It's been a thing for a long time, and it's not just Apple that does it, but we discovered the same thing a number of times with Microsoft's Surface Laptop series.
Over 33 percent faster reading speed
It's a strange phenomenon because it's not like any of the companies make customers aware of this very clearly - at least we've never seen PR material where it's clear that the models with the least storage space have weaker SSD performance, but for legal reasons, it must be listed somewhere. The reason is that these machines have one NAND chip instead of two, and if there are two there is no one to collaborate on to optimize performance - this year there are two of them.
The fact that you do not get 16GB of RAM with the cheapest model has not changed with the MacBook Air M3 series, it had been front-page material a long time ago, but what is better is precisely the NVMe performance that has been improved.
In the test from "Max Tech", he tests the MacBook Air with the M2 against the new M3 model, both with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage space - the clear speech of the numbers read as follows:
MacBook Air M2 scrive-hastighet: 1584 MB/s
MacBook Air M3 write speed: 2108 MB/s
MacBook Air M2 lese-hastighet: 1576 MB/s
MacBook Air M3 read speed: 2880 MB/s
Here are our numbers from previous tests:
MacBook Pro M3 1TB: 3000 MB/s write - 2900 MB/s read
MacBook M1 Max 512GB: 4800 MB/s write – 4800 MB/s read
MacBook Air M2 512GB: Lease: 2699 – Skrive: 2750
M2 MacBook Pro 256GB: Lease: 1446 – Skrive: 1463
M1 MacBook Pro 512GB: Read: 2900 – Write: 2215
Dell XPS 15″ 9510: Read: 6390 – Write: 4880
MacBook Pro 14 (base model – 8 CPU cores 14 cores): 4541 – 5149