Ars reviews Macbook Air with SSD

Wednesday, Feb. 6 2008 | Author: Griffith

It takes a lot of Apple love (and a thick wallet) to consider purchasing the most expensive Macbook Air. Despite of it’s lack of versatility, the SSD drive-enabled Macbook Air gives the ultra thin laptop the little extra nudge it needs to stand apart from the rest of the lineup.

Performance wise, the laptop had very mixed results compared to it’s HD-bearing brother, but overall, it’s safe to say that it performs just a little bit better than the HD model, despite losing to the Macbook and Macbook Pro in terms of overall performance and battery life.

As you may or not recall, the SDD model also comes with a slightly faster processor, that is 200Mhz faster in terms of clock speed though most of the tests saw only a slight increase of performance.

When it comes to every day use, there isn’t much difference between the two laptops. You’ll have faster boot times with the SSD drive obviously, thanks to the enhanced read/write speeds. But unless you’re really trying to choke the machine with multiple read/write tasks as the reviewer did, you won’t find the difference very satisfying.

Given that for $1300 you can almost purchase another Apple laptop, the performance and battery life gains aren’t nowhere near justifiable for that price difference. The battery life is still terribly low, by today’s standards, and considering that the Macbook Air was made to be used on the go, cutting out on that specification wasn’t the brightest of ideas. As it stands right now, the laptop is somewhat of a contradiction to what it claims to be, but still an engineering wonder nonetheless.

[Via Arstechnica]