Wednesday, October 27, 2010

The New MacBook Air’s SSD Performance

Marco Arment:

As you can see, standard hard drives perform so poorly in this benchmark—the most common operation that most people need their hard drives to do—that it’s no wonder that SSDs feel so much faster than hard drives. It’s not even close.

The difference is so stark that for many people getting an SSD would make more difference than getting a whole new Mac.

1 Comment RSS · Twitter

I'm quite pleased with the performance on my 13" mid-2010 MBP w Apple SSD.

The price comparison on basic competent client laptops (aka 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD) is interesting. The MBP is $1,550 and the MBA is $1,400.

Even with the extra ports and the faster CPU, I'd guess Apple's margin is still better on the MBP than the MBA.

(What I'd like to see Apple do going forward is to build a 13" MBP with the flash storage in chips like the MBA does. That design decision would theoretically give them enough additional space to put in an i5 CPU and NVIDIA graphics, all while still having space for adequate cooling capacity.)

Leave a Comment