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 11-inch as a Windows Notebook
As a follow-up to our Nvidia 320M/MacBook Pro 13 article last week, I’ve been running our Windows test suite on the MacBook Air 11”. I, like Anand, have the lowest end 11”er, with 2GB memory and the 64GB SSD. This makes installing Windows an interesting proposition since after the two OS installs, you’ve got right around 30GB of free disk space to work with. My suggestion - if you plan on installing Windows and dual booting often, save yourself the headache and get the 128GB model.
The other quirk with putting Windows on the Air is that it must be done with a USB optical drive - no hard drive/thumb drive installs. Interestingly, my external optical drive wasn’t recognized as a bootable drive, so I had to run out and grab an Apple SuperDrive. Apple says that you just need an external DVD drive, without specifying the MacBook Air SuperDrive, but your mileage may vary.
Boot Camp Drivers are now downloaded from Apple's servers prior to the Windows installation
With the Windows install out of the way, we were free to test the living daylights out of it, and that we most certainly did. The 11” Air has the same 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo SU9400 as the similarly thin Dell Adamo 13. Months after we move to Arrandale ULV, leave it to Apple to bring the good old CULV platform back to relevance. As expected, Cinebench and the x264 encoding test gave us results around the same level as the Adamo and the rest of the old CULV gang. Versus the 13” MacBook Pro, you’re looking at roughly a 40% decrease in the CPU compute-heavy benchmarks, roughly equivalent to the reduction in clock speed from the 2.4GHz Pro to the 1.4GHz Air. Arrandale ULV notebooks, such as the Alienware M11x and its Core i7-620UM, are another matter entirely, with the newer architecture posting numbers nearly doubling the Air’s Core 2 processor.
The gaming benchmarks get a bit more interesting. We’re looking at the same GT 216-derived GeForce 320M that was in the MacBook Pro 13, with the same 450MHz core and 950MHz shader clocks. Based on the performance we saw out of the Pro 13, we know that the Air, even in 11” form, can still hold its own in games.
At low detail settings, the Air is pretty consistently 20% slower than the Pro 13, except in SC2, where they were roughly equal. Given that the GPU is identical and that both are using 256MB of the system’s DDR3 1066 memory, it is likely that the 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo is slow enough to put a bottleneck on gaming performance. It’s still a ways ahead of the ASUS Core i3/G 310M combo, and all of our games are playable at native resolution.
At medium settings though, the Air starts to fall off a bit. Where the MBP13 was borderline-playable, always between the 25-35 fps range, the Air is about 10% behind and makes it to the magical 30fps mark in STALKER, but nothing else. DiRT 2, Left 4Dead 2, Mass Effect 2, and StarCraft II all ended up between 22 and 26 fps, still faster than the G 310M, but not quite playable. Another interesting concern during gaming is heat. The Air isn’t the coolest notebook in the world, with idle temps hovering around 50C, but while running the gaming tests, I saw GPU temps rise up into the 70s. Nothing too alarming, but still pretty toasty and more than enough to get the fans spinning to the max.
But let’s put this all in perspective. This isn’t about just an 11.6” notebook that can game - the 11.6” M11x is the fastest gaming notebook under 5lbs, but even then it’s still a full two times heavier than the MB Air 11. The Air 11 shoehorns quite a bit of power into one of the smallest form factors on the market. Having a GT 216 core in an enclosure this small and being able to run these games at 40 fps at native resolution is definitely very impressive.
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khimera2000 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
but on the flip side many of those larger notebooks make up for graphic loss with a stronger processer, which these will not be able to compete with, not to mention that although it is using a NV320, it is not the discreet model it is the intergrated model which saps your ram just like a netbook not to mention that you can play movies on a netbook. the point of a hard drive is rather mute since you yourself acknowledge that solid state drives exist on netbooks.to assume that netbooks will stay as slow as there oridional releas is kinda off, since technolagy moves at a fast rate. comparing this system to new systems that are released by other companies there is no where that it fits other than as a netbook since your going for the bottom of the barrel for Nvidia cards, and going for a CPU that can be smacked by a I3 mobile theres nothing coming out slower for PC then this unless you look at netbooks.
with this in mind it still just looks like a netbook performance revision.
appliance5000 - Friday, October 29, 2010 - link
So somewhere in this verbiage you're saying it a really really fast and powerful netbook. Ok - if it makes you happy -OK.Demoure - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Why must it be under 3 pounds? I can't think of a good reason for requiring a laptop under 3 pounds, other than that you are intentionally being picky so as to show it in a better light. At four and a half pounds you have the m11x, a far superior laptop. It is not thin or light, but it is not thick and heavy. Being a scrawny person myself, I cannot think of a person where the 1.5 extra pounds would be a deal breaker.And I do agree with you, it is not a netbook, unlike what the other replier said. It is powerful enough to do what netbooks cannot. As I describe netbooks, they fall short if you try to do anything other than text-based stuff. Ion blurs the lines a little, I've owned an ion laptop before. It was able to play movies flawlessly, but beyond that it was still limited in a netbook way. However, my m11x, and as the performance of the air is not too far off, are quite competent at a variety of things. Just about the only thing I would use my desktop for, but not my m11x, would be the heavy work of encoding, transcoding, that sort of stuff. For everything else, it really does feel like a full fledged laptop, if not a decent desktop. The processor being the limiting factor of the laptop, it is fast enough for everything reasonable.
tno - Wednesday, December 29, 2010 - link
This might sound slight to you but is reasonably significant to me. I'm a paramedic with a transport service based out of a tertiary care center (large hospital). This is very much a transient job, you are either in an ambulance going from one place to the next or in a helicopter doing the same. I like to keep some essentials with me at all times: food, water, phone charger, phone, reading material, lightweight computing option. Now phone goes in a pocket. Water has its own bottle. The rest has to go in my bag.After making do with a bulky laptop bag I decided I needed something slimmer and more useful. So I now have a 20L day pack from North Face. It has a laptop compartment/hydration bladder sleeve, and two water resistant compartments, as well as a few smaller pockets and a rain cover for real wet work. And it ways about 1/4 pound. It's amazing, especially compared to my old two pound bag that was bulky while not actually carrying much more stuff.
Food (two Power bars, a PBJ, an apple and some dried fruit/nuts) is about 1 1/2 lbs. Reading material is about 1/2 lbs. Phone charger's a few ounces. So that's about 2 1/2 lbs, including the bag. A 4 1/2 lbs laptop would bring me up to seven pounds. My Lenovo S10 with a 9 cell battery weighs about 3 lbs and having put both used that and my old Dell 15" lappy (about 4.5 lbs) I was much happier with the S10. One handed transitions from one place to another without having to close the laptop is one maneuver that definitely favors the S10 and one I do a lot.
As much as I'm bumping up all these Mac posts I'm going to start to sound like quite the fan boy. That said I still don't own one. And am having trouble making up my mind on which one to buy. The 13MBA and 13MBP vary by just enough to make the MBP's performance equally as tempting as the MBA's lightness. What a travesty of options.
omega12 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Did you just compare the power consumption of an unplugged laptop vs a plugged in laptop? The photo on the left says 0W DC Input and on the right we have 22.97W DC Input. What's up with that?Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Cropped the wrong screenshot, the actual processor power consumption doesn't change when plugged in vs. not in OS X but I ran the test both ways just to be sure.Fixed :)
Take care,
Anand
QChronoD - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Did you guys test the battery life for the air while running windows? Did I miss it on the charts?I need to replace my old laptop w/ something small so I can carry it all day at school. I don't need lots of power, but most of the software I need to use in lab don't run on OSX (AFAIK).
Anyone know anything else for about $1K that is as thin and light and runs for 4+ hours??
JMS3072 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Try the ThinkPad X201.kavanoz - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
You can also check Acer Aspire TimelineX AS1830T-3721. Just make sure to swap out the HDD with a SDD. I put a 40 GB Intel X25-V when I bought it and it just flies. Nowadays a 64 GB Sandforce based SSD makes more sense. You can find them for as low as $120.Demoure - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Compare it to a netbook and you will be delighted at how speedy and thin it is. Compare it to the ipad and well.. okay so the ipad is a bit silly no matter the comparison. Compare it to asus's UL series, and there you have a decent comparison. Thats one where it could really go either way, based on personal preference and which camp you side with. But when the new air launched, I wondered why a reasonable person would want it over an m11x. It is thinner, certainly.. but, is that really important? No laptop these days is really the thickness of a brick, to judge size, you would think people would be more concerned about length and width. Screen size. How thin the air is.. seems like it would never factor in to any situation. Places where an air can fit, a culv-type laptop would as well. If not for it being thin, I really can't think of a reason to get it over the m11x. Neither are really BAD buys, but the air just seems less impressive in comparison. With the money saved by getting the old r1 (you know, the one with more battery life, cheaper, just as useful, only lacking in its lack of optimus) you could get yourself a fancy ssd, to complete the package. Perhaps I am just baised after finding the m11x to be the perfect little laptop, but despite it being a hideous looking thing, I see no reason to get the air unless you just have to have an apple computer. However if the m11x did not exist, I would not blame anyone for getting an air. It is well rounded.