Apple's 2010 MacBook Air (11 & 13 inch) Thoroughly Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 26, 2010 10:08 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Apple
- MacBook Air
- Laptops
The Screen: Very Good
Many netbooks and notebooks have shipped with 11.6 inch screens. They deliver a good balance between screen size and portability. But the 11.6-inch displays we’ve encountered in the past have been crap. It’s not rocket science, but rather a matter of cost. The majority of users will pick a cheap, bright, glossy display over something with better viewing angles, higher resolution or more accurate colors. And when you’re competing mostly based on price, it’s tough to make a decision that won’t increase sales (I’d argue that it makes the most important part of your customers happier but then again, I don’t run Acer/ASUS/Dell/Gateway).
Apple opts out of low margin competition. The cheapest MacBook Air starts at $999. You pay a premium, and part of that premium goes towards the best 11.6-inch display we’ve ever tested.
Most 11-inch screens don’t get very bright and have sub-par contrast ratios. The 11-inch MacBook Air has neither of these characteristics. It’s 127% brighter than the Alienware M11x R2 and has twice the contrast ratio of anything in its class. It’s not the most amazing display we’ve ever seen, but it’s way better than the majority of what’s out there. In actual use it does look good. The contrast ratio in particular sells the display.
The 13-inch panel is pretty close in performance. The max brightness is a bit higher and black level a bit lower. The resulting increase in contrast ratio is appreciable. For the most part you don’t make any quality tradeoffs when going with one MBA over another. It just boils down to screen size and resolution.
Both the 11 and 13-inch MBAs use TN panels, but they are better than your standard TN panel. Viewed above center the display washes out, viewed below center the display gets very dark.
The dark underside of TN panels
Color reproduction is above average, but not quite as good as the 15-inch MacBook Pro we reviewed earlier in the year.
Color gamut isn’t very impressive at all. It’s in line with what you’d expect from a panels of these sizes though.
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nvidia2008 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Great article, just one niggle, Instant On does not refer to Boot, nor Wake From Sleep.From the Apple website:
"And when you put MacBook Air to sleep for more than an hour, it enters what’s called standby mode. So you can come back to MacBook Air a day, a week - even up to an entire month later - and it wakes in an instant."
http://www.apple.com/macbookair/design.html
Instant On refers to a Standby Mode (basically hibernate) that is not Boot nor Wake From Sleep.
AMDJunkie - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
This is a good point; Macs with hard drives have "deep sleep" standby, which is the typical, "Hey, your battery is about to die so we're taking the system state from RAM to the hard drive" hibernation. This is an SSD, though, so I presume it writes it to the SSD after an hour, instead of after your battery dips under 5%, to help you save battery.nvidia2008 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Yeah, I think Deep Sleep is the most closely related thing to Instant On, not Boot or Wake From Sleep. Cheershechacker1 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
OS-X, when put to sleep by closing the lid, will write out the necessary parts of memory to the hard drive.Then if your battery dies, the hibernate state resumes when you plug it back in.
If you have a ton of applications open and are using a lot of ram before closing the lid, it does take noticeably longer to actually begin sleep and turn off the HD, as indicated by the light on the macbook.
tipoo - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Yeah, Instant On is really just fast-wake-from-hibernate.Tuntavern - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Now there ARE two.ginny - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
HiYou had said that your macbook air was using about 1.4 gb of memory when diting a handful of imgs in Photoshop. Do you think then that it isnt the best machine to get if I anticipate in using Adobe CS frequently? Do you think i should opt for a MBP instead? Or will upgrading the CPU and Memory suffice?
Thanks!
zhill - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Good review. I was waiting for you guys to review the new airs, good data. FYI, your images comparing the 13" MBA's size appear to be labeled incorrectly. I think the image (http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/macbookair... is comparing the MBA 13" to the MBP 15" rather than the MBP 13".I'm also surprised that the screens had such a limited color gamut, I expected something in the 70% range rather than 40% but I suppose they trade that for energy efficiency(?).
I would be very curious to see your benchmarks include a new air with the 2.13GHz C2D and 4GB RAM to compare that to the the 1.86Ghz. I seem to recall that the last generation 2.13Ghz Air had even more thermal throttling issues than the lower spec chip so I wonder if it has been addressed in that configuration as well.
Any ideas on how they achieved such a fast wake time compared with the MBP 15" w/SSD? Typically, a sleep/wake operation is not very dependent upon the disk as the memory is kept powered so the system state should easily be restored without much disk access. Interesting stuff.
dsee15 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Great Review, thank you!How much faster do you think the 13 MBA with 2.1Ghz proc, 4GB Mem, 256GB SSD would be over the stock model you tested? Do you think the faster proc will generate too much heat and initiate the governor?
How would this 'tricked out' system run VMware/windows/office?
Lastly, it appears the tricked out version could out perform both the 13 MB aluminum with hard drive and 13 MBP with hard dive, except for the most cpu intensive apps, agree...??? Could it replace a 15 MBP with hard drive?
doubledown21 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Will there be any updates to the benchmarks if/when the 2.13GHz MBA is tested?