MacBook Air Vs. ThinkPad X220 Specs Comparison
These are the main specs of the machines under review:
Processor:
- Air – 1.7GHz i5-2557M 17w
- X220 – 2.1GHz i3-2310M 35w
Memory:
- Air – 4GB DDR3 1333MHz
- X220 – 3GB DDR3 1333MHz
Storage:
- Air – 128GB Samsung mSATA SSD
- X220 – 80GB Intel mSATA SSD/500GB Hitach Z5K500
Screen:
- Air – 13.3” Glossy WXGA+ (1440×900) TN LED
- X220 – 12.5” HD (1366×768) IPS LED
Graphics:
- Air – Intel HD3000
- X220 – Intel HD3000
Ports/Slots:
- Air – Two USB, Card Reader, Headphone, Thunderbolt
- X220 – Three USB(One Powered), Ethernet, VGA and DisplayPort, Headphone/Microphone Jack, Dock Connector, Card Reader, ExpressCard Slot
Battery:
- Air – 50w
- X220 – 63w Six-Cell
Dimensions:
- Air – Width 12.8”, Depth 8.94” and Height .11”(Front)/.68”(Rear)
- X220 – Width 12.0” Depth 8.13” and Height .75”(Front)/1.36”(Rear)
Weight:
- Air – 2.9 Pounds
- X220 – 3.3 Pounds
Warranty:
- Air – One Year
- X220 – One Year
Price
The pricing between the MacBook Air and the X220 is difficult to measure. The Air side isn’t that hard as the lowest you’ll see via the Internet for a new machines is around $1,250, but pricing on the X220 is a moving target. Usually, the least expensive way to get one is via Lenovo’s web site. Depending on what coupons are offered that day, the price can vary quite a bit. As an example, my X220 cost $750 shipped (see my review of the X220 here) and I’ve seen it lower, while right at this moment as I’m writing this review, the same configuration is a little over $1k. I think most savvy internet buyers can get close to the price I got if they’re willing to wait for coupons, but how to come up with a number for this article? I’ll split the difference and say $875. To be fair to Apple you have to add in the cost of the SSD. We’ll say $150 for a 128GB SSD. That makes it around $1,025 similarly configured to an Air, both with the one year warranties. A $225 price difference is significant, but not hugely so, especially if you plan to keep the machine for a number of years. In this instance, I’ll award a slight advantage to the X220.
Advantage: Slight X220Design
There’s no question the Air is the looker of the two, with its slim and sensuous body. I know I’m in the minority on this one, but I’ve always liked ThinkPad design. However, compared to the Air, the X220 is a little frumpy. I think both the Air and X220 come from the simple is elegant design school, they just come at it from different paths. Both are single color machines, silver for the Air and black on the X220, with simple logos adorning the lid.
ThinkPads have evolved from serving primarily business customers. Here utility, not appearance, is essential. ThinkPad design hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years. While that can be comforting, the flip side is it gets boring. The X220′s black look and squared lines say it’s here to perform and will be easy to use.
Apple has more been the more consumer products oriented company, though that is changing for both companies. Consumer tastes are more fickle than business users and catching the eye may be more important than the specs. Where the X220 is outdated, the Air reminds me a of a long distance runner. Its design is lithe, athletic and goes the distance. It’s the new direction notebooks will be taking in the future. Lenovo would do well to take a look at it.
Advantage: AirThinness and Weight
I always thought of my X220 as a pretty small notebook, but now that I’ve had the Air for a bit, my expectations of what a thin and light ultraportable can be are re-adjusting. Both are still light and portable, it’s just the Air has squeezed out any excess.
It doesn’t feel like there’s an ounce of fat on the Air anywhere. The Air weighs almost a half pound less than the X220 while having a larger screen. That’s pretty impressive. The X220 can be equipped with a four-cell battery that will make it close in weight to the Air, but you’ll have to give up a couple hours of battery life in doing so.
From a thinness perspective, the Air is even better. I just marvel at the engineering that makes the Air so thin. You’ll need two Airs stacked on top of each other to get to the thickness of the X220. With the aforementioned four-cell battery, the X220 is an inch thick machine, but it still has a long way to go.
Advantage: AirDurability
I’ve had my X220 for about six months now and the Air for about a month. I don’t know how much one can tell about the long term durability in that short of a time frame. Both feel very solid and well put together. Neither has had any issues while I’ve had them. The MacBook Air case is made from aluminum using Apple’s unibody construction method. It has that carved from one piece feel to it. Being that it’s so thin, there’s little give on the machine anywhere. The X220′s top and bottom case are made from magnesium, which is very light and durable. The inside LCD frame and palm rest use a durable ABS plastic. The lower half is augmented by a stiff roll cage. The top and bottom case are rubberized to give a more sure grip when carrying it around. Both use latch-less lid design, but neither feels like it will open unexpectedly. The X220 uses steel hinges and is tougher to open.
Advantage: Tie
Screen
The Air has a glossy 13.3” 1440×900 TN LCD while the X220 uses a matte 12.5” 1366×768 IPS LCD. I don’t know what the nit specifications are for the Air, but it appears to be a bit brighter than the X220. The gloss is pretty mellow on the Air, but it can get irritating in direct light Both screens are well-above average. Contrast is high for both panels. Colors are luscious and pop-off the screens. Photos and movies look great on each screen. The screen on the Air is very good, about as good a TN panel as you’ll see. If you never saw the X220 IPS screen, you’d probably be quite happy with the Air’s screen. As good as the Air screen is, it’s not as good as the IPS LCD offered on the X220. As you can see in the pictures below with both screens at full brightness, the Air is a bit more washed out than the X220 and it can’t match the viewing angles offered on the IPS X220.
What the Air can offer its users is a higher resolution. While the extra space is nice, the additional 132 vertical pixels, vertical pixels being the more important pixels, on the Air, it only adds only about three extra lines to the typical internet page.
That’s not significant enough to trump the better quality on the X220. I really see this as a quality versus quantity debate. If your goal is to have the most pixels possible, then that’s the Air, and you’ll still be left with a pretty good screen. If, however, you want the best image quality, then the X220 is the real deal.
Advantage: Slight X220Performance
Both the these machines are ultraportables. The Air uses ULV Sandy Bridge CPUs while the X220 has full voltage Sandy Bridge CPUs, either the i3, i5 or i7. The ULV CPUs do not require as much power as their full voltage counterparts, which should lead to better battery life all things being equal. Being that these are ultraportable machines, performance is probably not a major factor for most their users. The Air and X220 will spend most of their time doing such mundane tasks as surfing the web, watching movies, writing documents and listening to music to name a few. These tasks don’t really push the CPUs enough to where a difference between them is discernible. The i3 in the X220 should offer CPU performance that’s close to the ULV i5 in the Air, but the X220 can also be equipped with the i5 or i7 CPUs, which will offer better CPU performance for those tasks that need it. For this reason I think the X220 offers a slight advantage in CPU performance.
Advantage: Slight X220Storage
The often overlooked part of the performance equation is the hard drive. As common tasks don’t push the CPU much, it’s the hard drive, boot times and application launch times, that make a system feel faster or slower. The Air comes with SSD drives only. They help keep the Air slim and trim, but there’s no option for platter drives on the Air. The benefit of a SSD is that they are extremely fast, but they’re also more costly and offer limited capacity. SSD boot times are fast and applications open quickly. The X220 boots in just under 20 seconds and the Air came in a little over 20 seconds. Who doesn’t want that?
The X220 uses a different approach when it comes to storage that gives it an advantage. Lenovo will of course sell you an X220 with a SSD. That will equal what the Air offers, but the X220 has a second drive bay. It’s not a drive bay exactly, but a miniPCI slot. Into this slot you can plug in a mSATA SSD.
MSATA SSDs are small SSDs. Once it is installed, Windows sees it as a second drive. A mSATA SSD drive offers the same speed advantage as the SSDs on the Air, but you can also install a platter based drive in the main bay to use for storage where speed is speed is not as important. The X220 use a 7mm bay and the biggest platter 7mm right now is 500GB, but with this setup you still get the SSD speed advantage and at least twice the space compared to the Air, but at a lower cost. It’s really the best of both worlds and I think is preferable to what the Air offers.
Advantage: X220Keyboard
The Air uses a chiclet style keyboard while the X220 has a more traditional laptop keyboard. Each has an option to light the keyboard for use in dark areas. The Air’s keyboard is backlit, which can be adjusted to suit your needs. The X220 has the ThinkLight. It’s a light housed in the LCD bezel that illuminates the keyboard when turned on.
Both the keyboards are firm. Hitting one key does not cause the next to move. The keyboard on the Air is a bit larger than the X220. Despite this, I found my fingers stretching more when using the Air. It could be that I’ve used ThinkPads for so long that the spacing on their keyboards is grooved into my brain. I think what separates the keyboards for me is the key depth. The Air is more shallow with key travel. Meaning, when you strike a key, you almost immediately hit the bottom. The key depth on the X220 is perfect. When typing on the X220, you hit the bottom just as you naturally start to bring your finger up. It’s much easier to get into a rhythm when cranking out a long document like this review.
Advantage: X220Touchpad/Pointstick
If this is a comparison of the touchpads, it’s really no contest as the Air’s touchpad is superior to the X220 in almost every way. The touchpad on the Air is very large. It has a lot of gestures like two finger scrolling and pinch to zoom that make it very easy to use. If I have a complaint about the touchpad on the Air it is that the button mechanism is a bit stiff. This is particularly true at the top of the Air’s touchpad. It makes the effective area of the touchpad smaller than the actual size.
The touchpad on the X220 is serviceable. It basically works. The X220 has some of the same gestures as the Air, but I had some trouble with regularity. Because the palm rest real estate is so small on the X220, Lenovo decided to integrate the touchpad buttons in an effort to make the touchpad bigger, but it ends up being a poor compromise. The buttons are not marked on the touchpad. I had a tendency to miss them or hit in between them, which did nothing.
Fortunately, there’s another option for the X220, the little red nub. I find the stick to be superior to any touchpad. Your hands never stray far from the keyboard and you never hit an edge using it. As a long time ThinkPad user, I concede I may be a bit biased. I know there’s a large subset of users who do not like them. If you’re one of those people, it’s definitely something to consider before buying the X220. The touchpad is the X220′s one glaring flaw in my opinion. Because the pointstick is superior on the X220, but the touchpad is inferior to the touchpad on the Air, we’ll call this a tie.
Advantage: Tie
Battery Life
Battery life on the MacBook Air and the X220 with the six-cell battery is very similar. The Air comes in at just under six hours battery life while the X220 is just over six hours. The Air comes with one battery that is not removable. When your time is up, you must plug in or shut down. You can’t extend the battery life even if you are willing to pay for it. The X220 has a lot more battery choices. You can even buy an extra battery and swap them if you need more time. The X220 has four battery options – four, six and nine-cell batteries are options on the X220 along with the slice battery. The four-cell battery makes for a 1” machine and makes the X220 weigh about the same as the Air, but it only gives you about four hours of battery life. The slice battery attaches to the docking port. Coupled with the nine-cell battery, it offers an amazing amount of battery life. It will probably give you three to four times what the Air can. The larger batteries do add some weight to the X220, which is something to consider, but I think larger selection of battery options offered on the X220 and the longer battery life they can provide, make the X220 the better choice with regards to battery life.
Advantage: X220Upgrades
When you purchase a MacBook Air you can decide between a ULV Core i5 or Core i7 CPU and whether to get a 128GB or 256GB SSD. Those are the only upgrades available on the Air and they must be done when buying the Air, be it via Apple or a pre-configured model. If a better SSD comes along, you want a better WiFi card, or need to add some memory, you’re out of luck unless you want to void the warranty. The X220 is almost the complete opposite. Like the Air, the X220 CPU is not upgradeable after you buy it, but pretty much everything else is on the table. A bigger faster drive/SSD comes along? Have at it! Want to add 16GB of memory? No problemo there. Want to upgrade to WWAN? Whatever floats your boat. Lenovo even has a website with videos showing you how to complete the process from start to finish. I’d say from an upgrades point of view, the X220 offers the clear advantage.
Advantage: X220Ports
The Air keeps the ports to a minimum. You get two USB 2.0 ports, a card reader, a headphone/microphone jack and a Thunderbolt port. Thunderbolt in theory is a good addition. It’s a combination of displayport and PCI Express technologies. It offers twice the throughput of USB 3.0, and can be used to connect LCD or hard drives to the Air, but as of now, there’s not may devices with Thunderbolt connectors. The few that are there tend to be expensive. Hopefully, that will change down the road, but we’re not there yet.
ThinkPad X220 and MacBook Air ports left side
ThinkPad X220 and MacBook Air ports right side
The X220 has a wider selection of ports. It has everything the Air does, except the Thunderbolt port. You get three USB 2.0 ports. One of them is a powered USB port and it can ironically, charge your iPhone while the X220 is off. That’s not an option on the Air. You can also get a USB 3.0 port, but it’s unfortunate that you must upgrade to the i7 CPU to get it. That’s a costly upgrade for most users who don’t want the extra power, but there’s a lot more and less expensive USB 3.0 devices right now than Thunderbolt. In addition to the extra USB port, the X220 has a VGA port, a DisplayPort, an ExpressCard slot and Ethernet port. You can get most of those on the Air, but again, they’ll be external via USB, which is never as convenient. Not to be forgotten, the X220 can also offers docking options. That can get you an optical drive, more drives and connectors.
Advantage: X220Heat and Noise
The Air and the X220 run very cool, even when running more CPU intensive applications they never go much above warm. One note about the noise levels is that when the fan kicks on for each machine to cool the CPU, the fan on the MacBook Air is noticeably louder. I found this out by downloading a simple flash game from the App Store. The fan can get a bit noisy on the X220 too, but the decibel level is much lower. It can be drowned out with music or other noise. This should not be an issue for most users as the fan did not come on often while I was using the Air, but if you’re sitting on an airplane or in a meeting with the Air and the fan kicks on, you might get a few dirty looks.
Advantage: Slight X220Wireless and Networking
The Air and X220 both come with A/B/G/N WiFi cards. The Air has a Broadcomm card while the ThinkPad uses a Realtek card. Lenovo also offers Intel WiFi cards, including WiMax, for those who want it. Apple does not offer any option to upgrade the WiFi. Both cards worked great at home and work. I think from a business users perspective, I think you can knock the Air because it has no Ethernet and more importantly, you can’t get WWAN internally. Every X220 has Ethernet and is WWAN upgradeable. You can get those on the Air, but they must be external. That’s never as useful and they tend to get lost or forgotten.
Advantage: X220Software
I am primarily a Windows user. I have a Linux box too. While I don’t find OS X to be any better or worse than Windows or Linux, it’s been nice having the Mac around as something different. I don’t foresee us resolving the Mac vs PC debate in this article. Most people have probably already have made their mind up on that one, but there’s one area that might be of importance to business users and that’s security. The Air doesn’t offer much while the X220 has a whole software suite dedicated to managing and securing your data, the ThinkVantage Suite. With the X220 you get a TPM chip and can have an internal smart card reader. That may be important for someone who needs to really lock their data down.
Advantage: X220Warranty
Both the Air and X220 come with a base one year warranty. For the X220, this includes software support while the machine is under warranty, while the Air only receives software support for the first 90 days. Apple and Lenovo both offer warranty upgrade options. With Apple you can get AppleCare. It costs $250 and extends the warranty to three years. This would include software support for the life of the warranty. Another benefit for the MacBook Air is you can take the it to any Apple store and have it fixed right away if you’re close by, while the base warranty on the X220 only comes with mail-in service. I think where Apple needs to work harder for business users is they don’t offer on-site or accidental coverage. This is especially true for ultraportable laptops, which travel much more frequently. They are more likely to take a beating than notebooks that mostly sit on a desk.
The X220 has more warranty options. You can get up to five years of warranty coverage on the X220. This would include on-site, where a technician comes to your home or place of business the next day to make any needed repairs. Accidental coverage is an option on the X220 as well, though accidental coverage is limited to four years. Ever dropped or spilled a tasty beverage on your notebook? If you have accidental coverage, Lenovo will repair it for any reason.. You won’t have to know the pain of making a paper weight out of your expensive notebook. Unfortunately, this isn’t an option with the Air. If you damage your Air in a manner not covered by the warranty, you have made a doorstop from it. Because the X220 is less expensive than the Air, you can probably add on-site and accidental coverage to the X220 and be fairly close to the Air price wise, depending on what coupons are offered that day. I think the addition of on-site and accidental coverage on the X220, and the longer warranty options, give the X220 a leg up in terms of the warranty.
Advantage: X220And the Winner is?
Let me start off by saying these are both first-rate notebooks. I think I could choose either and live happily ever after, but this can’t be a contest if no one wins. If your biggest priorities are thinness and weight, a high resolution screen and you want a bit of style on your ultraportable, then perhaps the Air is in your future, but in the end, the X220 is the more well rounded machine in this reviewers opinion. With the X220 you get a machine that is durable, has a great keyboard, more secure, dual hard drives, more options to upgrade, a gorgeous IPS screen, better warranty choices, longer battery life and better performance. You get all of those and you’re still paying a few hundred dollars less for the X220, maybe less if you know how to work the system. Where I come from, that’s what they call value and is why the X220 is the better alternative.
Comparison Summary Table (green tick indicates advantage, both with ticks indicates a tie)
| ThinkPad X220 | MacBook Air Late 2011 | |
| Price and Value | | |
| Design | | |
| Thinness and Weight | | |
| Durability | | |
| Screen | | |
| Performance Potential | | |
| Storage | | |
| Keyboard | | |
| TouchPad & Pointing Stick | | |
| Battery Life Potential | | |
| Upgrade Capability | | |
| Ports Selection | | |
| Wireless & Networking | | |
| Installed Software (for Business usage) | | |
| Warranty Options | |
0 comments:
Post a Comment