With the recent announcements straight from Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) particularly that of the iOS 6, another thing to look forward to if you’re an avid and loyal Apple fan is the new 2012 Macbook Air.
The 2012 Macbook Air has two strong points and it is the inclusion of the Ivy Bridge processors and the storage provided by solid state drives (SSDs). Now let us take a look on the tale of the tape between the 2012 Macbook Air and the previously released Macbook Air in mid-2011.
Dimension wise, both 2012 and 2011 Macbook Airs have a height of 0.11-0.68 inches. In terms of weight, there isn’t that much disparity either as both ranges from 2.38 to 2.98 pounds. Display resolution hasn’t also changed as both have 1366×768 and 1440×900 pixel resolution for the 11-inch and 13-inch respectively. When we talk about CPU, it is where the difference lies. The 2011 Air used to sport Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 while the newer 2012 Air houses the Ivy Bridge Core i5 and Core i7. Graphics is also a bit different as the 2012 Air has Intel HD Graphics 4000 compared to the Intel HD Graphics 3000 found on the 2011 Air. Memory or RAM is also a distinguishing factor as the 2012 Air has 4 and 8 GB DDR3L with clock speed of 1600 MHz while the older Air only had 2 and 4 GB DDR3 with 1333 MHz clock speed.
Storage also varies as the older model used to have 64, 128 and 256GB formats while the newer one has 64, 128, 256 and 512 GB formats for storage. As for ports, the 2012 Air has two USB 3.0 Thunderbolt ports while the older model had two USB 2.0 Thunderbolt ports. Power is the same except that MagSafe 2 is present in the 2012 model (2011 Air had MagSafe). Both Macbook Airs have 802.11 a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 and a battery life of 5-7 hours.
If price happens to be a consideration, the 2012 Air costs relatively cheaper especially the 13-inch variant which is priced at $ 1,199 (the previous model of the same size retailed for $ 100 more). The 11-inch 2012 Air is still priced at $ 999 which is the same as the previous model. For those interested, it’s already available on Apple’s website.
