The design is virtually unchanged, but Apple is expected to introduce a new model later this year featuring a redesigned body and a 12-inch Retina display.Īpple heavily markets the MacBook Air’s new entry-level price point, and it actually calls the computer “The Perfect Everyday Notebook,” a tagline also used by the company’s SVP of worldwide marketing in his statement from April 29 (the day Apple debuted the new MacBook Airs). “iTunes movie playback times increase to 12 hours on the 13-inch notebook and 9 hours on the 11-inch notebook, adding up to two hours of playback time to the updated MacBook Air.” “Power-efficient fourth generation Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors work in conjunction with OS X Mavericks to give the 13-inch MacBook Air up to 12 hours of battery life and the 11-inch MacBook Air up to 9 hours of battery life,” says the Cupertino giant. Pricing aside, the actual flagship feature of the new MacBook Air is battery life, thanks to Intel’s low-power chips. Apple undoubtedly also gets a considerable discount on top for being such a faithful customer, and with Flash and RAM prices dropping every year, we now know why the $899/€899 price tag was possible. However, the list of Core i5 processors up on Wikipedia reveals that Intel’s newest Haswell chips used in the new-generation MacBook Airs are actually cheaper to produce.

For comparison, 2013 MacBook Air averaged scores of 2379 single-core and 4480 multi-core, respectively. Tests carried out using Primate Labs’ Geekbench 3 benchmarking tool churned out 32-bit single-core scores of around 2532 and multi-core scores of around 4781.

The change in pricing remains the key focus of this upgrade. Primate Labs’ Geekbench 3 search yields new scores from MacBook Air models introduced earlier this week, indicating that the fourth-generation Haswell chips inside these babies are not much faster than their predecessors.

2014 macbook air 13 inch battery life