[JamesRedwood]

I have used a first revision macbook 1.83 and was pretty happy with it.

Can anyone provide reliable benchmarks for the macbook air and in particular indicate how hot they get?

[mduell]

Doing what?

Mine gets "not on bare skin" hot under load, fine at idle.

[Eug]

CPU benches will be fine. You try one out with the standard hard drive though. The drive is slow.

[Simon]

They can get very hot under load. And they do feel slow. Blame the HD for that mainly. Purely CPU-limited stuff isn't all that bad, but perceived overall performance is sub-par.

If thin and light are more important to you than everything else, go for it. If not, it is definitely the wrong portable Mac for you.

[ctt1wbw]

The lack of a firewire port makes it extremely slow. I have problems connecting to the internet and using Word because of it.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by ctt1wbw 

The lack of a firewire port makes it extremely slow. I have problems connecting to the internet and using Word because of it.

Sorry my friend, but your attempt at sarcasm doesn't change the fact that the Air feels slow.

[ctt1wbw]

Mine feels hard and a bit warm on the bottom. Trust me, it's fast enough for lots of people. A few milliseconds here, a few clock cycles there, nobody can tell the difference to the point that they can brew a pot of Starbucks while the thing is working.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by ctt1wbw 

Mine feels hard and a bit warm on the bottom. Trust me, it's fast enough for lots of people. A few milliseconds here, a few clock cycles there, nobody can tell the difference to the point that they can brew a pot of Starbucks while the thing is working.

It feels noticeably slower than a MacBook even just for general usage, all because of the slow hard drive. Sure, that's not a deal killer for many people, but it is a big negative for many others, esp. considering it costs so much more than a MacBook.

To put it another way... If you're going from a G4 iBook to a MacBook Air, you'll probably be satisfied. If you're going from a MacBook to a MacBook Air, you may end up being quite annoyed with the Air's (lack of) speed.

[ctt1wbw]

Well, my stepson has a black Macbook and I can't really tell the difference. Maybe I'm just easy to please and whatever supposed speed differences are not noticeable to me. But then again, I'm 38 and I remember when the 80286 was the fastest thing you could buy.

[Eug]

Which drive do you have? If you have the SSD, there probably isn't much difference.

If you have the standard drive, it's slower. However, it also depends on your work habits. If you're only loading up Word once and typing in it all day, it might feel exactly the same (after the initial loadup). However, if you're hitting the hard drive more often, you may notice it.

A review describing this is located here.

The 1.8" HDD’s performance limitations are visible from the start. Spotlight searches aren't always instantaneous but on a brand new machine they tend to be faster than they were on the Air. OS X does a great job of hiding slow disk performance (subjectively much better than Vista, but I don't have scientific test results to back that up), but even then the drive is a clear limitation of the system.

For basic typing, email and web surfing it's fine. If you throw in some multitasking, spotlight searches and start launching some more complex applications, then you really see the drive choke.

He installed an SSD in the Air. The write speeds of the hard drive were actually faster than the SSD, but the SSD's read speeds (both sequential and random) were markedly faster on the SSD, and he states the overall feel of the SSD-endowed MacBook Air was much better too. Unfortunately, the SSD isn't really a practical solution for most people, because it costs so much, and that's on top of the already expensive Air.

I cannot verify the faster feel of the SSD-endowed Air since I've never used one. However, I can definitely confirm the feeling of slowness with the hard drive endowed Air. FWIW, my frame of reference is a Core Duo MacBook (2.0 GHz at home and 1.83 GHz at the store), compared to a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo Air.

[ctt1wbw]

I have the hard drive version. The ssd version was too small and too expensive. I need more space for my porn, man!

I'm not a power user by any stretch, so that might explain it.

[mduell]

My MBAir feels slow when kernel_task pegs both cores with system calls taking up 70% of their time (when time machine runs, when a web page has flash embedded, etc)... seems to have gotten worse after the recent update for the Airs.