MacBook Air 2009 is slower than 2008?

Seth Weintraub
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June 26, 2009
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Ouch. Those numbers below have to hurt if you are in the market for a new high end MacBook Air.  Macworld tested the new machines and found the high end 2.13GHz MacBook Air didn't perform as well as the previous high end 1.86Ghz machine with the same 128GB SSD.  In fact, to them, it was noticably slower. 

A lot of things could account for the speed decrease including: battery mangement, cheaper laptop parts, testing methods, etc.  As I said in my Computerworld column when the Air was released, Apple is making significant sacrifices to make this machine razor thin.  If the specs above matter at all to you, you may want to look into a 13-inch MacBook Pro.  That being said, would it be that hard to add a 4GB RAM premium option? 

Comments (6)

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | June 26, 2009 - 10:48am

I think it's beacuse of the summer. The old MacBook Airs were released in october and january, while the new one in june. I think it just underclocked itself to avoid overheating. Maybe if all of them were tested under the circumstances the new one would have had better results. Just a theory

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | June 26, 2009 - 11:11am

So I pay $1000 less today for the high end model that provides roughly the same performance as last year's high end model. And this is bad how???

ken1w (not verified) | June 26, 2009 - 11:37am

Maybe the new versions are better optimized to take advantage of Snow Leopard, when it is released in a few months, and less well suited for the current Leopard.

Canada Chas (not verified) | June 26, 2009 - 11:45am

my new air is on a slow boad from China right about now.

I hope it is not as slow as I hear.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | June 26, 2009 - 12:10pm

once again proving that mhz dont matter. A 2mhz processors that can do a thousand operations per clock would be just as fast as a 2ghz processor that could only do one operation per clock.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | June 26, 2009 - 12:46pm

You're right, still a great value. Though the expectations are disappointing since logically, if you 'upgrade' the components the expected result is better performance, not slightly worse.