While the 2018 MacBook Air is generally a worthy upgrade to Apple’s iconic laptop, it has one glaring issue — it’s underpowered when you take its high price tag into consideration.
Along with a new, sleeker design that features minimized bezels and a retina display, the new MacBook Air includes a 1.6Ghz dual-core 8th-generation Intel Core i5-8510Y processor rather than the more powerful i5-8250U silicon featured in comparable devices like Microsoft’s Surface Pro 6.
If a new report is accurate, it looks like Apple at least considered featuring a more powerful processor in the new MacBook Air at some point, specifically the Intel Core i7-8510Y. A benchmark result for the more powerful version of the Air appeared on Geekbench last week, according to a recent post on Slashleaks.
The laptop in question, which appeared on Geekbench with the codename ‘AAPJ140K1,1,’ featured a dual-core 8th-generation Core i7 processor with a base clock speed of 1.8GHz. MacRumors states that while the specific model of the laptop isn’t listed on Geekbench, its logic board model number matches that of the current 2018 MacBook Air.
The benchmark also lists 16GB of 2133 MHz LPDDR3 RAM, the highest configuration of RAM available in Apple’s new MacBook Air.
The i7 MacBook Air’s single-core Geekbench score comes to 4,249, while its multi-core score measures in at 8,555, according to a screenshot posted on Slashleaks. MacRumors says that Geebench founder John Poole told the publication that “nothing about the benchmark looks fake to him,” though it’s still possible someone could have put together a false benchmark.
It’s unclear why Apple opted to ditch this i7 version of the 2018 MacBook Air, though it’s likely the tech giant felt the laptop ran too hot. On the other hand, maybe Apple still plans to release this slightly more powerful version of the laptop at some point in the future.
MobileSyrup will have more on the 2018 MacBook Pro later this week, including a full review of Apple’s new laptop.
Image credit: Slashleaks
Source: MacRumors, Slashleaks
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