MacBook Air 2014: Notebooks with $100 price-cut run on slower SSDs

(Image: Apple)MacBook Air

It turns out the $100 price slash for the MacBook Air came at a price: slower SSDs or solid-state drives.

Lab testing of the Apple MacBook Air lineup whose prices were cut by $100 across the board last week reveals a slight difference in performance. The benchmark testing seems to show that Apple used slower SSDs on its cheaper MacBook Air models. Apple does not consider these refreshed units to be all-new models, hence the slower SSDs.

Analysts noted that Apple also seems to have changed the supplier of the SSDs used in the MacBook Air. Apple uses PCI Express SSDs but has often used components from different manufacturers in different variants of the same model.

An SSD, also called an electronic disk, is a data storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently. It does not contain an actual "disk" of any kind or motors to "drive" the disks.

Other tests show that both the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air versions use a fourth-generation Intel Core i5 CPU running at 1.4GHz. The variants launched last year used the same CPU, but running at 1.3GHz.

Analysts said the change is consistent with Intel's periodic refreshes of its CPU lineup since yields of higher speed processors increase over time after a new generation's launch.

All other specifications of the cheaper MacBook Air, including the integrated Intel HD 5000 graphics processor; the amount of RAM and choice of SSD sizes remain unchanged, however.

The low-end 11-inch MacBook Air now sells at the same price as a Microsoft Surface 2 Pro with half the MacBook Air's storage space and without a keyboard. With a keyboard such as the Type Cover 2 and 128GB, a Surface 2 Pro costs $1,128.99. That's enough to buy an 11-inch MacBook Pro with 256GB of storage.

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