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The more things stay the same on the outside, the more they change
under the hood. That seems to be Apple's motto this summer.
Last year Apple
overhauled the MacBook Air design and introduced a smaller,
netbook-sized model. This year's MBAs look the same, but there are a
lot of changes within the aluminum unibody.
In terms of power, the biggie is leaving behind Intel Core 2 Duo
technology, which Apple first used in mid-2006, in favor of Intel Core
i5 and i7 CPUs. Last year's 11.6" MBA with its 1.4 GHz CPU scored 2159
in Geekbench; this year's 1.6 GHz i5 hit 5040, way more than twice the
score. The 2010 1.86 GHz 13.3" benchmarked at 2976, but the 2011 1.7
GHz G5 version blew past that at 5860, nearly double the score.
In terms of expansion, the addition of Thunderbolt, introduced with
the Early 2011 MacBook Pro line and also included with the Early 2011
version of the iMac, is being positioned as the expansion bus of the
future. Thunderbolt has over twice the bandwidth of USB 3.0, 60% more
than SATA 3, and enough bandwidth to support high resolution monitors,
SSD RAID arrays,external video cards, and adapters for FireWire, USB
3.0, and other protocols. Look at it as a virtual expansion slot.
Apple's new Thunderbolt
Display is a perfect complement to the MBA or MacBook Pro, as it
has its own USB 2.0, FireWire 800, and Gigabit Ethernet, along with a
Thunderbolt pass-through port and a FaceTime HD webcam.
In terms of graphics, it depends. The Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics
used in last year's MBA were nice but far from state of the art. The
same can be said of the Intel HD Graphics 3000 built into the CPUs of
this year's models.
Early benchmarks using World of Warcraft at native resolution turn
in higher frame rates for the new models (28 vs. 24 on the 13" and 31
vs. 22 on the 11"), but that will be game dependent.
In terms of storage, the 2011 MacBook Air uses the same SSD modules
as last year's model, but this time on 6 Gbps SATA 3.0, not the older,
slower 3 Gbps SATA 2.0. If you want more capacity or speed than Apple
offers, OWC's Mercury
Aura Pro Express SSDs range in price from $400 for 180 GB to $1,400
for a whopping 480 GB of SSD storage.
Last Year's News
With the addition of Thunderbolt and the move to Intel Core i5 and
i7 CPUs, there's a huge difference in expandability and performance in
comparison to last year's models, so the question is, Why should
anyone buy a 2010 MacBook Air?
One reason is the bottom line. You can buy a refurbished 2010
11-incher for $749 - $200 below the best price on the 2011 model. It's
a perfectly adequate computer for most users most of the time, and its
price dropped $100 when Apple introduced the new model. You can get a
13-incher refurb for $999, which saves you $250 over the new
entry-level 13" MBA.
Probably the biggest reason to choose last year's MBA over the 2011
versions is that the older ones run OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which
contains Rosetta, which means they are compatible with PowerPC software
- things like Quicken, AppleWorks, older versions of Photoshop, etc.
These apps won't roar with Lion, but they will continue to run under
Snow Leopard.
Gamers might find the Nvidia graphics give them a reason to choose
the 2010 MBA, but they'll want to check benchmark results for their
favorite games on both platforms to see which offers superior
performance on the titles they play.
The Lion Conundrum
The biggest drawback to the Mid 2011 MacBook Air is that it comes
with OS X 10.7 Lion. If you are still using PowerPC apps (AppleWorks,
for instance) and want to keep doing so, you don't want to run Lion
exclusively, as it no longer supports PowerPC apps. You may also have
apps that are Intel-compatible but no yet compatible with Lion.
We've heard that VirtualBox will let you virtualize Snow Leopard and
run it as a session on your Lion Mac, but that was done using hardware
that supported Snow Leopard. Whether Macs that can't boot Snow Leopard
will be able to virtualize it remains to be seen, but it could give
users the best of both worlds - the totally up-to-date Lion environment
plus Snow Leopard for all those old apps you can't run in Lion.
If you are going to do virtualization, whether for Windows or Snow
Leopard, be sure you get your MBA with 4 GB of memory, because you
can't upgrade after the fact. While the extra memory is a plus
regardless, it becomes even more important when running multiple
operating systems.
For some of us longtime Mac users, the ability to use our existing
PowerPC software is a real issue. If you've come to the Mac in the past
five years, it's probably not an issue at all.
Dan Knight has been using Macs since 1986,
sold Macs for several years, supported them for many more years, and
has been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. If you find Dan's articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.
Links for the Day
Mac of the Day: Blue & White Power Mac G3, introduced 1999.01.05. The most colorful Power Mac introduced an innovative 'drawbridge' enclosure.
