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.