The MacBook Air: Thoroughly Reviewed

Microsoft Office 2008 Performance

Our Word 2008 test comes from Intel and times how long it takes to compare two different versions of the Count of Monte Christo using Word's built in document compare function:

The 2.6GHz MacBook Pro is a good 40% faster than the Air (I'd expect the 2.2GHz model to have a 25 - 30% advantage), while both versions of the Air are a good 20% faster than Apple's first Intel based notebook.

Our multitasking Office 2008 is another Intel-supplied benchmark; this one has us running the document compare test from above, while printing a PowerPoint presentation to PDF. Note that the original MacBook Pro took so long to complete this test that we had to just give it a DNF score and leave it out of the chart:

File Decompression, Photoshop and Quicktime Performance

Using MacPAR Deluxe we took an 800MB archive and deleted 5% of it, forcing MacPAR to read the archive, calculate and write the missing bits, then extract the whole archive:

As we saw in our SSD performance pages, the SSD just can't keep up with the standard hard drive here making it slower than the old MacBook Pro. The fastest MacBook Pro is around 20% faster than the Air, which itself is faster than the old MBP.

Our CS3 benchmark is the standard Retouch Artists test that we use in our CPU reviews. We're just timing how long it takes to complete a handful of operations on an image in Photoshop:

While the MacBook Air can handle Photoshop as well as a two year old MacBook Pro, if you're serious about image editing you may want to deal with lugging around 2 more pounds and get the MacBook Pro.

Finally we have our Quicktime H.264 encode test. All we're doing here is taking a 500MB MPEG-2 avi file and encoding it using Apple's H.264 codec and Quicktime's default settings:

Quicktime agrees with the rest of our tests, now time to discuss what we've seen.