It's been three weeks since I reviewed the MacBook Air, and in the intervening
time we've gathered a whole lot more information about Apple's latest, and lightest,
laptop. With a month of use under our belts and solid lab testing of three different
MacBook Air configurations, it's time for a follow-up look at the MacBook Air.

Clock speeds, hard drives, and speed

Macworld's initial review of the MacBook Air was based on its stock US$1,799
configuration, which features a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 80GB of
storage provided by a 1.8-inch traditional hard drive. In the intervening weeks,
we've obtained two 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Airs: one with the same 1.8-inch
80GB hard drive, and one with 64GB of flash memory as its primary internal storage
device (what Apple calls a solid-state drive, or SSD.)

With those three models, we can begin to extrapolate the effects of the MacBook
Air's two main build-to-order configuration options, the $300 processor-speed
upgrade and the $999 SSD upgrade.

The results aren't surprising, though they will probably be disappointing to
those who had hoped that the extra investment in the SSD option would result
in dramatically improved performance. Both upgrades improved performance, with
the processor upgrade improving calculation-based tasks such as 3-D rendering
and video encoding, and the SSD upgrade improving disk-intensive tasks such
as duplicating a file or launching Adobe Photoshop.

In terms of Speedmark, our battery of general-use tests, the base MacBook Air
model scored a 124. The Macbook Air with the same hard drive but a 1.8GHz processor
improved to a score of 130. The model with both the 1.8GHz processor and the
SSD earned a score of 140. To put that in percentage terms, the $299 processor
upgrade improved the overall speed of the system by 4.8 percent, while the $999
drive upgrade improved the speed by 7.7 percent.

Of course, speed isn't the only reason to invest in the SSD option. In theory,
its lack of moving parts make it a safer storage device, because it's not eligible
for the mechanical failures that hard drives with spinning platters can suffer.
However, until we get a long-term read on the reliability of the SSD, that advantage
remains theoretical.

Life with the SSD

I've spent the past two weeks using a 1.8GHz MacBook Air equipped with the
64GB solid-state drive as my primary system. As difficult as it was for me to
remove files from my MacBook in order to fit on the Air's stock 80GB drive,
moving to the SSD was almost impossible. My only recourse was to move my 10GB
Windows disk image from Parallels Desktop to an external drive. By sacrificing
my ability to run

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