Air 11’s video encoding speed astounds Don McAllister

Readers of Don McAllister’s blog, The Mac Screencast Guy, will have learned that he’s taken delivery of a new specced-up MacBook Air with the i7 processor and 4GB of memory. He’s as impressed as the rest of us with the speed and sheer usability of the smaller Air, but he is astounded by the real-world speed when running his speciality, video encoding. This is one of the most processor-intensive jobs you can do on a computer and Don normally relies on his eight-core MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM. So it was something of an experiment to give such a task to the little laptop. It soldiered on valiantly and the test task took an amazingly short 8.30 minutes compared with the Pro’s 5.01 minutes. More to the point, the Air beat hands down a 2GHz Mac Mini and a 2010 13in Air with the 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo (respectively, 15.10 and 16.04 minutes).