Leander Kahney reviewing the new 11″ MacBook Air (base configuration):
In an initial test, I opened up 17 applications and launched more 40 tabs in Safari and 24 tabs in Google’s Chrome browser (each is its own separate process). A funny thing happened: nothing. It kept on cranking. There were no spinning beachballs, no stuttering in the music I was playing.
I opened three more Safari windows and 40 more tabs. At this point the RAM was completely overloaded. The Air had carved out 1.76GBytes of drive space for virtual memory. Now the music started stuttering. But then it resumed.
Impressive – most of this is due to the flash memory, it is simply mind-boggling how much faster flash memory is than platter based HDs.