Apple offers the 2018 MacBook Pro with up to 4TB of storage — twice of what is offered on the 2017 variants. Apart from the bump in storage space though, Apple has also given the SSD inside its latest MacBooks some major performance boost.

As tests conducted by Laptop Mag reveal, the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s SSD is capable of offering an average write speed of 2,682MBps. While duplicating a 4.9GB file, the MacBook Pro took only 2 seconds making it significantly faster than other laptops in the same price range. For comparison, the SSD on the Dell XPS 13 featuring a Core i7 processor has a write speed of nearly 400MB/s — that’s over 6.5x times slower than the MacBook Pro.

Apple uses such speedy PCIe-based SSDs inside the iMac Pro as well. Plus, the company’s APFS (Apple File System) is optimized for flash storage which gives it another advantage over its competition. Such a fast SSD will ensure that the MacBook Pro remains smooth even when under heavy load.

Laptop Mag also carried out other tests on the 13-inch MacBook Pro just to see how fast it is. In a 4K Handbrake video encoding test, the MacBook Pro took 16 minutes and 57 seconds making it about 4 minutes faster than the average premium laptop and about 2.5 minutes faster than its predecessor. In the Excel VLOOKUP Macro test, the MacBook Pro took 1 minute 16 seconds. While slower than the Dell XPS 13 and the ZenBook 13, it was still almost twice as fast when compared to the 2017 MacBook Pro (2 minutes 24 seconds).

Its only in the graphical department where the new MacBook Pro struggles to keep up with its competition. While playing DiRT 3, the laptop only managed an average of 38.8 fps, while almost every other laptop in the competition managed at least 2x of its average fps.

Nonetheless, barring the poor graphical performance, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro is easily among the best in its range and offers stellar performance. This is true even when you compare the 2018 MacBook Pro to the 2016 or the 2017 variant as in some cases, there is a 2-3x improvement in performance.