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First 2018 MacBook Air Benchmark Shows Moderate Gains Over 2017 MacBook Air and MacBook
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I dunno. My wife has an old i3 Lenovo that doesn’t get beyond 2.2GHz. Not once has she complained about its speed, and she’s a 20 tab browser.
Yeah for most general users the basic 13 retina was and still is best. And you can get an official refurb for less than the air
I wonder if the chip inside the iPad Pro was able to run on MacOS fully if it would be able to still put out such impressive numbers (I assume iOS is less taxing). If so, I'll be curious how much longer they will go with intel chips as losing the ports of my old MacBook Air for this less than impressive upgrade at the moment is not worth it for a puny few thousand extra points here.
I have the 12” MacBook 2017 with the i5. It runs just fine, even when I virtualize Windows 10 in Parallels to run an occasional Windows app.
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Not really. There is plenty of room for a 15W chip as both Apple and other OEMs have shown. The 13” TB Pro is basically the same size and has a quad-core processor and better graphics.
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Hence the reason it didn’t get the bump to Amber Lake. It would have been faster than the heavier Air (though still not enough thermal capacity to support Thunderbolt).
Exactly. The Air is not really a power user machine. Many will never run a game on it, or anything more taxing than a browser. The RAM and SSD make more of a difference when it comes to “feel.” If I were to complain, it would be the price hike, but even that was a long time coming.
Bottom line, Apple needs to hurry up and discontinue the MacBook Air and call it MacPad Pro with OS X. Killer combo!
I’d like to add it’s also a machine that’s for penny pinchers like me who are ok with giving up a few minutes of rendering time and use that difference on something else like actually buying FCP or an Adobe subscription.
That’s the appeal of the MacBook, MBA and to a certain extend the Mac Mini. At the end of the day it’s a macOS machine for people who wants to make things work with a lower budget.
I did some digging and found that the benchmarks are not much better than the i7 Macbook Air from 2015...
No HEVC acceleration on the MBA 2017 (which uses a Broadwell 5th generation Intel CPU). Considering iPhones can record 4K HEVC video, this is pretty significant.
To achieve the 12 hour battery life, a compromise had to be made. The Pro has a bigger battery and the case design allows this.
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iOS and macOS both use the same kernel, so they're basically the same and the iPad Pro would perform wonderfully.
The only major difference is how RAM is handled. iOS will force quit apps and discard webpages when memory is full, while macOS tries to find inactive memory and writes that to disk, allowing it to be used for something more important.
Ideally on the Mac a user will close apps and browser tabs when they're not needed, but we're not very good at it and therefore a Mac needs to have more RAM than an iPad — I just checked, I'm currently using 11GB on my Mac, while these new iPads only have 6GB.
Of course, it'd be easy for a Mac with an iPad CPU to have more RAM. Or even better, hopefully macOS will pick up the iOS feature of closing things that aren't being used anymore. Especially webpages - if I haven't brought the tab to the front for 3 days, I don't mind if it has to be re-downloaded when I do load up the tab.
Its not quite an Apples to Apples comparison
Despite the gap in geekbench scores, the TDP is completely different as is the architecture (ARM vs x86)
There's a reason Apple doesn't use their ARM chips in their laptops
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Completely different to compare ARM vs x86
It's not the same
you can only compare the iPads to other iPads & iPhones and any other ARM-based chips, those are fair comparisons
That's hardly surprising, when you consider Intel's CPUs haven't actually improved at all the last few years, except for when they increase the number of CPU cores, requiring a larger battery that doesn't make sense on a MacBook Air.
I completely agree with you. However, some people have been financially responsible in so many other areas that allows them to spend a $1,000 on a laptop for word docs, YouTube and social media without being irresponsible. I mean an iPhone cost $1,000 these days. Most people probably spend a ton of time on social media with their phones too.
I hate to criticize the people who work on developing a new version of 2018 MacBook Air.
The major mistake it made is by using less stellar performance of CPU (Y series) that's similar to MacBook 2017. In fact, the MacBook Air is used to equipped with intel U-series CPU which offer more valuable performance.
A brief comparison of which CPU is more appropriate for the 2018 MacBook Air and the right side of the image is 2017 MacBook Air specification.
The major mistake it made is by using less stellar performance of CPU (Y series) that's similar to MacBook 2017. In fact, the MacBook Air is used to equipped with intel U-series CPU which offer more valuable performance.
A brief comparison of which CPU is more appropriate for the 2018 MacBook Air and the right side of the image is 2017 MacBook Air specification.
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Intel processors can't maintain their speeds either, and they tend to be worse than ARM chips.
Even if you can keep the chip cool, Intel processors often drop their clock cycle due to the power supply being unable to keep up. Core i9 processors draw almost 200 watts under full load. Consider the MacBook Pro only has an 80 watt power brick... which means the other ~120 watts are running off the battery... plus it's also got provide power for the display, SSD, GPU... do that for long enough, and the battery begins to overheat - and fans don't really help with that, so the only option is to throttle the CPU.
Look at long running CPU clock cycle tests for a modern MacBook Pro, and you'll never see it running at 4.8Ghz for more than a moment - that's why they advertise the "turbo boost" clock speed separate from an arbitrary "normal" clock speed. In reality, it's usually running somewhere in between those two numbers, and in some cases much slower.
Personally if I had a choice, I'd pick an ARM processor for my Mac every time. If only because it'd be cheaper. Intel famously charges ridiculously high prices for all their stuff.
Both of my sisters have a Macbook Air and Pro respectively, and they are barely used. There must be a market for people who just want a laptop and will only buy Apple.
I agree - the new keyboard is a deal breaker for me. I had planned to buy a new MBA, but not with that horrible "upgrade." Its now official: All new Apple laptops have the worst keyboards in the industry. I hope someone will develop a reverse Parallels software program so I can use Apple's OS on a better, Windows laptop from Dell or Asus that has a great keyboard and for which I don's need a collection of dongles.