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
Can You Be Productive With the 11-inch?
The new Airs are slow, they are great for writing and browsing the web (sort of like fast iPads) but they are noticeably slower than the Pro lineup everywhere else. To get a good feel for what could be done with these machines I put them through my normal review publication workflow. In particular, I focused on my Photoshop experience on both of these systems.
I edited 43 photos for this article, and of course I split the editing time across both the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air.
Each photo was a 12MP RAW, imported into Photoshop, cropped, color/contrast balanced, and saved twice as a compressed JPG (once at 1900 pixels wide and once again at 600 pixels wide). I brought 10 photos into Photoshop at a time, trying to be mindful of the memory constraints each of these systems presented.
I started on the 11-inch.
The import process was noticeably slower than what I was used to. It took seconds for each photo to appear in Photoshop once I’d told it to process the RAW files. Over the course of 10 photos imported at once, that amounted to a reasonable amount of down time.
The SSD kept things moving however. Performance was consistent between editing one photo to the next.
The slow CPU impacted everything. Basic tasks like opening and saving the images took longer than I was used to. Even bringing up Spotlight to launch Chrome felt slower than I’d like.
The screen size and resolution never made me feel cramped, although it was difficult to see detail in the high res photos without zooming in.
While it’s possible to do work like photo editing on the 11-inch MacBook Air, it’s not very pleasant. If you’ve got no other computer around you can do it, but if you’ve got access to anything faster you’ll be a lot more productive.
I realized this when I switched to the 13-inch machine. The 33% higher clocked CPU makes a big difference. Everything pops up quicker, the editing process takes a lot less time and the screen is just a good enough size/resolution where you don’t have to do a ton of zooming to prepare web presentable photos.
I edited half the photos on the 11-inch and the other half on the 13-inch. The half I did on the 13-inch took about half the time as the group I did on the 11. If you need a machine for content creation/editing, the 11-inch won’t cut it.
As a pure writing device however, the 11-inch is great. The SSD ensures that performance is consistent and applications launch quickly. If all you do is write, browse the web, write emails and talk on IM - the 11 gets the job done. Ask more of it for long periods of time and I think you’ll be disappointed.
The 13 isn’t a productivity workhorse, but it’s possible to get heavier work done on it if you need to.
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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?