Hey everyone! I’m Nuked, and I’m here to bring you the latest news about Apple’s new M2 14-inch MacBook Pro.

The base level 14-inch M2 MacBook Pro reportedly has a slower SSD than its predecessor, according to tests done by 9to5Mac. In BlackMagic’s Disk Speed Test, the 512GB SSD in Apple’s latest flagship achieved read speed scores of around 2,970 MB/s and write speed scores of around 3,150 MB/s, compared to 4,900 MB/s reads and 3,950 MB/s writes that the M1 Pro with a 512GB SSD was capable of.

This means that the 2023 base model has around 39 percent slower reads and 20 percent slower writes than the one released in 2021. The reason for the difference is likely down to chips. The 512GB SSD in the previous-gen 14-inch had four NAND storage chips, whereas the one on the M2 Pro seems to have two.

Those are obviously higher-capacity chips, so the computers have the same amount of storage but with worse performance because they can’t parallelize reads and writes as much.

It’s not just the 14-inch MacBook Pro that has suffered from this problem; both the 256GB M2 MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro had slower storage than the M1 versions of those machines. (The situation was even worse with those machines, which had a single NAND chip.)

Thankfully, it seems like MacBook Pro models with upgraded storage don’t come with the same performance hit. Tom’s Guide and Laptop Mag tested a 14-inch M2 Pro-equipped laptop with a 2TB SSD, as well as one with an M2 Max processor (which is only available with a 1TB SSD and up), and the storage turned out to be roughly as fast or faster than the previous-gen models.

So while it’s unfortunate that the base M2 Mini has a slower SSD than its predecessor, there is a tradeoff — it starts at $100 less than its predecessor. Given everything the computer offers in terms of real-world performance, perhaps it’s hard to complain.