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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kingzad - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 - link
I see the performance gain is not much with 13 inches i7 upgrade but can the 4 MB cache shows itself in other ways that may not be directly measured by typical performance tests? For example will it help with faster switching applications if a large number of applications are running at the same time. As an example lets say we are running XCode with many files open, Interface Builder, iPhone Simulator, Firefox, Safari, MS Word, iTunes plus some other apps. How about if I don't turn off my mac for many many days (quite typical) and there are just more and more applications which are active on it. Could it be more responsive with i7's 4MB cache rather than i5's 3 MB?ningmeng - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
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MiddletonBanks - Thursday, April 19, 2012 - link
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