What you need to know
- Apple released a new MacBook Air this week.
- The earliest benchmark scores are starting to roll in.
- Initial reports show a marked improvement on the 2018 model.
Apple's new MacBook Air may well be benchmarking up to 75% faster than its predecessor according to the very earliest benchmarks.
MacRumors has taken some early scores posted by Jason Snell from Six Colors and averaged them with other Geekbench 5 results.
According to their report:
Jason Snell of Six Colors was provided with the mid-range MacBook Air with a 1.1GHz quad-core Core i5 processor for testing purposes. In his first impressions article this morning, he shared Geekbench 5 benchmark results for this configuration, including a single-core score of 1,047 and a multi-core score of 2,658.We averaged Snell's results with ten other Geekbench 5 results to end up with a single-core score of 1,072 and multi-core score of 2,714, suggesting that the 2020 MacBook Air with a 1.1GHz quad-core Core i5 is up to 76 percent faster than the 2018-2019 MacBook Air, which was only available with an 8th-generation 1.6GHz dual-core Core i5 chip.
This is obviously a massive improvement and a welcome sign to prospective purchasers. Indeed, when Apple announced the new MacBook Air, it noted that it would deliver "up to two times faster CPU performance and up to 80 percent faster graphics performance, letting customers breeze through daily activities and play more games."
The very earliest benchmark scores suggest that Apple may have been deliberately conservative in its promise of processor performance and that the outlook is actually much brighter.
Of course, Apple doesn't create Macs to score well in benchmark tests, however, this is still a strong indicator of vastly improved processing power. For many, the biggest pull of the new MacBook will actually be the new Magic Keyboard which has replaced the loathsome butterfly mechanism of old.
Yesterday, the earliest reviews of the new MacBook Air began to surface online, you can read them here!
Apple finally fixed the keyboard.
With a faster processor, way more storage, and the new scissor mechanism Magic Keyboard, this is the MacBook Air you've been waiting years for.
