First benchmarks: MacBook Air is the slowest Apple machine on the block

No one should be surprised, but if you were looking for a speed freak of a laptop, you’re going to want to glaze those lustful eyes over the MacBook Air . While the new hotness has a speedy memory bus, overall its performance is dramatically smushed by its integrated graphics, anemic 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo processor, and 1.8-inch hard drive. Yes, you can officially call the MacBook Air the slowest machine Apple makes — but you already figured as much, right? No one buys an ultraportable for its real ultimate power. All machines tested with Xbench 1.3. Sorry, we didn’t have a Mac Pro around. All machines tested were using Leopard (except the MBP in the center). Also, MacBook uses 1GB RAM. You can check the bold Xbench scores to compare the cumulative results for each test. ADVERTISEMENT Advertisement Air (1.6GHz Core 2 Duo) MBP (2.16GHz Core Duo) MBP (2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, Tiger) MacBook (2.2GHz Core 2 Duo) iMac (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo) CPU 79.98 90.06 112.93 126.66 138.58 GCD Loop 9.67 Mops/s 14.89 Mops/s 13.17 Mops/s 13.43 Mops/s 14.91 Mops/s Floating Point Basic 2.03 Gflop/s 2.34 Gflop/s 2.96 Gflop/s 2.95 Gflop/s 3.23 Gflop/s vecLib FFT 1.71 Gflop/s 1.68 Gflop/s 2.98 Gflop/s 3.36 Gflop/s 3.66 Gflop/s Floating Point Library 12.82 Mops/s 15.78 Mops/s 14.15 Mops/s 17.80 Mops/s 19.43 Mops/s Thread Test 148.81 185.75 219.18 186.4 208.77 Computation 2.77 Mops/s 3.36 Mops/s 4.04 Mops/s 3.58 Mops/s 3.56 Mops/s Lock Contention 7.04 Mlocks/s 9.07 Mlocks/s 10.47 Mlocks/s 8.48 Mlocks/s 11.06 Mlocks/s Memory Test 140.42 129.56 137.1 150.23 150.82 System 143.51 139.25 126.92 158.95 151.56 Allocate 718.86 Kalloc/s 731.25 Kalloc/s 401.22 Kalloc/s 856.78 Kalloc/s 657.80 Kalloc/s Fill 5770.30 MB/s 5565.31 MB/s 6490.47 MB/s 6480.99 MB/s 6606.88 MB/s Copy 2802.78 MB/s 2652.96 MB/s 2954.03 MB/s 2914.92 MB/s 3014.12 MB/s Stream 137.46 121.14 149.05 142.41 150.08 Copy 2621.64 MB/s 2400.99 MB/s 2923.94 MB/s 2799.64 MB/s 2926.68 MB/s Scale 2602.03 MB/s 2412.90 MB/s 2918.16 MB/s 2797.66 MB/s 3022.24 MB/s Add 3230.58 MB/s 2703.93 MB/s 3359.19 MB/s 3196.17 MB/s 3364.41 MB/s Triad 3199.37 MB/s 2681.42 MB/s 3368.41 MB/s 3211.97 MB/s 3328.48 MB/s Quartz Graphics Test 96.89 144.23 141.5 154.32 193.4 Line 6.94 Klines/s 8.84 Klines/s 9.23 Klines/s 9.69 Klines/s 11.64 Klines/s Rectangle 32.23 Krects/s 49.67 Krects/s 51.59 Krects/s 51.66 Krects/s 70.02 Krects/s Circle 7.22 Kcircles/s 11.31 Kcircles/s 13.30 Kcircles/s 11.54 Kcircles/s 15.29 Kcircles/s Bezier 2.49 Kbeziers/s 3.58 Kbeziers/s 3.71 Kbeziers/s 3.79 Kbeziers/s 4.51 Kbeziers/s Text 5.53 Kchars/s 9.12 Kchars/s 6.65 Kchars/s 10.39 Kchars/s 12.66 Kchars/s OpenGL Graphics Test 17.26 175.06 129.88 23.36 152.66 Spinning Squares 21.89 frames/s 222.08 frames/s 164.76 frames/s 29.64 frames/s 193.65 frames/s User Interface Test 105.81 217.79 303.98 244.28 335.18 Elements 485.60 refresh/s 999.54 refresh/s 1.40 Krefresh/s 1.12 Krefresh/s 1.54 Krefresh/s Disk Test 24.05 27.59 38.13 39.64 80.72 Sequential 42.21 49.22 59.81 66.07 115.15 Uncached Write 30.96 MB/s [4K blocks] 31.32 MB/s [4K blocks] 42.60 MB/s [4K blocks] 53.34 MB/s [4K blocks] 72.17 MB/s [4K blocks] Uncached Write 31.19 MB/s [256K blocks] 28.37 MB/s [256K blocks] 39.19 MB/s [256K blocks] 47.63 MB/s [256K blocks] 66.51 MB/s [256K blocks] Uncached Read 7.27 MB/s [4K blocks] 12.11 MB/s [4K blocks] 11.59 MB/s [4K blocks] 10.83 MB/s [4K blocks] 27.81 MB/s [4K blocks] Uncached Read 30.42 MB/s [256K blocks] 28.65 MB/s [256K blocks] 39.37 MB/s [256K blocks] 49.62 MB/s [256K blocks] 69.83 MB/s [256K blocks] Random 16.81 19.16 27.99 28.31 62.13 Uncached Write 0.57 MB/s [4K blocks] 0.65 MB/s [4K blocks] 1.08 MB/s [4K blocks] 1.03 MB/s [4K blocks] 2.67 MB/s [4K blocks] Uncached Write 18.35 MB/s [256K blocks] 17.49 MB/s [256K blocks] 19.24 MB/s [256K blocks] 22.73 MB/s [256K blocks] 48.45 MB/s [256K blocks] Uncached Read 0.35 MB/s [4K blocks] 0.46 MB/s [4K blocks] 0.41 MB/s [4K blocks] 0.48 MB/s [4K blocks] 0.63 MB/s [4K blocks] Uncached Read 13.28 MB/s [256K blocks] 15.08 MB/s [256K blocks] 16.33 MB/s [256K blocks] 19.31 MB/s [256K blocks] 27.08 MB/s [256K blocks]