Apple’s 45nm Refresh: New MacBook & MacBook Pro

The Air Update

Apple released the new Penryn notebooks on Tuesday and on Wednesday I was on a flight to Austin to visit AMD and Intel. Unfortunately, due to battery life testing, I couldn’t get all of my benchmarking done before the trip which meant either waiting until I got back Friday night to finish testing or taking a bunch of notebooks with me. Seeing as how I would be back home for a day before heading off to Germany for CeBIT, I had to take them with me.

In my carry on I had the new MacBook Pro, the new MacBook and my MacBook Air (which made for a fun trip through the security line at RDU). I needed the Air so I could have something to write on while the Pro and regular MacBook ran down their batteries in my hotel room Wednesday night, and it was the lightest thing I had available so it gave me an opportunity to really use Apple’s new ultra portable on the road.

The keyboard continues to be one of my favorite aspects of the Air, it’s so easy to write on and it does allow me to be productive on a very light notebook. I am eager to try out Lenovo’s X300 to see how it stacks up in this regard, as Lenovo and IBM before it are well known for having highly usable keyboards.

Using the MacBook and the Air back to back, the Air’s sluggish 4200RPM 1.8” HDD is very apparent. As I suggested in the MacBook Air review, it isn’t a MacBook replacement or even an upgrade. The MacBook Air is much like a horizontal promotion within a company, you’ve got the same level of responsibility and pay grade but you may be better suited for the job. The Air isn’t a clear upgrade from the regular MacBook despite its pricing, it’s simply better suited for some users thanks to its form factor.

So far I’m not missing the optical drive, but I am still getting used to having to bring the silly USB Ethernet dongle with me wherever I go just in case. For this trip I had three power bricks (one for each notebook), another for my camera and yet another for my iPhone. I had to bring along a compact flash reader and when I thought I was done with all of my cables, I forgot I needed to bring along the USB Ethernet dongle in case my hotel didn’t have wireless. It’s not a heavy item to bring along but a minor annoyance nonetheless.

Battery life is about where I expected it to be based on the tests I ran for the review. If you remember in the original review I managed 4.5 hours for light web browsing with MP3 playback, while my more intensive test drained the cells in about 2.5 hours. Writing this article on the Air left me with about a 3.5 hour battery life, largely due to my constant saving which prevents the hard drive from going to sleep. I’m also constantly typing and not giving the system much think time, which keeps the CPU from entering deeper sleep states. So the 2.5 - 4.5 hour average lifespan for the Air seems to work out in actual usage (which makes sense since the battery tests were derived from actual usage). My concern is what happens once the battery ages and no longer manages to hold a full charge. In my opinion 3.5 - 4.5 hours is reasonable although not perfect, start dropping closer to 2 - 2.5 hours and the system stops being as useful to me.

The SSD option would obviously help things, but I had to send my sample back so it’s back to the mechanical disk for me.

I’m also extremely glad Apple didn’t go with the same panel on the Air as it uses on the regular MacBook. If this thing is designed for people like me who write a lot on the go, a crappy display would just be unacceptable.