“The 13-inch MacBook Pro has been updated with the latest processors, more powerful graphics, faster flash, longer battery life and the all-new Force Touch trackpad,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We’re also bringing the latest processors and graphics, and faster Thunderbolt 2 to the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air, as well as up to two times faster flash to the 13-inch MacBook Air.”
Tear down specialist iFixit decided to put Apple’s storage speed claims to the test by running the Black Magic benchmark on new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs. The results show that the SSD in the 13-inch MacBook Air is in fact twice as fast as the SSD in older models, and the drive in the current 11-inch Air. The smaller of the siblings can hit average read speeds of 668MB/s, while the new 13-inch MacBook Air averages speeds of 1285.4MB/s.
Related: MacBook (2015) vs. MacBook Air (2015): Spec Showdown
The key difference that consumers should note is the flash memory in both of the MacBooks. The 13-inch edition has Samsung flash memory, while the 11-inch model has SanDisk flash memory with a controller chip from Marvell.
The 11-inch MacBook Air is now available on the Apple website starting at $899 for the 128GB model, while the 13-inch edition starts at $999 for 128GB. The 256GB versions of the MacBook Air are configurable to a 512GB flash storage.
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