MBA - is it worth waiting for Sandy Bridge, if it comes?

Hey guys,

So the online Mac store is offering refurbed MacBook Airs for $1219.00:

"13.3-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display

4GB memory
128GB solid-state drive

NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics

Built-in iSight Camera"

That seems pretty tempting to me and a fairly reasonable price, but I keep hearing about this supposed Sandy Bridge refresh. I've currently got a laptop with a Core 2 Duo and it doesn't seem that slow to me, and I'd be doubling my RAM and going to a Solid State Drive, so I'm thinking the MBA will be a lot faster anyway.

But are there any major advantages to this Sandy Bridge stuff I keep hearing about or is it a bit like the lettuce upgrade?

 

No, Sandy Bridge is in fact a rather large upgrade over the older Core 2 Duo releases. In fact, just when comparing the entry level MacBook Pro, the 2011 model was over 50% faster when conducting real world tasks. The upgrade would be less when comparing last generation's Core i processors to Sandy Bridge but the Core 2 Duo line is showing its age now.

The only issue is that nobody truly knows when Apple is going to actually upgrade the MBA line. Normally Apple does a major upgrade once a year and then do a spec bump about half way through the refresh cycle. So this means that Apple will refresh something, give it a spec bump ~6 months later, and then refresh it again 6 months after that. The refreshed MBA was introduced in November so Apple might wait 5 months before putting Sandy Bridge in there or they could do it at WWDC. We won't know anything concrete until Apple officially announces it.

My general rule of thumb, and I know others follow this as well, is to not buy something if it is going to be updated/refreshed in less than 6 months. In all honesty, that is such a short amount of time and it makes no sense in getting something that will have a short life. Plus you never know what is going to be offered in the next refresh/update. You may say "I am fine with a Core 2 Duo and the current specs of the MBAs now" until Apple puts something else in there that you want.

All-in-all, I think it would be best to just wait things out to see where Apple goes with the MBA line especially since Sandy Bridge offers a large performance boost over the Core 2 Duo line (even with the ULV and CULV processors).

 

Depends on whether you want to play games on it. The new MBA is most likely to come with a ULV Sandy Bridge processor, like the i5-2537M in the Samsung 900X you were looking at. This review has some benchmarks comparing the two:

Samsung Series 9 (NP900X3A) laptop review -- Engadget

The Samsung scores about 50% higher in PCMark Vantage, but the MBA more than doubles the Samsung's score in 3DMark06. Assuming I'm right about the ULV in the MBA, the Sandy Bridge version should be significantly faster on CPU intensive tasks but it won't really be useable for gaming like the current models are.

Battery life was poor on the Arrandale ULVs compared to the Core 2 Duo ULVs, but I don't know how the Sandy Bridge ULVs will compare.

 

I'm not denying that the newer SB CPUs are better than the C2D ones, but only if you actually utilize the CPU power. Majority of users will never notice the difference since web surfing, Word, Excel, etc. are not extremely taxing on the CPU and hence will run mostly at a fraction of its rated speed.

As for battery life, C2Ds can be undervolted and in my experience still on average consume less power than even the newest SB CPUs. As above, unless you're utilizing your CPU for intensive purposes, the efficiency gains seen in these CPUs will not be realized.

 

From the reviews I have come across, the ULV Sandy Bridge chips consume less power while pumping out better performance than the Core 2 Duo ULV models. So not only is there potential for far greater CPU performance but also gaining the ability to go longer on a single charge. Of course, that comes at a price of giving up more powerful graphics (as Apple will likely stick with a slower clocked Intel HD 3000 IGP).

I do think users will see a difference when surfing the web, using Word, Excel, iTunes, and various other media tasks though. A 50% CPU performance increase is something that will not go unnoticed. 10-20%? Yeah, that would be difficult but not something as large as 50%. Those programs may not be CPU intensive but the end user will still notice if they start up 30 seconds faster, if iTunes can encode tracks at a faster rate, etc.

It also doesn't help that Apple is already phasing out the Core Duo processors with OS X Tiger. Granted, that is due to them being only 32-bit but there is no guarantee that the same thing won't happen to the Core 2 Duo models in a year or two when Apple starts requiring a minimum of a Core i5 (non-SB) for their next OS release.

 

Thanks a lot guys, very helpful responses. I think I'll wait for a couple of months and see what happens, but the only games I really play are three or four years old and I'll keep my old windows lappy for that.

The real issue for me is battery life, especially in relation to wifi web surfing (at work/university) and video playback time. Seems to me like the jury's out as to whether the sandy bridge processor can improve that in a MBA (but it's difficult to tell with something that hasn't actually been announced yet I guess)

 

Right, it hasn't been announced yet and Apple might not do anything with the MBA until November of this year. Just remember that the more time you wait, the closer you get to an update of the MBA. In other words, if you really want a C2D model, the time to buy it is now and not in 2-3 months. Otherwise there is absolutely no point in buying it in 2-3 months as it is only another ~2 month wait until November. It is hard trying to predict what Apple will do as Steve has been known to change things at the last minute just to throw everyone a curve ball. So the MBA might just receive a spec update here soon and then migrate to SB this November or the move to SB could come sooner. It is all kind of a gamble.

 

I'll wait and see what happens at this WWDC thing, but I've got a 1000 scholarship to buy the computer and I'm 200 dollars off so I have to earn that in the next couple of weeks anyway.

So I've got maybe a 3 week window for a MBA refresh haha

 

Definitely wait and see what the WWDC brings. The MBA's are due for an update with Sandy Bridge processors as well as the new Thunderbolt I/O. OS X Lion is supposed to be released this summer and there's a planned announcement this week. Perhaps the MBA update will coincide with the new OS X Lion.

 

One benefit of Sandy Bridge is the new AVX feature - Advanced Vector Instructions. This bumps up the size of vector registers from 128 bits to 256 bits and allows for double the parallel operations for streaming SIMD extensions instructions. There isn't a lot of software taking advantage of AVX yet but there will be in the future and you'll get the benefits only if you have Sandy Bridge or higher.

 

Well, just as speculated and as I thought, Apple's announcements today were all about software and nothing hardware related. So no MBA update this time around. It still hasn't been a year since the redesigned MBA was introduced (which was November 2010) so that isn't surprising.

 

Yes, when using the maximum frequency (such as encoding), the CPU is much faster, but on idle or low usage (Word, Excel, iTunes, etc.), all CPUs will downclock. The idle speed of the C2D notebook and the Ci notebooks aren't significantly different nor that much faster.

 

I'd say the most CPU intensive thing I ever do is watch HD video on my laptop. I don't really have any music on there, I don't convert files to different formats and my paintshop use is restricted to editing forum avatars and facebook profile pictures.

so basically, as i don't really do anything that CPU intensive (I web browse, watch video, write documents) will I even notice the difference?

 

only on battery life, the SB based i core CPU'sare much more energy efficient normally

 

Correct. I still think you will notice a difference even when the Core i processor is throttled down. The clock speeds of the C2D and ULV SB Core i processors might be similar but the SB processors are going to outperform the C2D models on a GHz for GHz comparison. 1GHz on a C2D ULV is going to perform slower than 1GHz on a SB Core i. Given all of the advantages of the SB platform (and the possible inclusion of other aspects such as Thunderbolt, faster SSD, ability to handle more RAM, more USB ports, etc.), I think it is worthwile to wait even if Apple doesn't upgrade the MBA line until around November (which is when I think it will happen). That is only 5 months away and really not a long time to wait in order to ensure that you get the most out of your $1500+ that you are going to spend.