Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air (Core i7 1.8GHz) Review Update
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 2011 6:08 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Apple
- Intel
- Core i7
- Sandy Bridge
- MacBook Air
Final Words
If you're buying the high-end ($1199) 11-inch MacBook Air and care about performance, the 1.8GHz CPU upgrade is worth it. You shouldn't expect any real impact on battery life in normal use but you'll see a noticeable gain in performance across the board. Subjectively the CPU upgrade does make the system snappier, easily faster than the base 13-inch MacBook Air (although technically not always as fast as the i7 in the 13).
The big downside is, of course, heat. The 11-inch MacBook Air already doesn't have a lot of room to dissipate heat and with a faster CPU inside the system definitely gets warmer. It's still manageable but under load expect a system that gets even warmer than last year's 15-inch MacBook Pro.
As far as the LCD panel lottery goes I'd say the LG and Samsung panels are pretty similar, with the Samsung being a bit better about vertical viewing angles. My personal preference is the Samsung but after using the LG exclusively for a couple of days I no longer have any complaints. Unfortunately both are TN panels and thus have inherent, highly annoying issues with viewing angle.
The bigger problem in my opinion is the difference in SSD performance. I'd really liked to see Apple ditch Toshiba and move to Samsung SSDs across the board, or at least deliver a second higher performance alternative.
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jnmfox - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
"If you're buying an 11-inch MacBook Pro and care about performance, the 1.8GHz CPU upgrade is worth it."An 11-inch MBP could be sweet though....
CharonPDX - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
For $50, you get an 11" that is faster than the base 13", and you're giving up an SD slot and some resolution, in favor of a smaller/lighter chassis and better performance.To me, it's a no-brainer. If I were in the market to replace my notebook right now (aka: if my MacBook Pro were to die in the next couple months,) I would immediately get an 11" Air upgraded to i7.
h00ligan76 - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
You also give up battery life, and that screen space is palpable to some. Anyone needing photo editing on the go is going to benefit from added screen, sd (potentially) and battery life...I agree for some it's a no brainer.. just which way depends on the person :)
vrusso87 - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
I was just at the web store and noticed something characteristically Apple - you can't upgrade the base 11-inch (64GB) or 13-inch (128GB) Air models to the i7. You have to swallow the $200-$300 price premium for the larger SSD before you can shell out another $100-$150 for the i7.Irksome.
blue_fireball_eater - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
Is how fast the OWC Aura drive run in these machines. I have the Samsung drive, so should I even consider upgrading to a Sandforce drive, or just wait for inevitable Sandforce 2000 version to come out?tipoo - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
I'd still like to see decible readings of these at load, I see them in other Anandtech laptop reviews but for some reason never on Mac's.aladdin68 - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
does the fact that the 11 in i7's run a little hotter likely to have any impact on their overall lifespan as compared to the 11 in i5's?narlzac85 - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
I wish there was a comparison review of the base $999 model, because I think a lot of people are going to buy that one not realizing that they are only getting 2GB of memory and its not able to be upgraded. Which to me would seem like buying a completely crippled system. Wasn't 2GB determined to be the absolute minimum for OSX way back in Leopard? Bad move by Apple. They should have ditched thunderbolt on the base model and increased the memory. Considering more ram benefits everyone and thunderbolt benefits very few people at the moment. Or they could have just eaten the cost of the 2 extra GB if they are really trying to push Thunderbolt.h00ligan76 - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
My air boots requiring 1.25 GB - before running anything. It starts paging pretty fast even with 4gb the minute lightroom and photoshop get opened.At this point, for anything other than an iPad with a keyboard, I wouldn't be buying the 2gb model.
hechacker1 - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
I too noticed as soon as I upgraded to Lion, even with 4GB it started to swap out to disk.I'm assuming they changed the memory management in Lion compared to Snow Leopard, because it rarely swapped in SL.
So I went out to buy 8GB, and now it doesn't swap. But it does somehow consume 7.5GB with what I assume are caches (even when I'm not running lots of programs).