No spin: Ars reviews the MacBook Air with solid state drive
The MacBook Air's high-end model comes with 200 extra MHz and a solid state drive. Is it worth the extra $1,300 to upgrade? We compare the two Airs directly to find out whether the price is worth paying.
Context & Ripple Effects
Five days after MacRumors published [[a:1182897|direct benchmarks pitting the MacBook Air's 1.6GHz hard-drive model against the 1.8GHz solid-state configuration]], Ars Technica has put both machines through a full hands-on review. The question on the table is narrow and expensive: whether the $1,300 premium buys enough real-world speed to justify itself on a machine whose thinness already forces compromises.
The pairing matters because the Air is the first mainstream laptop to offer an SSD at all, so this review is effectively the market's first serious price-performance verdict on consumer flash storage rather than a routine model comparison.
First-order effects
- Buyers configuring a MacBook Air now have a benchmarked answer to the SSD question instead of a spec-sheet guess — anyone who was holding off on the $1,300 option until independent numbers arrived can decide today.
Second-order effects
- Apple's willingness to attach a $1,300 price tag to a 64GB-class drive sets a public reference point for what flash storage costs in a laptop, which notebook rivals must either match, undercut, or explain away when they add their own SSD options.
Third-order effects
- If reviews keep finding the SSD premium hard to justify at these capacities, pressure builds on flash makers to bring NAND prices down faster — the path by which solid-state storage migrates from a luxury checkbox to a default laptop component.
The trend: Laptop storage is at the start of its shift from spinning platters to flash, with early-adopter premiums like Apple's $1,300 SSD option marking how far prices still have to fall before the transition goes mainstream.