> Yet, I’m on a MBA3,2 (late 2010) and it’s great. Still running Yosemite. It’s got 4gb ram but handles running 10 JVMs with modest heaps for development no problem. Stable and runs for months without issue. I’d love more RAM and more cores but none of these computers seem worth it.
I have the same hardware but unfortunately my experience is the exact opposite. It’s barely usable. I literally can’t browse JavaScript-heavy websites (e.g. Gmail).
I wonder if having kept up with the OS releases has anything to do with it (I’m on High Sierra).
I'm using an MBP5,1 (2 years older than yours) as my main personal machine still, it's quite comparable to your MBA3,1, (P8600 vs SL9600), both Core2Duo roughly same clock speed, same RAM and bus speed etc, but different GPUs, also I added an x25-M SSD back when that was "new" :P it's lasted well...
I'll admit some of the really heavy websites are crap, but that's mostly because the websites are crap and wont be smooth on anything than the latest i7. Generally I have no problem with gmail or google maps which are reasonably heavy.
Depending on what version of OS X you are using that might be the culprit, OS X is a pretty heavy OS, especially post 10.6. For me 10.6 was o-k but changing to linux and a tiling window manager freed up a lot of resources, I never end up paging out with web browsing even though it's only 4GiB, additionally I find graphics are faster on linux but that may be GPU and driver specific due to Apple's underclocking tactics. If I hadn't switched I would probably have ditched this hardware by now.
Alternatively the GPU difference between these machines may explain web browsing speed considering how much stuff is hardware accelerated these days.
I think this era of hardware is pretty linux friendly if you wanted to try it, you don't have dual GPU which is the biggest pain for linux too... there is no issue with mac EFI from grub anymore so should be zero configuration install for you, at the most you might have to manually select the proprietary drivers for your GPU for reasonable performance.
Weird! I’m sorry to hear that. My fan starts whirring on video/graphics heavy sites, like landing pages with huge videos or overwrought effects. But sites like Gmail are totally fine. Maybe it is the OS updates? I almost pulled the trigger and updated the other day but I’ll hold off now with this story. Gah, that is frustrating.
I have the same hardware but unfortunately my experience is the exact opposite. It’s barely usable. I literally can’t browse JavaScript-heavy websites (e.g. Gmail).
I wonder if having kept up with the OS releases has anything to do with it (I’m on High Sierra).