The MacBook Air: Thoroughly Reviewed

Overall System Performance

The next question is: how much performance are you giving up for portability with the MacBook Air? We compared the Air to two other Apple notebooks: the original MacBook Pro based on a Core Duo (not Core 2) running at 2.0GHz and the latest MacBook Pro with a 7200RPM HDD and 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo. All systems were configured with 2GB of DDR2-667 memory.

iPhoto Performance

We ran two iPhoto tests, one of which we've used in the past several Apple reviews. We simply time the import of 379 images into an empty iPhoto album. This test is both processor and disk intensive, which should be fun on the slow HDD in the Air:

The fastest MacBook Pro is nearly twice as fast as the MacBook Air, the standings aren't unexpected but the margin of victory is a little surprising. The more interesting comparison however is between the Air and the original MacBook Pro - the two perform identically.

Our next test takes the pictures we just imported and exports them to a multi-page website, once again we're measuring completion time in seconds:

Here the MacBook Air is actually faster than the old MacBook Pro. The new Pro is still significantly faster.

iWork '08 Performance

What do iWork users often find themselves doing? Exporting their wonderful documents to formats that can be used by Microsoft Office users. Thus our Pages and Keynote benchmarks involve exporting to Word and PowerPoint respectively:

Both benchmarks continue the trend we've seen: the ultra-fast MacBook Pro is faster, while the Air actually outperforms the original MBP released two years ago.