MacBook Air Benchmarked Against Its Brethren

There isn't a much better way to find out just how much of a runt the youngest in a family is than to hold a pentathlon testing everything that matters in athletic capabilities. So that's what Gizmodo did, pitting the new MacBook Air against an MBP and a regular MacBook.

The MacBook Air was completely standard with the 1.6GHz processor, the MBP was a generation old (I believe that means no Santa Rosa) and had a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of DDR2, and a 160GB 5400 RPM HDD, the MacBook was a generation old as well and had a 2GHz C2D, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB 5400 RPM HDD. The tests were as follows: a boot test, a thumb drive duplication test, a thumb drive to MacBook copy test, a video conversion test, and an MP3 encoding test.

The MacBook Pro obviously won all of the tests, except one, the MP3 encode test, which was won surprisingly by the MacBook Air. But the most surprising part is how well the MacBook Air, without the SSD drive, kept up with the MacBook, in fact on all the tests except for the one that it won and one other, the difference in times of completion were in the single digit seconds. Oh, and the conversion of a 1:46 video that was 73MB in size was converted in QuickTime using the iPhone preset only took 1 minute 13 seconds, so apparently video processing isn't nearly as abysmal as we previously thought.

[via gizmodo]