2018 MacBook Air Early Benchmarks Highlight Respectable Performance Gains
It's only been a few days since Apple unveiled its refreshed MacBook Air notebook keeping the thin profile and sporting a Retina Display, Touch ID, and 8th generation Intel Core i5 processors among other tweaks. A few days later the first benchmarks for the 2018 MacBook Air have turned up on Geekbench giving us an idea of what the updated hardware inside the machine means for performance. The Air in these benchmarks is called out as having a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-8210Y CPU and 16GB of RAM under the hood.
The Geekbench scores for the machine show a single-core score of 4248 and a multi-core score of 7828. Those benchmark scores are better than the previous generation MacBook Air could muster with its 1.8GHz Broadwell-based processor turning in scores of 3335 on single-core and 6119 on multi-core. The new MacBook Air turns in better benchmark scores than the 2017 MacBook with the 1.4GHz Core M chip that earned 3925 on single-core and 7567 on multi-core.
Apple's new Air is much faster than the base 2017 MacBook with the 1.2GHz Core M chip; that machine turned in a single-core score of 3527 and a multi-core score of 6654. The new Air is close to the 2018 13-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro packing a 2.3GHz Core i5 processor; in single-core performance with that rig scoring 4504, but the MacBook Pro destroys the Air in multi-core performance turning in more than twice the Air's score at 16464.
The new MacBook Air machines debuted on October 30, and along with the processor updates, the machines also ditched the USB-A and display ports in favor of a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports. The new machines have an edge-to-edge screen with bezels that are 50% thinner. Apple managed to pare the weight of the new Air down to 2.75 pounds from the 2.96 pounds of the previous Air. Apple did switch to the maligned butterfly key mechanism keyboard on the Air, something that Apple fans will love or hate. The good news is that butterfly keyboard is the new design that has the silicon gasket inside to help keep debris from destroying the keyboard. The gasket fix debuted on the 2018 MacBook Pro after the original butterfly keyboard sparked a class action lawsuit and cries for a recall.
