Apple’s refreshed MacBook Air was unveiled at this year’s WWDC, with Intel Haswell processor and incredible battery life with no design changes. The updated MacBook Air is now available in some markets and the rest of the world wait for the launch.
I’ve been reading a lot of reviews to understand the performance compromises and incredible features the new MacBook Air has to offers to its users, and I thought I would make a post with the best and worst features of the new device.
Almost all the reviews talk about the incredible battery life, and also some reviews concentrated on the display, which has been a major selling point for a lot of companies now. The device indeed sports the same old display which shipped with the previous generation MacBook Air, and is not really great when compared to the competitors. But the battery life with nearly no compromise in the performance is what Apple has achieved with the refresh.
Design:
While there’s no major design change in the looks of the new MacBook Air, the device did get a dual-microphone, which sits at the left side of the machine, making some MacBook Air cases unusable.
Other than the changes that are not visible outside, the device still sports the same unibody finish, and The Verge has a say on this:
“Apple’s been shipping this MacBook Air design since 2010, and there’s not much new to say about it — although the basic idea has been aped by almost every other PC manufacturer in the industry, it remains as class-leading as ever. The backlit keyboard is solid-feeling and comfortable, and Apple’s multitouch glass trackpad remains leaps and bounds ahead of the Windows competition. There are other laptops on the market now that are thinner and lighter, like the Sony VAIO Pro and the Toshiba Kirabook, but the Air’s blend of size, weight, stiffness, and durability continues to set the standard.”
Performance:
While Engadget Benchmarked the new MacBook Air for its SSD performance and bunch of other stuff, AnandTech has got some deeper statistics about how the new device performs.
The comparison mainly stands with the previous generation MacBook Air. AnandTech notes that the new MacBook Air does not fail to perform the same way the previous generation devices performed, though there’s a compromise in the processor Apple has put in. But thanks to the TurboBoost, it brings all the performance back to the device.
You can get a 1.7GHz Core i7 upgrade with a 3.3GHz max turbo (i7-4650U). Both parts have Intel GT3 graphics clocked at a max of 1GHz on the i5 and 1.1GHz on the i7. Since the max GPU clocks are south of 1.2GHz, this is officially Intel’s HD 5000 graphics and not Iris despite using the same silicon. The GPU base clock drops from 350MHz down to 200MHz, which should help reduce idle power consumption.
Here are some of the statistics AnandTech has provided for the new MacBook Air:
This is not all. The new MacBook Air also offers a custom built connector from Apple for PCIe:
It’s a custom Apple design, not M.2. Since there’s no PCIe routed off of the CPU in Haswell ULT, these 2 lanes come from the on-package PCH.
The new MacBook Air is also an example for Apple leading the innovation and taking some bold steps. The company has moved from the typical DDR RAM module to LPDDR , which performs much faster than the regular DDR RAM modules. This new feature is supported only by the new Haswell processors from Intel.
Battery Life:
This is one of the most talked about feature in the new generation MacBook Air. Apple originally claimed that the device comes with a 12 hour battery life. The insane battery life is offered by all the tweaks the company has made to the hardware. And I think this is a huge step forward.
The Verge’s Nilay Patel reports that it got a better battery life than Apple had promised. And that was an insane 13 hours and 29 minutes of battery life with one single charge. Here’s what he says about the day long batter life:
13 hours and 29 minutes. That’s all you really need to know — that’s how long the new MacBook Air running Safari lasted running The Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of websites and images at 65 percent brightness. Run time in Chrome was shorter, at 11 hours and 29 minutes, but both are still ridiculously impressive. In fact, it’s the record for a laptop running our test without an external battery.
While some might think that this is the typical thing reviewers say, here’s a statistic from a Google+ user, who shows that he has got 9 hours and 2 minutes of batter life with 69% charge left in the battery:
Gizmodo also has got almost similar statistics to The Verge. The blog reports that they managed to get 13 hours and six minutes of battery life on the device:
The battery. The battery makes this Air what it is, and that is properly ridiculous. On a video run-down test: — streaming Nyan Cat over Wi-Fi, with brightness on 80 per cent — the Air lasted 13 hours 6 minutes. Thirteen hours and six frigging minutes. That’s well over double the six-hour life of this generation’s ultrabooks, more than the most stamina-happy tablets, and way more than any smartphone.
Well, this explains about the battery life the new MacBook Air has to offers for us. And I am getting this as soon as it hits the Indian Store.
So, Should I get it?
If you’re a traveler, and would not depend on the power sockets on the way, then this is the device for you. The money which you spend on this device would be worth it for all the same awesomeness, brilliant OS with a day long battery life. Even if you hate the Mac OS, but would love to get Windows running on the deice, this is probably the best device you can get in the market.
Disclaimer: The images in this article are not my own. These images and its rights goes to its photographer.