David Hanak It's been over a week since Apple introduced the new MacBook Air for this year and the results of various tests and reviews are gradually starting to appear on the website. From them, it is now clearly visible how Apple achieved a reduction in production costs so that it could reduce the selling price - the new MacBook Air has a slower SSD drive than its previous generation from last year. However, in practice this is not too much of a problem.
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Petr Škuta Apple is famous for installing super-fast NVMe SSD drives in its modern devices, with transfer speeds that exceed the vast majority of other commercially available alternatives. The company will also charge you for it, as anyone who has ever ordered extra disk space will confirm. However, for the new MacBook Pros, Apple has gone for cheaper SSD variants, which are still fast enough for the average user, but are no longer so expensive. This means that Apple could afford to lower prices while maintaining a similar level of margins.
Last year's MacBook Air had memory chips that were capable of reaching transfer speeds of up to 2 GB/s for reading and 1 GB/s for writing (256 GB variant). According to the tests, the speed of the chips installed in the newly updated variants reach transfer speeds of 1,3 GB/s for reading and 1 GB/s for writing (256 GB variant). In the case of writing, the speeds thus achieved are identical, in the case of reading, the new MacBook Air is some 30-40% slower. Even so, these are very high values, and if we take into account the target group the MacBook Air is aimed at, the vast majority of users will probably not notice the reduction in speed.
With this step, Apple fulfills to some extent the wishes of many people, who have long criticized the company for using very powerful memory chips that make some models unnecessarily expensive. At the same time, a large number of potential users do not need such powerful memory chips and would much rather settle for worse ones, which, however, will not increase the price of the required device to such an extent. And that's exactly what Apple has done with the new Air.
Source: 9to5mac
It's not true that the fast SSD somehow makes MacBooks more expensive. They sell them for an immoral price, and slower SSDs are not that much cheaper.