Returning MBA 13 - Replace with newer MBA 13 or new MB 12?

[englishman]

Returning my 13" base MBA under the 14 day policy.

Thing is - do I do the obvious and buy the 13" Base MBA

or

for a few more £££ get the new MB 12" with a nice screen? (haven't seen it yet) and double storage SSD

mmmh - any advice appreciated especially if you've seen the new screen.

 

[Airboy1466]

Returning my 13" base MBA under the 14 day policy.

Thing is - do I do the obvious and buy the 13" Base MBA

or

for a few more £££ get the new MB 12" with a nice screen? (haven't seen it yet) and double storage SSD

mmmh - any advice appreciated especially if you've seen the new screen.

Depends what you do with the computer if you actually need to perform task with apps and such i say get the updated MBA

if your just going to be web surfing get the rMB because all its good for is web surfing the Core M is inferior to Core i

 

[englishman]

Be nice to see some benchamarks comparing the Intel Core M 1.1 v the i5 1.6

 

[Ulenspiegel]

I would do the obvious.
We still have to see how will the new 12" perform in practice.

 

[z31fanatic]

None of the two. Go with the 13" MBP with retina.

 

[Velin]

I'd wait until the new MBooks are in the store, and specifically check out the form factor, screen, and keyboard. If the new screens are as good as the reviews say, it's worth the one-month wait for machine that could last you years.

 

[keysofanxiety]

Judging solely on the clockspeed and date it was released, I'm stipulating that the processor in the new MacBook is the Intel Core M-5Y70, which has a Passmark of 3096. That's pretty much equivalent to the 2.4GHz i3-3110M, so it's fairly competitive for being such low voltage.

(Suspected) MacBook CPU: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+M-5Y70+@+1.10GHz&id=2382

For reference, the i5 in the 2014/2015 MBA (before yesterday's update) has a Passmark of 3617, so there isn't a huge performance gap between the two.

The Retina MBP (Late 2014) has a Passmark of 4169.

EDIT: the TDP on the M-5Y70 is 4.5-5W, so I'm 99% convinced this is definitely the CPU that will be used in the new MacBook.

 

[englishman]

Judging solely on the clockspeed and date it was released, I'm stipulating that the processor in the new MacBook is the Intel Core M-5Y70, which has a Passmark of 3096. That's pretty much equivalent to the 2.4GHz i3-3110M, so it's fairly competitive for being such low voltage.

(Suspected) MacBook CPU: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+M-5Y70+@+1.10GHz&id=2382

For reference, the i5 in the 2014/2015 MBA (before yesterday's update) has a Passmark of 3617, so there isn't a huge performance gap between the two.

The Retina MBP (Late 2014) has a Passmark of 4169.

Yes thanks thats what I was thinking - I used to live in a cold house too (your sig) - in UK central heating did the trick for us.

 

[Naimfan]

For reference, the i5 in the 2014/2015 MBA (before yesterday's update) has a Passmark of 3617, so there isn't a huge performance gap between the two.

The Retina MBP (Late 2014) has a Passmark of 4169.

Thanks for posting that - it's helpful and informative.

One quibble - there is roughly a 20% performance differential between the the new MB and the prior MBA, which I'd agree might not be "huge" but does seem significant.

OP - if you're in the 14 day window, your only choice is a new MBA - the new MB won't be out until April 10, which is more than 14 days away.

 

[keysofanxiety]

Thanks for posting that - it's helpful and informative.

One quibble - there is roughly a 20% performance differential between the the new MB and the prior MBA, which I'd agree might not be "huge" but does seem significant.

OP - if you're in the 14 day window, your only choice is a new MBA - the new MB won't be out until April 10, which is more than 14 days away.

That's true, though I tend to find a Passmark score of 3000+ is 'acceptable' performance in real-world benchmarks. Basically anything above that number doesn't matter as much as it would, say, with a score of 1500 (mobile Core2Duo).

IMHO, any bottlenecks you'd encounter in real-world performance from the chip in the MacBook would be offset by the speed of the SSD & 8GB RAM at a higher MHz than previous gens. And as the mobile processor in the MacBook has a much better benchmark than I'd expect from a 1GHz CPU, I really think it'll perform excellently.

To put it in perspective, the quad-core i7 in the 15" 2011 MacBook Pro has a score of about 5500, (which can easily be beaten by a newer gen dual-core mobile i7), so the leaps and bounds Intel are making with each generation is quite staggering once you look at the bigger picture.

Typically on Macs you'll rarely encounter a CPU bottleneck unless you're running heavily-threaded applications - for instance, Logic Pro 9 with a wealth of plugins. Most users will encounter a bottleneck with the RAM or the HDD first. For anything up to light Photoshop work, I think the MacBook will run as well (if not even a little better due to the amount of RAM) than the 13" MacBook Air. Once you get to anything CPU intensive though, you'll definitely feel the pressure of the CPU; though when you reach that level, the MacBook Air wouldn't really be powerful enough either.

TL;DR: if you can afford it, it's my opinion that the MacBook offers as good performance as the MacBook Air in 'real world performance' - other than the examples stated above - though historically I'd suggest avoiding first-gen Apple products until either the price comes down or they resolve any issues with manufacturing (if there will be any).

 

[Naimfan]

Don't neglect the timing - if he is in the 14 day window waiting for the MB on April 10 is simply not an option.

 

[Breaking Good]

I apologize for piggybacking on someone else's thread, but is it worth returning an 11" MBA for an 11" with the new specs?

Is the new processor better than the previous generation processor? Did they move from the Haswell processors to the new Broadwell processors in these as well? Did the performance increase, or was it just a reduction in power consumption?

Thank you.

 

[Naimfan]

I apologize for piggybacking on someone else's thread, but is it worth returning an 11" MBA for an 11" with the new specs?

Yes.