Today while on our lunch break a couple co-workers and I ventured over to our local Apple Store here in San Diego. We had seen on a few Apple related sites that the new MacBook Air had been showing up in Apple Stores so we decided we needed to take the latest laptop from Apple for a test drive.

A little background from my point of reference.? My wife is currently using a 2.2Ghz Black MacBook with 1GB RAM and my personal laptop is an ‘ancient’ 17″ Titanium PowerBook with a 1.33Ghz G4 processor and 1GB RAM. Both are currently running the latest version of Leopard (10.5.1). So these are the benchmarks I’ll use when comparing the speed of the new MacBook Air.

The model I was testing was the ‘top of the line’ 1.8Ghz model with 2GB of RAM and a 64GB solid state drive (SSD). I verified that it was in fact the 64GB SSD because the system preferences labeled the available disk space after format as 55.35GB and the serial number was that of the listed 64GB SSD model.

Our first test was to just see how fast iTunes opens as this usually takes even a couple seconds on my wife’s MacBook. Even on a machine only clocking in at 1.8Ghz, iTunes literally took only a SECOND (we timed it) to open and be ready to use. I was floored! Other applications such as iMovie or Garage Band only took a second or two to open as well.

It’s obvious that performing every day operations will be much, much faster on the new MacBook Air with the additional ($999 additional as well) solid state drive. The benefit here is the seek time for non-cached data has dropped from milliseconds to NANOSECONDS. That alone greatly increases the load time of data, regardless of actual transfer rates once the data is accessed. Operations such as saving or opening large sequential files might seem a little slower on an SSD drive compared to traditional disk drives, but honestly, I feel the benefits far outweigh the draw backs.

What excites me is now we’ll have storage devices that can finally feed our fast data hungry CPU’s information at a rate that will actually make then earn their keep Even when booting Windows XP while watching the CPU monitor, you’ll notice that it’s not the CPU that’s the limiting factor in boot time. It’s the disk I/O that’s causing things to slow down. The hard drive has to trash around all over the disk loading information and god forbid you don’t defrag regularly

For additional reading, you can check out the benchmarks posted over at MacRumors where users in their forums are posting actual MacBook Air SSD Benchmark information using such programs as Xbench.

Cheers!