I tried out the Macbook Air 2.0 with the 1.8 cpu and the 128 ssd in the apple store today. I initially almost passed it by because it looks almost identical to the old revision and the sales person at the store mistakingly informed me that the new revision hadn't come in at the store yet. I double checked the stats to make sure the cpu had the 6 meg cache and the ssd was 128 gigs in size.
Like the others have already stated the ssd makes applications load almost instantly. I compared loading iTunes with the older Macbook Air and the new aluminum Macbook and Pro, and on the normal hard drives there was a noticeable pause and a few seconds of delay between clicking on iTunes and on when it appeared on screen. With the ssd every default application I clicked on seemed to appear with very little, if any, delay. At most about a second or two compared with sometimes 4-5 seconds of delay on the other machines.
I can also verify that the heat produced was much less than the older Macbook Air. I had them side by side and the new version didn't seem to break a sweat when I had three youtube videos running, iTunes, the activity monitor, and iPhoto up at once. Using the four finger swipe to bring up expose to switch between the windows seemed smooth as well. Activity Monitor had the cpu at roughly 60% usage with all that running.
The screen was also noticeably better than the Macbook screen, and the viewing angles considerably larger.
The only drawback I found that didn't seemed to be mentioned in the other threads was the animation of the dock did not seem to be anywhere as smooth as either the new Macbook or Macbook Pro. This concerns me a bit because the machine is supposed to be using the new nividia graphics chip. When the dock on the Macbook and Pro does the magnification animation, it is flawlessly and perfectly smooth. It looks like the animation from a game running at least 30 frames a second. On the new Macbook Air, the magnification animation looks comparable to a game running at say, 15 frames a second. There is a drastic difference in animation smoothness between the machines. When I compared it to the old Macbook Air the dock had the same animation underperformance.
Anybody else see the same thing when comparing these machines at the store? Other than that, the only other drawback I saw was that the trackpad is not as silky smooth as the new glass ones in the new Macbook and Pro. After getting used to the new glass trackpads this is one thing I really miss when using the Macbook Airs.
Like the others have already stated the ssd makes applications load almost instantly. I compared loading iTunes with the older Macbook Air and the new aluminum Macbook and Pro, and on the normal hard drives there was a noticeable pause and a few seconds of delay between clicking on iTunes and on when it appeared on screen. With the ssd every default application I clicked on seemed to appear with very little, if any, delay. At most about a second or two compared with sometimes 4-5 seconds of delay on the other machines.
I can also verify that the heat produced was much less than the older Macbook Air. I had them side by side and the new version didn't seem to break a sweat when I had three youtube videos running, iTunes, the activity monitor, and iPhoto up at once. Using the four finger swipe to bring up expose to switch between the windows seemed smooth as well. Activity Monitor had the cpu at roughly 60% usage with all that running.
The screen was also noticeably better than the Macbook screen, and the viewing angles considerably larger.
The only drawback I found that didn't seemed to be mentioned in the other threads was the animation of the dock did not seem to be anywhere as smooth as either the new Macbook or Macbook Pro. This concerns me a bit because the machine is supposed to be using the new nividia graphics chip. When the dock on the Macbook and Pro does the magnification animation, it is flawlessly and perfectly smooth. It looks like the animation from a game running at least 30 frames a second. On the new Macbook Air, the magnification animation looks comparable to a game running at say, 15 frames a second. There is a drastic difference in animation smoothness between the machines. When I compared it to the old Macbook Air the dock had the same animation underperformance.
Anybody else see the same thing when comparing these machines at the store? Other than that, the only other drawback I saw was that the trackpad is not as silky smooth as the new glass ones in the new Macbook and Pro. After getting used to the new glass trackpads this is one thing I really miss when using the Macbook Airs.
