Apple has started to ship the higher-end Air that comes with 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 64GB SSD in place of traditional 80GB hard drive. But to get these options you will have to pay $1300 more then the base price of $1799. There is no other difference in both the models so performance can be the only thing that can justify the price difference. Ars Technica run some benchmarks to see how much of a difference the two options make. The start up time was 12 seconds faster than the HDD model Macbook Air. Ars Technica ran Xbench, Cinebench and three other applications benchmarks. Overall the SSD model slightly outperformed the HDD model. But most of these results were inline with difference in clock speed of the two models. The battery life was also not improved by much, even though the SSD option should in theory increase the battery life by 20%. The SSD model did perform better in tasks that required lot of disk activity compared to HDD option. Now the big question is, is it worth spending $1300, well I would say no because the overall performance gain is less then 15% and that doesn’t justifies the $1300 price increase. SSD cost is coming down exponentially and by the end of 2008 we will have 128GB SSD for less then $250. So if you want a computer with SSD for better performance I would suggest waiting till end of 2008.