New 15-inch MacBook Pro appears to offer fastest SSD performance on the market

iFixit uncovers the SSD in the 13-inch non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro as we await the Touch Bar models

ComputerWorld notes that if the latest 15-inch MacBook Pro benchmarks anywhere close to its claimed SSD performance, it will offer the fastest drive read and write speeds of any stock computer available – and that Apple is around two years ahead of most of its competition.

Computerworld‘s own benchmark tests with Blackmagic software on a 2015 13-in. MacBook Pro with Retina display revealed it could pin the needle at more than 1.4Gbps for writes and more than 1.3Gbps for reads. The new MacBook Pro’s specs smoke its predecessor.

The 2016 13-in. MacBook Pro‘s specs claim it has sequential read/write speeds of 3.1Gbps and 2.1Gbps per second, respectively. The new 15-in MacBook Pro ups the write speeds to 2.2Gbps, while the reads remain the same as the 13-in [which would make it] the highest performing stock system on the market …

IDC VP Jeff Janukowicz says that Apple has led the industry not just in the switch from hard drives to SSD, but in choosing the fastest SSD available.

The newest PCIe SSDs use the NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification, which is a logical device interface for accessing flash storage via the PCIe bus.

“With regard to PCIe, Apple has been a pioneer when it comes to PCIe/NVMe storage,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research vice president at IDC. “They were the first PC company to broadly adopt it across its laptop portfolio while other companies today are still just using it in a very limited portion of their PC lineup.”

Apple first used a PCIe/NVMe SSD in the 2015 12-inch MacBook, while Janukowicz said that he didn’t expect other companies to adopt them in significant numbers until late 2017, putting Apple two years ahead of the curve.

Most users are likely to see the benefit of the even faster SSDs in the new MacBook Pro only in boot times and loading apps, but professional users working with large files should notice a significant boost in performance.