The Retina MacBook Air was refreshed last week with a new price and the addition of a True Tone display. The refresh was minor, with the same CPUs as 2018, but a $100 cheaper price point: the 2019 MacBook Air starts at $1099 from Apple, with $999 student pricing.
It turns out that one downside to this latest revision is that the laptop actually features slower solid state storage than the 2018 model.
As tested by Consomac using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, the 2019 MacBook Air can attain read speeds of 1.3 GB/s read and 1 GB/s write performance.
The equivalent 256 GB SSD 2018 MacBook Air could top 2 GB/s read and around 0.9 GB/s write speeds. Therefore, the new SSD component in use has marginally superior write speeds but 35% slower read speeds, falling from 2 GB/s to 1.3 GB/s. (The 128 GB SSD option has slower 0.5 GB/s write speeds, but this drop-off was also observed in the 128 GB 2018 Air.)
Read more at 9to5Mac.com