this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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You’re right, but not for the reason you’re citing. Apple has its own T2 Secure Enclave which performs encryption. Microsoft relies on the TPM for hosting the keys, but does not use AFAIK hardware encryption and thus slows down significantly.
This article: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/03/03/whats-the-overhead-of-using-apfs-encryption/ shows that for an external drive the overhead on MacOS for encryption is insignificant (less than 5%) in most cases. That’s significantly better than Microsoft.
Even before Apple added custom chips, just using the intel AES instructions, their encryption performance penalty was like 3% https://archive.techarp.com/showarticle0037.html?artno=877&pgno=1
Microsoft is doing something very wrong to end up with this much overhead
It's understandable that MS use software implementation for their disk encryption by default. Can't trust 3rd party hardware vendors to not messing up the hardware encryption feature.
The T2 chip is only in Intel Macs. ARM Macs have the Secure Enclave too but it’s part of the main SoC, not a dedicated chip.