Early vs Late 10/22 Magazines

Only benefit I know of is that some people will pay more for "correct" magazines than later ones. I'm a shooter, my only concern is that it feeds reliably. So, I will often sell off older magazines, sometimes at a premium and replace with newer ones.

when I put together a chassis 10/22 for Steel Challenge I purchase 6 new red rotor mags... in the mid 90's I'd built a 10/22 for the Sportsman's Team Challenge, and had 4 of the early black rotor magazines in storage...when I shot a couple of practice SC matches, I did not get the reliability with the new red mags...in the 5 years I shot the Team Challenge, and lots of practice sessions, I never had a malfunction.... I measured the fore and aft lengths... the black rotor mags were within about .005".... the red rotor mags varied within .015"...with the ejector and feed ramp on the magazine lip, I thought this may have been the source of my reliability problem....at that point I retired the project and went with a CMMG conversion upper and Black Dog magazines for my SBR

are we talking, the ones with the slotted screw, early?...I find those to run the best

the ruger 10 round magazine used to be the envy of every other 22 caliber rifle out there, but at least to me anyways, it seems that the newer the mag, the worse it performs..it's a shame really, that Ruger would treat the very best feature of the rifle so

I have one with the slotted screw and two with the hex screw. They all work perfectly. In fact, every one of my mags seem to work just fine, to include the black and clear bodies with red followers. Maybe I'm just lucky.

I have multiple units of the older and the newer styles, the only I’ve had a problem with is the one with the B on the bottom, that came with my Bergara BXR, it does not work good in any rifle that takes the 10/22 style mag

Haven’t had any issues with either.