Oliver Haslam·

2018 MacBook Air Vs 2017 Air Vs 12-Inch MacBook Benchmarks Compared

Apple announced plenty of new hardware when it held the October 30th event that brought us new iPad Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini products, and that has led to a lot of talk about the performance of two of those lines.

The new iPad Pro has been shown to be quite the powerhouse thanks to recently appearing in Geekbench results, and now the MacBook Air is starting to turn up, too.

Apple’s decision to use a relatively low-powered CPU in the new MacBook Air has received some criticism in certain quarters, and these new benchmark results were much anticipated. As it turns out, the new machines are a reasonable improvement.

According to the newly found Geekbench scores, the MacBook Air’s 2.5GHz dual-core 8th-gen Intel Core i5 CPU is capable of around 4248 in single core test and 7828 in multi-core tests. Those numbers equate to a reasonable improvement over the most recent MacBook Air update, which took place in mid-2017.

That machine used a 5th-gen dual-core Intel Core i5 processor at 1.8GHz and the new model bests it by 27% in single core and 28% in multi-core tests. That’s a reasonable improvement, although whether it is enough to warrant an upgrade will depend on your particular use cases.

(MacBook Air 2018)

Much has been said about where the MacBook Air now sits in Apple’s notebook lineup, and with the 12-inch MacBook still around, it’s notable that the new MacBook Air beats it out by 20% in single-core and 17% in multi-core tests when compared with the base model MacBook.

(MacBook Air 2017)

(MacBook 12-inch)

Geekbench scores don’t always tell the whole story of course, but it’s heartening to see the new MacBook Air holding its own, especially considering concerns regarding its particular CPU of choice.

(MacBook Pro with Touch Bar 2018)

(Source: Geekbench)

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