Performance tests
Performance tests will hardly interest people who buy this notebook. Centimeters, grams, and design are much more important here than megabytes per second and FPS. It's clear that, given the "player" hard drive and compact processor, even MacBook outperforms MacBook Air. So, you will hardly meet a user, who wants MacBook Air for serious tasks, like photo/video processing.
Below are XBench performance results - we compared MacBook Air with a mid-end MacBook (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of system memory). Note: the rightmost column (the one with MacBook performance results) contains only numbers to save room - it uses the same units of measure as in the column with MacBook Air results.
|
MacBook Air |
MacBook |
| Test |
Score |
Performance |
Score |
Perf. |
| Total score |
50.66 |
|
176.73 |
|
| CPU Test |
92.36 |
|
136.23 |
|
| GCD Loop |
176.78 |
9.32 Mops/sec |
280.94 |
14.81 |
| Float. Point Basic |
82.96 |
1.97 Gflop/sec |
135.78 |
3.23 |
| vecLib FFT |
64.25 |
2.12 Gflop/sec |
74.21 |
2.45 |
| Float. Point Library |
99.68 |
17.36 Mops/sec |
201.46 |
35.08 |
| Thread Test |
145.99 |
|
265.68 |
|
| Computation |
140.76 |
2.85 Mops/sec, 4 threads |
463.61 |
9.39 |
| Lock Contention |
151.62 |
6.52 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads |
186.19 |
8.01 |
| Memory Test |
134.21 |
|
170.36 |
|
| System |
129.28 |
|
188.64 |
|
| Allocate |
131.78 |
483.96 Kalloc/sec |
299.21 |
1100 |
| Fill |
118.73 |
5773.00 MB/sec |
150.68 |
7326.42 |
| Copy |
138.98 |
2870.62 MB/sec |
168.80 |
3486.43 |
| Stream |
139.53 |
|
155.31 |
|
| Copy |
129.35 |
2671.58 MB/sec |
146.26 |
3020.88 |
| Scale |
127.47 |
2633.53 MB/sec |
144.49 |
2985.14 |
| Add |
153.38 |
3267.33 MB/sec |
166.80 |
3553.18 |
| Triad |
152.18 |
3255.55 MB/sec |
166.60 |
3564.00 |
| Quartz Graphics |
100.92 |
|
182.20 |
|
| Line |
104.63 |
6.97 Klines/sec [50% alpha] |
173.05 |
11.52 |
| Rectangle |
111.42 |
33.26 Krects/sec [50% alpha] |
218.96 |
65.37 |
| Circle |
90.36 |
7.37 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha] |
175.55 |
14.31 |
| Bezier |
100.39 |
2.53 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha] |
178.06 |
4.49 |
| Text |
100.18 |
6.27 Kchars/sec |
172.90 |
10.82 |
| OpenGL Graphics |
16.39 |
|
25.45 |
|
| Spinning Squares |
16.39 |
20.79 frames/sec |
25.45 |
32.28 |
| User Interface |
126.34 |
|
240.18 |
|
| Elements |
126.34 |
579.83 refresh/sec |
240.18 |
1100 |
| Disk Test |
29.23 |
|
37.32 |
|
| Sequential |
43.73 |
|
57.47 |
|
| Uncached Write |
49.92 |
30.65 MB/sec [4K blocks] |
67.55 |
41.48 |
| Uncached Write |
59.77 |
33.82 MB/sec [256K blocks] |
77.70 |
43.96 |
| Uncached Read |
25.26 |
7.39 MB/sec [4K blocks] |
32.38 |
9.48 |
| Uncached Read |
66.12 |
33.23 MB/sec [256K blocks] |
90.57 |
45.52 |
| Random |
21.96 |
|
27.63 |
|
| Uncached Write |
7.41 |
0.78 MB/sec [4K blocks] |
9.62 |
1.02 |
| Uncached Write |
70.82 |
22.67 MB/sec [256K blocks] |
64.85 |
20.76 |
| Uncached Read |
50.24 |
0.36 MB/sec [4K blocks] |
66.70 |
0.47 |
| Uncached Read |
76.21 |
14.14 MB/sec [256K blocks] |
96.17 |
17.84 |
|
Prices
MacBook Air costs this much in the USA. You shouldn't expect prices for this notebook to drop much, or new powerful configurations to roll out. It has been presented just recently for a definite target audience that is ready to pay.
Pros:
- Ultraslim
- High-quality case
- Full-size keyboard
- Wide touchpad
- Remote Disk (using an optical drive in another computer via Wi-Fi)
Cons:
- Users cannot replace the battery
- Only one USB port
- No optical drive
- Only one speaker
- Low-capacity hard drive
Bottom line
It's a very thin high-quality and stylish notebook. Don't forget that it does not have a built-in optical drive, it's equipped with a low-capacity hard drive, it has one mono-speaker and one USB port. If it's not a problem to you, MacBook Air may be your choice. This product will especially attract users, who travel a lot (including planes), who do not work with resource-intensive programs, but who want a stylish and slim notebook to highlight their image and produce a good impression at presentations and business meetings.
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