I will mention that the MacBook Air used to wake from sleep almost instantly however as of several OS revisions ago there seems to be a noticeable lag before I get a usable mouse cursor. Again the Air still isn't as good as the new quad-core MacBook Pros, but if you've got a machine from 2008 the new 13-inch MBA will actually be a performance upgrade (and a more portable machine).īoot time on these machines is great thanks to Apple's minimalist EFI and their SSDs. Thanks to Hyper Threading and better performance per core you get around twice the performance of last year's models.

The single threaded performance of the new 11-inch MacBook Air is actually higher than the multithread performance of last year's model. Where things get even more ridiculous is in multithreaded performance: The 13-inch MacBook Air enjoys a similar advantage over its predecessor. The 11-inch MBA is 71% faster than the upgraded 11 from last year, that's more than noticeable in real world usage. Single threaded performance on the new Air is much better than before thanks to turbo boost. They were good enough if you didn't do much with your machine, but for those who lived on the bleeding edge they performed like a 3 year old MacBook Pro. The old Air just wasn't that great of a performer. If you have anything older than a 2010 MacBook Pro, these new Airs will actually be an upgrade for you.Ĭinebench: Single & Multithreaded Performance But most of the time these chips are running near their max turbo frequencies under load, which really helps narrow the performance gap between them and their 2010 professional counterparts. Part of the performance advantage is the integrated SSD, whereas those older Macs didn't come with one by default. Remember the 2010 MacBook Pro only had two Arrandale cores and these Airs have lower clocked, but higher performing Sandy Bridge cores. While the 2011 Macbook Pro is still considerably faster, completing our CS4 test in just over half the time as the 13-inch Air, these machines are competitive with last year's MBP. The story is completely different with the new MacBook Air however. You could manage, and I definitely did, but it was painful. The old Air was not very good for those doing a lot of photo work. As I mentioned in our Lion review, performance hasn't changed between Snow Leopard and Lion for the most part so the older data in these benchmarks is still quite valid.

I've got an expanded test suite here courtesy of the testing I did for our Lion review.

2011 macbook air ssd upgrade