Much as The Doodler would love to actually put the MacBook Air through its paces himself, availability and resources have conspired to deny him the pleasure.

Not so our friends at Ars Technica, where Jacqui Cheng recently did a detailed, comprehensive review of the base model. More interestingly, she just got a unit of the higher-end, slightly faster and US$1300-more expensive Air with the 64GB Solid State Drive, did the same benchmarks as with the base model, and then put the results head-to-head.

So, is the MacBook Air with the SSD worth the extra $1300?

No.

Read Jacqui’s comparative review here.