Is the Air still being made?

[Peter Franks]

Just wondered why magazines like Mac Format, supposed best selling.. in their buyer's guide completely ignore the 'Air' every month. It's not in there, ever. I've asked them a couple of times by email why, but they've never afforded me a reply.

I'm on an early 2011 MBP 13", and quite like the Air, but would it be a big downgrade or is there still one with spec greater than the MBP I own which is the:

Intel Core i5, Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB

 

[keysofanxiety]

If Apple still sell them, they're still manufacturing them.

Any new MBA would exceed the spec of your machine. The CPUs are better than yours even though the clockspeed is lower, because they're much newer generations. Factor in the fast Flash drives and it'll feel infinitely more snappy than your laptop.

However you do get a lot more for your money with a 2015 13" rMBP. For not much more you get a better CPU, better GPU, faster RAM, better display, new trackpad, HDMI, 2x Thunderbolt, and faster Flash storage. So I'd recommend getting that instead.

The MBA is still a great machine though!

 

[Peter Franks]

Thanks for your help. All good info.

 

[Boyd01]

I had a 2011 MacBook Air and upgraded to a 2013. Huge difference. But the CPU performance will be very similar. One big upgrade was the addition of USB 3.0. You can get inexpensive external disks with read/write speeds around 180MB/sec on USB 3.0. On your machine the the same disk will only give you about 30MB/sec.

The SD card slot is also much faster on the newer MBA models, in 2011 it is connected to the same slow USB 2.0 bus.The new machines also have the very fast 802.11ac Wifi. If you have a compatible router, this can give speeds approaching 10x your machine. Now you probably won't notice much difference connecting to the internet, but it's very significant if you use shared disks on your network.

As already stated, the SSD is faster, especially for the larger sizes. You might not notice this much in everyday type operations though. However IMO the most significant improvement is battery run time which is around twice as long. This can make a big difference in how you use the computer, you don't have to bring a power adapter much of the time. This was the main focus of the CPU upgrade, the new chips are more power-efficient.

And of course, in 2011 the largest amount of RAM you could get was 4gb and the largest available SSD was 256gb.

All of these things were available in 2013 and those machines are a lot of bang for the buck if you can find one in good condition. The current version is only slightly faster.

 

[Peter Franks]

Good points, to be honest with you, battery issue is a bone of contention with me, I've never had a good battery life with my MBP, and it's ridiculous if I watch any video/YouTube. It drains continually and barely get a few hours when I'm not watching videos. It's really bad. I am tempted to go with the Air as long as it's a 13 inch. That's one thing I couldn't go down from.