2010 MacBook Pro -> MacBook Air Question

The Macbook Air would be an upgrade for you. Even though your MB pro's CPU has a higher clock speed, it is an older gen i5-520M arrandale from the calpella mobile platform, and the Air uses the i5-4260U Haswell from the Shark Bay platform. While clock speed can be an indicator of performance when comparing CPUs on the same platform and with the same instruction set, it is not an indicator of performance advantage across platforms. Through the generations and revisions, CPUs undergo upgrades in IPC (instructions per cycle) -- the ability to get more done more efficiently. Couple that with the turbo boost capabilities, which ramps up the CPU clock speed under adequate enough load (the only situation in which CPU speed would matter), the clock speeds are similar (2.7 Ghz for the 4260U and 2.9 I believe for the i5-520). Both CPUs also have the same number of cores and threads per core, so the Air's CPU will outperform the 2010 MB Pro's CPU in both single and multi threaded applications, and consume less power.

The Haswell also has a much better integrated GPU and an integrated memory controller that natively supports faster memory. Hence, the 4GB of RAM in the Air is actually over 50% faster than the memory in the 2010 MB Pro. This might not translate to much of an advantage in real-world use, but it's a measurable enhancement nonetheless.

However, by far, the most noticeable boost in overall performance in everyday tasks will come from the MacBook Air's solid state drive. Your 2010 MB Pro uses a 5400 rpm hard drive, which is the lowest of low in industry standards for consumer-level storage. Mechanical hard drives are always the bottleneck of any decently configured PC and almost certainly why your MB Pro is slower than you'd like.

With no read/write heads to seek data blocks on a moving platter, SSDs have tremendously superior access and transfer times compared to hard drives. If your operating system needs to access data on an SSD, it does not have to wait for the data to be found. The data is always there and waiting for your OS. Sequential read/write speeds are also several times faster, but much of the everyday noticeable speed increase comes from its random read/write performance with small file blocks and ability to support a queue depth. In other words, there can be dozens of read/write requests pending at any given time, so hosts can submit requests simultaneously, which the SSD can execute with very low latency, improving random read/write speeds dramatically. Individual hard drives don’t have this capability.

It amazes me how many budget Windows laptops still ship with 5400 rpm hard drives for the OS, just to get the cost down another $50. Apple is smart in recognizing the value in flash-based storage for the average user. You're going to notice a major performance increase, despite losing some internal storage capacity.

TL;DR -- The Air's CPU is based on an improved design and would be an upgrade from your 2010 MB Pro, but the biggest performance boost you'll notice is the significantly increased access times in the SSD.

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The Air's CPU is based on an improved design and would be an upgrade from your 2010 MB Pro, but the biggest performance boost you'll notice is the significantly increased access times in the SSD.

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An alternate way to read most of this post is that, based on the average user's needs and desires (and I take your leaving any specific needs out to mean you have no specific needs and are thus an "average" user, which is a big assumption on my part, though I am rather confident in my assessment), you would gain almost as much by upgrading the HDD to an ssd in the mbp. You are almost certainly not stressing the CPU or RAM limits and, as stated before, the bottleneck on your mbp is almost certainly in the disk and nowhere else.


Just something to think about.