Apple keeps the latest MacBook Air updates on the inside, the new Intel fourth-gen CPUs help the updated MacBook Air achieve amazing all-day laptop battery life and a less-expensive starting price make up for a lack of flashy design changes.
The new 2013 versions of both the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air look very familiar indeed, as these slim systems have hardly changed at all physically over the past few generations.
The Air was the only Apple laptop line to get a June 2013 update at Apple’s WWDC conference. At first glance, it looks like a relatively minor set of changes, with the primary selling point being a move to Intel’s new fourth-generation Core i-series CPUs, also known by the code-name Haswell. There is, however, one very important difference in the new models, and one that’s especially noteworthy if you spend a lot of time on the road and away from your Apple A1021 AC Adapter.
We’ve previously tested Haswell chips in a few laptops and been impressed with both the performance and battery life gains (to be realistic, the latter is much more important for consumers). If you add Haswell to Apple’s already-stellar battery life reputation, you get a system, in the 13-inch Air, that Apple claims will run for up to 12 hours, and in our tests (spoiler alert) ran even longer.
Having a Haswell-generation CPU also gives you Intel’s improved HD5000 graphics, which promises improved game performance over last year’s HD4000 graphics (itself an improvement over the preceding HD3000, and so on). It’s still not anything like having a discrete GPU, as in the 15-inch Retina Pro, but with game services such as Steam and EA’s Origin now being Mac-compatible, it may make some small inroads for OS X gaming.
It’s easy to say that this new version of the 13-inch MacBook Air is a modest step forward, with no physical changes to the exterior, and still no higher-res display, touch screen, or HDMI port. The battery life is a very big deal, however, and when you couple that with a $100 price cut on the base model, down to $1,099, the 13-inch MacBook Air is, despite not being the newest design on the block, still one of the most universally useful laptops you can buy.
Laptop Battery life is where the new MacBook Air (both the 11-inch and 13-inch versions) really stands out. The previous generation 13-inch Air ran for 7:27 on our video playback Apple A1322 Laptop Battery drain test. The 2013 version blows that out of the water, with an astonishing 14:25 on the same test. That’s better than Apple’s estimate of 12 hours, and one of the only times our tests have indicated longer battery life than a manufacturer’s claims.
Now, before we get too excited, there are a few caveats on that number. Much of the credit must got to Intel’s fourth-generation Core i-series platform, which was pitched as being incredibly power efficient. Our early tests confirm this, with the new 13-inch Sony Vaio Pro 13 running for nearly nine hours. And, while this is a much better score than last year’s Air, the CPU itself runs at a lower clock speed, and the new Intel chips are especially optimized for video playback, which is the heart of our battery test. Using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth heavily or playing 3D games would cause that number to drop.
