A bit of good news from iFixit on the teardown of the new M3 MacBook Air: they have now switched to two 128 GB storage modules. You may know that in the first two iterations of the Apple silicon MacBook Air, the base storage models were significantly slower in read-write speeds than the other models in the line because they only used one socket for storage, significantly cutting down the bandwidth. With the M3 model, the device gets SSD write speeds approximately 33% faster and read speeds approximately 82% faster.

There was a lot of hand-wringing when the M2 model didn’t make any changes to the SSD problem. It could just be that the manufacturing timeline didn’t give them enough time to fix it. I would argue that they should have caught this problem before releasing the first one. Regardless, I’m happy that Apple did respond, and now customers of the lower-end MacBook Air will get better SSD read and write speeds.