MacBook Air: Read/write speed reality

Saturday morning and my new 2GHz/8GB/256GB is up and running like a dream. If it weren’t for the continued outage of my Virgin broadband, all would be well with the world. I currently harbour very uncharitable thoughts about Richard Branson and all his works.

The new Air lives to the hype. It’s a lot of processing power for the money and outshines my old 2010 Air in every department, except looks. Here, as I said earlier in the week, there is no obvious difference unless you look carefully at the ports on either side. The Speck case from the old Air snapped on and fits perfectly.

My initial read/write speed tests show a remarkable 452/404 MB/s. This is very similar to the results obtained by OSX Daily last week. My 2010 Air, with its 128GB SSD drive, was scored at 188/157 MB/s. Two years ago I thought that was incredibly fast compared with run-of-the-mill HDDs. It still is if you continue to rely on mechanical drives.

After my week spent mainly in the Apple Store, all seems to have ended well. The decision to upgrade the 2010 Air was a good one. I am also for the moment happy with the outstanding order for a retina-display Pro. But at least I now have three weeks to try out the 11-in Air and decide if I still need the more powerful Pro as a desktop companion.