So today I caved in, I bought a new MacBook Air 11” the Core i7 1.8Ghz 4Gb RAM 256Gb SSD model. I was going to custom build and get the 128Gb model but the 2 week build and shipping was just enough to send me into the Apple store at Chermside to buy the fully speced model. It was rather painless to buy from the Apple store but with the new process of having to “order a specialist” to attend to you just to buy was slightly troublesome, along with the 15 minute wait to be served. At least I wasnt clapped out of the store (thankfully the sales guy asked first). All this to replace my six month old first generation MacBook Air 11”, Core2Duo 1.4Ghz 64Gb model.
There were two main reasons for upgrading:
- Core i7 CPU & the 2.5x benchmark performance increase
- The higher resale value of the first generation air
In the spirit of verifying those benchmarks myself i’ve downloaded XBench to the first and second generation airs, freshly loaded with a clean install of OS X Lion and I’ve run the full benchmark. For your drooling pleasure.
First Generation: XBench CPU Score - 98.6
Second Generation: XBench CPU Score - 216.17
Really, how could I argue with those numbers?
