#Macbook air 13 inch battery drains pro#
#Macbook air 13 inch battery drains windows#

#Macbook air 13 inch battery drains pro#

Neither is a gaming machine (and you'll have to move all the way up to the 15-inch Retina Pro to get a discrete Nvidia GPU), but our anecdotal gameplay tests in Portal 2 show that the Air can handle mainstream games that lean a bit more on the casual side.Д«attery life is where the new MacBook Air (both the 11-inch and 13-inch versions) really stands out. In our older Call of Duty 4 test (one of the few standard gaming benchmarks for OS X), at the native 1,440x900-pixel resolution, the game ran at 39.0 frames per second on the 2013 Air and 21.9 frames per second on the 2012 Air. What is decidedly different, however, is the integrated HD 5000 graphics from Intel, a step above the HD 4000 in the previous Air. Any of the past few generations is more than powerful enough for mainstream users. As a longtime MacBook Air user, in everyday use - Web surfing, social media, HD video playback - the 2013 MacBook Air didn't feel any different than the previous version. Year-over-year application performance doesn't show any real improvement, and the new Air actually ran some tests a hair slower. The actual difference in our test results between the 20 models was minor. The step-up $1,299 configuration keeps the same CPU as the $1,099 one, but doubles the SSD to 256GB. Interestingly, last year's base model CPU was a 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, while the newer Haswell version is a 1.3GHz Intel Core i5-4250U. Most of the system is unchanged, with the main difference being the new Haswell-generation Intel processor and platform. The base configuration for the 13-inch Air now costs $1,099, versus $1,199 previously. Of course the Retina Pro models, along with a handful of laptops from Toshiba, HP, and Dell, are experimenting with even-higher-than-HD resolutions. On the positive side, the native resolution of the display is 1,440x900 pixels, which is better than the 1,366x768 you find in many 13-inch laptops, although even midpriced models are quickly switching over to 1,600x900 or even 1,920x1,080. The screen area also lacks the edge-to-edge glass over a black bezel found in the MacBook Pro instead the screen is, as in previous years, surrounded by a thick silver bezel. Unlike on the 11-inch MacBook Air, the 13-inch screen is still not a 16:9 display.

#Macbook air 13 inch battery drains windows#

For now, flicking around with three-and-four-finger gestures on the MacBook trackpad remains the most seamless way to swap between windows and applications, at least in my experience. It will be interesting to see how Apple's user interfaces develop in the face of both Windows 8, which tries (not terribly successfully) to reinvent the entire concept of working with a computer OS, and the upcoming OS X Mavericks update. The MacBook Air keeps the same external look as the previous couple of generations, a look that still rivals the newest ultrabooks, although some new systems, such as Sony's Vaio Pro line, are getting thinner and lighter without sacrificing much in the way of productivity.