Apple this week refreshed its MacBook Air lineup with a scissor switch Magic Keyboard and faster 10th-generation Intel Core processor options, including a 1.1GHz dual-core Core i3, 1.1GHz quad-core Core i5, and 1.2GHz quad-core Core i7.
Jason Snell of Six Colors was provided with the mid-range MacBook Air with a 1.1GHz quad-core Core i5 processor for testing purposes. In his first impressions article this morning, he shared Geekbench 5 benchmark results for this configuration, including a single-core score of 1,047 and a multi-core score of 2,658.
We averaged Snell's results with ten other Geekbench 5 results to end up with a single-core score of 1,072 and multi-core score of 2,714, suggesting that the 2020 MacBook Air with a 1.1GHz quad-core Core i5 is up to 76 percent faster than the 2018-2019 MacBook Air, which was only available with an 8th-generation 1.6GHz dual-core Core i5 chip.
While the new MacBook Air has a lower starting price of $999, many early reviews of the notebook suggest spending an extra $100 on the Core i5 processor, as the base model is limited to a dual-core Core i3 chip. Geekbench 5 results for that configuration are not very consistent yet, so it is hard to paint an accurate picture of performance, but average single-core and multi-core scores are currently 849 and 1,685 respectively, suggesting that the new $999 model could be up to 10 percent faster than the 2018-2019 MacBook Air.
