how do you know? No reviews and full on comparisons have been done and tested yet between the old and new macbook air.
Upgrades I think will have a significant difference besides the GPU which you claim is overrated are, DDR3 ram, Sata instead of Pata Harddrive.
And the tested and proven claim you make is in comparison to the old penryn chips. The first gen MBA did not use penryn, and i believe was using merom. So that claim does not apply here as well.
I think I tried to make it fairly clear that my thoughts were simply my opinions. I'm not trying to start any argument or anything. We are all entitled to our own opinions until official benchmarks have been released. Even then, we may still disagree in what we may define a large improvement. And yes, everything I've stated is pure speculation. Please also take that into consideration in what I have to say next:
Historically, the difference between sata vs pata has almost always been just the interface (especially in the case of laptops). Although the maximum throughput of SATA may be greater than PATA, the transfer speed (especially in 1.8" 4200rpm HD) are not nearly fast enough to come close to hitting the ceiling for PATA, much less SATA.
Regarding DDR3. Again, historically speaking, the difference between DDR3 and DDR2 is small, and even smaller in real world use. As the FSB increases, the latency of the memory increases as well (which is not a good thing) in order to preserve stability. It would be a marginal difference at best.
The only real speculation here is the difference between the CPU's. Considering that they are the same clock speed, it is extremely unlikely the performance of the new 45nm chips will be significantly faster than the older chips. If you compare speeds between their desktop counterparts, you'll notice that the difference is not as significant as you might believe. The only significant benefit from the 45nm chips is the temps.
And to better explain a previous comment I made, I don't think I articulated well what I meant by overhyped. I never doubted the capabilities of the new GPU over the integrated one - all I meant was that I think that people are overemphasizing the difference you would experience in real world everyday use from midlevel GPU. As stated before, unless you're rendering or playing games, the differences will be small.
All being said, I'd like to once again say that the above is all in speculation and should be taken for a grain of salt. My opinions are based from historical data and may very well be different this time around. Only time will tell. I apologize if you somehow think I've offended you in your beliefs that the new MBA will be vastly superior to the old MBA.
