Last week, Apple refreshed the MacBook Air with a lower price and the addition of a True Tone display. The device now starts $100 lower at $1,099 and $999 with student pricing. The updates to this device were minor, including the same CPUs as the 2018 model, but with this one downside.
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This downside may not mean much to most people looking to buy a MacBook Air. The laptop features a slower Solid State Storage drive than the 2018 model. Consomac tested using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, showing that the 2019 MacBook Air reaches speeds of 1.3 GB/s read and 1 GB/s write on the 256 GB option. The 256 GB 2018 MacBook Air reached speeds of 2 GB/s read and 0.9 GB/s write.
9To5Mac comments saying, "Presumably, the slower SSD is a cheaper component for Apple to pack into the machine and helped the company achieve the $100 price drop, and even more aggressive education pricing for students."
I think that this is probably the best thing that Apple could have done in order to cut costs. Doing anything else, like downgrading the processor would not have gone over well. College students are slowly needing more and more computing power just for their school work and a slower processor would not have helped. By simply getting a slower SSD most people will not notice the difference as storage speeds are not a problem for many use cases as they are already plenty fast SSDs.
9To5Mac comments saying, "Presumably, the slower SSD is a cheaper component for Apple to pack into the machine and helped the company achieve the $100 price drop, and even more aggressive education pricing for students."
I think that this is probably the best thing that Apple could have done in order to cut costs. Doing anything else, like downgrading the processor would not have gone over well. College students are slowly needing more and more computing power just for their school work and a slower processor would not have helped. By simply getting a slower SSD most people will not notice the difference as storage speeds are not a problem for many use cases as they are already plenty fast SSDs.