I just upgraded my workstation from a SATA SSD (~500MB/s) to an M.2 NVMe (~3GB/s). For standard usage, there's really no noticeable difference. The extra IO and lower latency is amazing though for heavy tasks.

Not even heavy tasks. Even just installing packages and launching applications is just so much quicker after I upgraded my thinkpad to an NVME drive.

I don't think that's a fair characterization - I won't be getting a MBP regardless of the amount of I/O I do, because I very much dislike the Touch Bar.

What do you dislike about it?

I haven't really noticed mine.

I use the function keys and escape key - a lot. The lack of even haptic feedback on the touchbar makes it a big downgrade. Having a touchbar just isn't an option.

I use vim and my work-macbook has a touch bar. I haven't really noticed a difference in user experience between the touch-bar version and the physical esc-key on my personal macbook pro without a touch bar.

Before I actually used the touch bar version I also thought that it wouldn't be easy to use, but as I said, I haven't noticed a difference.

> I use vim and my work-macbook has a touch bar. I haven't really noticed a difference in user experience between the touch-bar version and the physical esc-key on my personal macbook pro without a touch bar.

Of course you don't. You use ctrl+[ or rebind caps lock to esc, and you don't use F-keys with vim. But outside of vim you might use the F-keys or Mac keys. I know I do. Cause I'm too shit with multitouch.

Thanks, but no I don't. I use the ESC key on the touchbar all the time.

IMO if you're hitting the escape key you're doing it wrong. Remap to caps lock!

I'm a fan of remapping F keys to the numrow as well. But my desktop keyboard is a 60% without F keys anyways. Less for the fingers to move when you use an fn row :)

I accidentally touch keys on it all the time, undoing text I've written, switching tabs while I'm typing, pressing escape and losing something, etc. I can't think of anything positive I've gotten out of it to be honest.

I just like the functionality and feel of actual buttons. It's like the difference between using the iPad software keyboard vs. an actual hardware keyboard to type on. The Touch Bar makes a row of my keyboard worse.

In VSCode, while debugging, I rest my fingers on F10/F11, for Step, Step Into, Step Out, Continue. Does that work with a Touch Bar mac?

Usually the beef is less than the fact that it exists and more to do with the loss of the Esc key.

1.3GBps is still super fast.

It wasn't that long ago that we were using 7200rpm HDs which capped at around 110MB/s for large files.

110MB/s was the super-best-case-scenario if you're doing sequential writes with exactly 1MB blocks, which almost never happened anyway.

> and if they did, they'd just get a MBP.

Or better Dell/HP/System76 with upgradable 32GB RAM.

Hardware of latest MBP aren't super reliable anymore, so I don't see any reason to pay premium price.

It's perfectly reasonable and wouldn't be noticed by the overwhelming majority of users. There is a point of diminishing returns for most uses, and this is far beyond it.

Further this sort of single-sample analysis of a vendor like Apple's products is always folly. Apply doesn't advertise specific SSD units, speeds, etc, and we know that they often vary them within a product, sometimes with multiple variants on the market at the same time with slightly varying performance.

> It's perfectly reasonable and wouldn't be noticed by the overwhelming majority of users.

Apple used to launch new phones/macs with these kinds of changes, and people used to buy them for these kinds of changes -- just a little bit thinner, just a little bit more battery. And suddenly people won't notice this. I am sure if it were the other way around, Apple would have claimed to have invented a new device and would have sold them as something new. And people would have gathered in queue to buy them.

And when you do the reverse, suddenly its okay.

There are certain things that Apple holds dear in many products, but there are many that are great and are just transparent. The iphone has virtually always had flash that is much faster than competing phones, for instance, but nary a word is mentioned about it.

In this case, the internal store went from "extremely fast -- far above most competitors" to, at least in this sample, "slightly less extremely fast -- still far above most competitors".

It's a giant nothingburger topped with a clickbait condiment.

At least next time Jony Ive will not say "fastest disk read ever"

Ive never talked about specs

I think the most common pain point with this is going to be an initial iCloud sync if your drive is full of stuff.

Are you suggesting your SSD read speed will be a bottleneck when uploading huge amounts of data to the cloud?

What kind of Internet connection do you have?

Thats gigabytes per second. You’d need a 10Gbps+ internet connection to even start getting close to saturation.

The MBA has Thunderbolt 3 ports good for "up to 40 Gb/s", so all you need is an external box to convert that to 10gig ethernet. Sonnet sells one: it weighs 3 lbs, has a 60W power adapter, and costs $500. It's the perfect accessory for your 2.75lb, 30W, $999 laptop!

A 1.3GB drive would still saturate a 10Gbit link.

Fortunately, there’s this: https://store.atto.com/order?ipa=211 at a mere 2000$

Those have been slowly coming down in price. You can get a bus-powered TB3 10G Ethernet adapter for $150 now.

Only if you're an iCloud network administrator that plugged a 10gbps network cable at the data center.

Unless you have a datalink over 1Gbps (and iCloud can actually saturate that link) the SSD isn't going to bottleneck it either way.

actually 1GBps

Even better! So you'd basically need a 10Gbps connection. I highly doubt many macbook air users have a 10Gbps connection, and are connected with a thunderbolt -> ethernet. I also doubt you'll find many cloud providers that can saturate that anyway.

Not many people have a WAN link that will notice the difference.