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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dsee15 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Great thanks. Until then as a technical site, does anyone have a sense what the faster proc and additional 2GB mem do to performance? For example, it should run 20% faster for cpu intense apps, etc.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Well if you're spending money on any of these crapple concraptions then you are either not being productive or simply getting paid too much. Like those retired public employees who get paid 6 figure pensions for doing nothing. I dont know when that crap will stop, but I imagine it will be at around the same time apple flirts with bankruptcy.michael2k - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
They have more cash than Microsoft. So after Microsoft flirts with bankruptcy?Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
They do have a lot of cash. But I can easily see them burning up half of it buying back their own stock once it starts tanking. And the other half could be burned up by just one or two flops. And that can easily happen once most apple lovers realize we are in fact in a depression and there is just no place for a company like apple in a depression.ShepherdH - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
they just gave you more RAM and a larger hard drive at them. Same with most other Apple products.iwodo - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
When Apple gets SandyBridge, i suspect 32nm, SandyBridge 1.8Ghz could do so within the same 1.4Ghz C2D Power envelop. But will be much more powerful. The only trouble is Apple wants CPU to be CPU, not a CPU with GPU built in.khimera2000 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
im not sure about that. they might just be looking for a sweet spot with CPU and GPU performance. in which case AMD's APU chips should be an intresting prospect since it gives you modern architecture on both sides in one chip.where intel took two dies and just slaped them together,AMD made it so the CPU and GPU can actualy talk to each other, also if AMD is to be beleaved this core would be retasked in the presance of another AMD card so the video chip on the CPU dosent become dead weight like the intel solution which just shuts down entirely in the presence of another card. (at least thats what i read)
personaly i think apple should get back into building there own hardware just like the g4 days. but that would require building there own OS, and seeing as mac hasent built an OS from the ground up for a long time (last time being os9? check out something called OpenStep) it might not be in there best intrest with win 7 getting so much traction and the failings of there previous Operating Systems it might not be good for the company to build something there not good at creating.
khimera2000 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
actually i dont think thats the case. there looking for a balanced system, and to this day intel has not released anything that can run a modern title (that i know of) if intel had a half way descent architecture on there vid cards i could see apple using it.however as things stand intel does not have a descent processer, and thats the reason why they have to use an nvidia video card. being that these notebooks use intergrated memory i can see that apple is looking for a specific perfomance point for there systems.
with that in mind i dont see why they wouldent consider AMD's soon to releas offerings. these chips has better gpu/cpu intergration then intel's options and sports the latest DX11 video architecture AMD has. I dont think theres anything in intel's arsinal that would be able to but heads with these chips from a graphic stand point, the only rogue facter in this is the new CPU architecture, since it has to yet be released.
Speaking of which... when can we expect to see reviews of the amd APU offerings from Anand? i would love to see how well it ticks, and a review to better define what makes it so differant from the intel chips that are comming out... perhaps an architetual comparison sometime in the future???
khimera2000 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
wow... i didnt know my first post went through for this response.. sorry about that. my connection hickuped. Love the sight keep up the good work :Dblufire - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
You stated that the software restore drive is not write-protected, but Apple states that it is read-only. Who's right?http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4399
Thanks for the review!