On a full charge, the new 13-inch MacBook Air is good for 12 hours of general computing, and lasted for nine hours of live video streaming. The Haswell processors are designed to go light on power, and it shows. However, there's one test where the new MacBook Air clearly trounces the previous model. In performance terms, this means it outperforms its predecessor in some tests, but falls behind in others, generally by small margins. The new 2013 13-inch MacBook Air makes some significant improvements on the 2012 model, but the processor's clock speeds are down. If you're sick of lugging a hefty notebook around with you, the MacBook Air could be just what you need. Most impressively of all, it weighs just 1.35kg (2.96lbs). The new MacBook Airs are just as portable as their predecessors too, with a tapered height of 0.3-1.7cm (0.11-0.68 inches), a width of 32.5cm 912.8 inches) and a depth of 22.7cm (8.94 inches). It's still a 1440 x 900 resolution, 13.3-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, with rich, deep colours and good viewing angles. One thing that hasn't changed is the laptop's display. It's around 40 seconds slower when encoding our five-minute test movie to iPod format using iMovie, too. The faster graphics enjoyed by the Haswell processors meant that in our Call of Duty 4 test, the 2013 13-inch MacBook Air ran the game at 67.8 frames per second, compared to 59.5fps for the 13-inch, 1.8GHz dual core Intel Core i5 model from 2012.

ITunes encoding (USB SuperDrive): 452 secondsĪlthough the processors have a slower clock speed than the previous generation, across-the-board performance improvements mostly make up the difference. At last, you can use your notebook all day long on a single charge. But with the Haswell processors in place, it's absolutely stunning.

Since switching to solid state storage off the shelf with the late 2010 update, the MacBook Air has been known for its good battery life. That's significantly better than the 11-inch MacBook Air's 7 hours 15 minutes, and a substantial improvement over the 2012 MacBook Air's 5.5 hours. In our test, in which we streamed the live BBC News channel feed on iPlayer over a wireless network, the laptop lasted for nine hours. The new Haswell processors use very little power, giving the 2013 13-inch MacBook Air and absolutely stunning battery life. Perhaps it would've taken too great a toll on the battery life. Yet we didn't get one on the 2013 MacBook Airs, even as a custom option for those ordering on the Apple online store. Packing in such a high resolution it's impossible to distinguish between individual pixels at a normal viewing distance, Retina screens proved extremely popular on recent MacBook Pro and iPad models. Interestingly, the oft-predicted Retina screen never emerged.

Macbook air 11 inch 2013 battery