem on the 256Gb models is a massive problem though.

Although after all this I'm still not sure why the M2 MBP exists. By the time it's useful it costs nearly as much as the MBP 14" for the same spec which is far superior. And if you want to cheap it out, the M1 MBA is probably a better deal because it's far cheaper and perfectly adequate.

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Yeah

> Export time: 21 min 40sec compared to M2: 19 min 40 sec.

So, the M2 is still faster, even throttling?

(Also no mention of ambient temperature, location of the device, etc)

> The SSD performance problem on the 256Gb models is a massive problem though.

Care to explain why? I recall the speeds are still in the order of Gigabytes a second. Who is this actually going to have a significant impact on in the real world?

The major impact is that it has a significant impact on the depreciation of the device if the second generation is slower than the first generation.

We don't have enough data to see if the problem scales to things like latency and fragmented read/write throughput (yet). I'll draw my conclusions then because that does have a massive impact on every day productivity.

Apple are using a single 256gb nand chip in the base model of the M2.

So parallelization of read/write isn't possible. You have to wait on that one chip. Which kills random I/O speeds, which are the more real world model of usage than blasting a 500mb file all at once.

A single NAND package as used in SSDs almost always contains multiple NAND dies (up to 16), commonly exposed through two or four independent channels per package (M.2 drives with 8-channel controllers frequently have just 2 NAND packages). A 256GByte NAND package must contain multiple NAND dies, because nobody makes 2Tbit NAND dies yet. Each NAND die is partitioned into two or four planes that can operate more or less independently, save for sharing the same uplink to the SSD controller.

So while it is reasonable to worry about reduced parallelism in small SSDs when moving to newer, larger NAND dies, it is wildly incorrect to say that a 256GB drive has no capability for parallelization.

Chip? As in soldered on nonreplacable chips? Apple sure loves doing weird stuff.

I have the same question, why does the MBP in the old chassis exist. My guess is that it’s some combination of: they have extra chassis lying around, or they want a machine in the old form factor for people who like that (like the iPhone SE).

It also could be a bean counter thing too I suppose: they haven’t recouped enough of their investment in tooling for the previous generation, so they are grinding out more units until the accountants are happy. If this is the case, it would be alarming.

That really doesn’t sound like something Apple would do. My bet is they want to hit a specific price point, between the MBA and the 14” MBP. Possibly school/corporate volume purchase programs are involved.

It is the second best selling computer in Apple’s line. I suspect it is a combination of people who see this as the last chance to get the Touchbar (there are fan of this) and corporate IT departments who buy this because they have an existing spec for a moderately priced laptop that is not a “consumer” line. That “pro” in the name gives them an out.

For any individual buyer, the upcoming Air or the existing 14” MBP would be better choices depending on your needs and budget.

One company I worked for would only allow purchasing the 13" Pro, and not the Air models, for years. Most of us who traveled would've rather used the Airs, and after maybe 2-3 years with that policy it was relaxed a bit.

With the first generation or two of MacBook Air, it was light but it was WAY less performant than even the entry level MacBook Pro. With Apple Silicon, the case for the entry Pro is very slim, but inertia keeps it going.

I think it's like how Apple kept making the eMac for a while, even after the iMac had eaten its lunch.

Perhaps even manipulating the fan on purpose?

German reviewer group, didn't find any of such problems: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2022-M2-L...

Notebookcheck doesn't have a perf graph of sustained CPU+GPU workload, but here's their thermal analysis:

> We can see a maximum package power of 35W for the M2 SoC during combined CPU/GPU load. However, this value can only be maintained for a couple of seconds before there is a drop to around 25W while the fans speed is slowly increasing. The package power will stabilize at 28-30W once the fan has reached its maximum speed, but the chip temperature is still very high at 98 °C. This means the cooling solution cannot utilize the full potential of the M2 chip, despite the fan.

This suggests OP is correct.

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