On June 10, Apple took advantage of the WWDC 2013 keynote to renew the range of notebooks belonging to the MacBook Air family. Among the main novelties, the hardware update has brought us the Intel Haswell processors, a new SSD with a PCI Express interface and Wi-Fi ac with which the wireless transfer speed is considerably increased.
Perhaps the most important novelty of the new MacBook Air is its autonomy, exceeding 12 hours of continuous use. In our tests, we have reached the figure that Apple indicates on its website and best of all, we have managed to significantly exceed it if we reduce the brightness of the screen to half.
As it usually happens, autonomy depends a lot on the task we perform with the computer since surfing the Internet or making an office use is not the same as rendering a video in which much more processor power is required.
The secret to such good battery life lies in the incorporation of Intel Haswell processors. At the energy level they are very efficient And this has managed to considerably reduce its consumption, in addition, instructions have been added to manage its energy demand depending on each situation. Apple has also contributed by adding a higher capacity battery without increasing the dimensions of this very light notebook.
The performance of the new MacBook Air is impressive. Although at the benchmark level the figure of the previous generation has hardly been improved (motivated by a reduction in the processor's working frequency), the new SSD uses PCI Express instead of SATA 3 and that achieves much higher read and write speeds. Our computer is equipped with the 5Ghz Intel Core i1,3 and is capable of fully booting OS X in less than 14 seconds.
In the days that we carry with him we have not experienced any kind of problem with Wi-Fi connectivity or the screen flickering that other users have suffered. Luckily or not, Apple is investigating these bugs and we should see a solution in the form of a software update soon.
The highlight of this MacBook Air is undoubtedly the battery, yes, Apple's goal for the next generation has to be to improve the screen. Many expected a Retina panel but I prefer that they improve viewing angles that although they are not bad, they could be better. At the resolution level, you could also jump to 1080P or, even better, duplicate it and put the Retina surname that is still late in coming.
Otherwise, this MacBook Air still feels as "Air" as ever and it has finishes of which we can only provide good comments.
The price of this MacBook Air with 5Ghz i1,3 processor and 8GB of RAM with 128GB of SSD is 1229 euros.
More information - MacBook Air Wi-Fi Update 1.0, the beta patch to solve problems with Wi-Fi