When comparing the new Macbook Air to the rest of Apple’s notebook line, some improvements when compared to the previous generation Air can be found in terms of speed and performance, however the machine still lags behind the rest of the notebook line overall.
The Macbook Air that Macworld tested was a standard configuration, 1.86Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB of L@ cache. The frontside bus has been boosted to 1066Mhz in the new Macbook Air, and the SSD storage options have been doubled to offer an 128GB drive.
In Macworld’s lab tests, both models of the new Macbook Air eek out better graphics than the original Air, largely due to the new, more powerful NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU. This is the same GPU that can be found in the new Macbook and Macbook Pro models, only in order to conserve power and reduce heat, the GPU runs slower in the Macbook Air. In their Speedmark 5 benchmark results, the new 1.86GHz Macbook Air produced a 51% higher speedmark score than the previous generation 1.6GHz Macbook Air. “…the most impressive individual results being the Quake 4 frames per second score and the Zip Archive test, which took nearly 10 minutes on the older Air and a less painful 6 minutes on the 1.86Ghz MacBook Air.”
More telling were the new system’s results compared to our build-to-order Air from earlier this year, the model that featured the optional 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo processor, but kept the standard 120GB Parallel ATA hard drive. The new high-end Air posted a 39 percent higher Speedmark 5 score than that old CTO Air. It was also 28 percent faster in our Photoshop tests and 22 percent faster in our Cinema 4D testing. Compressor, iMovie and iTunes were faster on the new system, but not by as big of a margin. Again, the biggest gains for the new Air were in our game frame rate tests. The new Air was able to display 24.8 frames per second in our Quake 4 tests, as opposed to the older CTO Air’s 3.9 fps – that’s more than a 6x improvement.
Interestingly, when compared to the lowest end standard $999 Macbook, the new high-end Macbook Air still clocks in at slower overall speeds. The white entry level Macbook runs 13% faster that the new high-end Macbook Air. In nearly every single test, the white Macbook edged out the Macbook Air, except for the unzipping of a 2GB folder, where the solid state drive in the Air did the heavy lifting for the task.
Additionally, when stacking up the new high-end Macbook Air to the high-end unibody Macbook (2.4GHz, same GPU), there’s a much more drastic difference. The Air had an 18% slower Speedmark 5 score, 25% slower Photoshop test score, and a staggering 71% slower score in MPEG encoding tests.
Comparatively, if you’re in the market for a new Apple notebook, unless the slender form factor and light-weight of the Macbook Air is explicitly what you’re after, you’ll generally find better performance in most of Apple’s other notebooks, for nearly a fraction of the price.
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