XBENCH REVIEW UPGRADE
If you fit the above description and you're dead set on spending money on an upgrade this year, you might be better served by going for the $999 low-end MacBook Air and paying the extra money for 8GB of RAM. This is where different personal budget philosophies come in.
If you already have a high-end MacBook Air from 2011, you may not actually notice a significant improvement if you upgrade to the equivalent high-end Air of 2012. The highest-end 2012 machine certainly performs well on all tests, but the numbers are only about 20 percent (give or take) higher than what you could get out of the low-end 2012 machine or the high-end machine from 2011. What cost approximately $1,700 last year is something that you can get this year for $999, and the performance is still pretty good even when comparing against the highest-end 2012 Core i7 MacBook Air. The numbers are similar enough to say that they perform at about the same level on most tests. What's more interesting is that the high-end Core i7 (Sandy Bridge) MacBook Air from 2011 is roughly equivalent to the 2012 low-end Core i5 (Ivy Bridge) model from 2012. There was a big jump in processor speeds from 2010 to 2011, but the OpenGL tests didn't change very much: they went up, but only a bit. The patterns that we can see here are fairly straightforward. That one in particular is the lowest-end model, but we also have numbers from a high-end BTO model with 8GB of RAM from this year's revision for comparison purposes. It's important to note that all machines in this section were the high-end MacBook Airs at the time of their release except for the 2012 Core i5 MacBook Air that I used for the majority of this review. These were the MacBook Airs available to us to test using the same version of the OS and the same version of Xbench. Subjectively, with my usage, this means the computer feels significantly faster than my 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Air from 2010. The "Turbo Boost" means (in short) that the CPU can boost the frequency of a single core while shutting off the other in order to give a performance bump to processes that only require one core. Overall, Ivy Bridge processors boast faster clock speeds and lower power consumption than the Sandy Bridge processors from 2011). (Read our Ivy Bridge coverage from April when the processors were officially launched for more background. The machine I used for the majority of this review was a 1.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor, with "Turbo Boost" up to 2.6GHz.
Power supply: 45W MagSafe 2 Power Adapter.
Screen: 11.6" diagonally, 1366 x 768 native resolution.1.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (Turbo Boost up to 2.6GHz) with 3MB shared 元 cache.
Instead, we will focus on the main points of interest that differ from the previous few generations-in particular, those that differ from the 13-inch version that we reviewed last August.įor the majority of this review, we used Apple's baseline 11" MacBook Air, though we were also able to include benchmarks from a maxed out, built-to-order MacBook Air to discuss the numbers in a little more depth. This was not a revolutionary upgrade to the MacBook Air-rather, it was an incremental, evolutionary one.īecause of these subtle changes, this piece won't aim to review the machine as an entirely new device. In fact, the 2012 MacBook Air looks practically identical to its last few predecessors.
XBENCH REVIEW PRO
Like the MacBook Pro, the newest MacBook Air received a bump to Intel's latest Ivy Bridge CPUs and saw updates to its graphics capabilities, USB speeds, and more.īut unlike the fancy new MacBook Pro with retina display, the MacBook Air did not get much of a design makeover. Apple's lightweight machine has come a long way since it was first released in 2008. At last week's 2012 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple updated it once again alongside a plethora of MacBook Pro updates.
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