Technology review site Ars Technica got their manus on two (!) of the new MacBook Air notebook computers…a slower vanilla one at 1.6 GHz with a 80 GB hard disk and the other at 1.8 GHz but with a fancy 64 GB solid-state disk.

They put both machines through a battery of tests and drew some conclusions.

A/T said the regular MacBook Air is nice & did ok on tests and all that, but a main workhorse computer it’s not, it should considered a 2nd or even 3rd computer. And…it might even be ok to regard the thing as an iPod with a keyboard or perhaps as an Internet appliance…ouch. The battery life sucks and the disk drags at times.

As for the zippier more expensive SSD version of the MBA, the reviewer found that it did indeed out-perform the hard-disk version, but not by much & declared the extra $1300 not to be worth it.

Thin is in: Ars Technica reviews the MacBook Air - Ars Technica, February 03 2008
No spin: Ars reviews the MacBook Air with solid state drive - Ars Technica, February 05 2008

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