ORIGINAL REVIEW
Just as with the 13-inch MacBook Air Apple has decided that, externally, the new 11-inch Macbook Air didn't need any work. It has a point, as the aluminium case still looks gorgeous and there's no real way of making it thinner or smaller without damaging build quality or usability. Instead, the changes fall into two important areas: you get a battery-saving Intel Haswell processor and a bigger SSD for less money.
Battery life is one of the most important aspects of any laptop, but it's particularly important in the 11-inch Macbook Air. It weighs just 1.1kg and is small enough to fit into practically any bag, so it's designed to be carried anywhere you go. With last year's model we managed eight hours of use in our light-use battery test, although putting a bit more strain on the laptop realistically brings that figure down to less than five hours.
When you've got the best laptop case, there's little point in changing it
With the 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-4250U 'Haswell' CPU in 2013 model, things are different. This CPU has been built to conserve battery life, with a special low-power state that draws very little energy when the computer's not doing anything. As a result our light-use battery test let this laptop last 14h 33m, which is simply incredible.
As our test means that the laptop hasn't got a lot of work to do, we ran a new battery benchmark, which plays a 10m-long video every 30m. In this test, we found that the laptop lasted 5h 54m. That's still impressive and means that for general use the 2013 11-inch Macbook Air should last a good two-hours or so longer than the 2012 model.
Without a doubt, the MacBook Air's keyboard and touchpad are the best
Likewise, the responsive and large touchpad is brilliant. This is largely down to OS X 10.8, which properly supports the multi-touch gestures. For example, you use two fingers to scroll, three fingers to swipe between different Desktops and three fingers up to show Mission Control and all of your open apps. It's a fluid and brilliant system that makes Windows laptops feel quite old-fashioned.
It would have been nice to see a higher resolution screen
The 11.6in screen is the same model used in last year's model. It has a resolution of 1,366x768 and it's a slight disappointment that a higher-resolution screen or Retina model couldn't have been fitted. We can get over this, though, as fitting a higher-resolution screen would most likely have impacted on build quality, durability and battery life.
Besides, on an 11.6in screen, you'd have struggled to read anything on the screen, without increasing the size of the interface. In all likelihood, then, more resolution would have looked slightly sharper, but you wouldn't get more on screen.
Fortunately, the screen quality is fantastic thanks to the brilliant IPS panel. Viewing angles are brilliant, the anti-reflective coating means you can read it in practically any lighting condition, and it's very bright. Colours are vibrant and we saw all of the detail in our high-contrast images. Given a choice between more resolution or better quality, quality wins every time in our book.
You don't get a lot of ports on the MacBook Air, as the case is too small, but it should be enough for most people
Round the outside of the case, you don't get a lot of ports, with two USB3 ports, Thunderbolt (fast storage and for connecting to displays) and a headphone jack. There's no SD card slot, as you get on the 13-inch Macbook Air, so you'll need to carry a USB reader around for memory cards. The only change to the case is that the single microphone has been replaced with dual microphones, which should make audio clearer when you make Facetime calls using the built-in webcam.
Whether or not the Macbook Air is the computer for you depends on a lot of things. Strictly speaking, we think that the 13-inch Macbook Air, is better value and its larger, slightly higher-resolution screen is that bit easier to read; if you need a more multi-purpose computer that you can carry around, that's the one to buy. However, if you want an incredible small laptop that's very comfortable to type on, and you have a main computer for day-to-day work, the 11-inch Macbook Air remains a brilliant choice.
FEATURED Apple 11-inch MacBook Air (Intel Dual Core i5 1.3GHz, 4GB RAM, 128GB Flash Drive, Intel HD Graphics 5000, Mac OS X) Launched June 2013
- Processor clock speed: 1.3 GHz
- Processor family: Intel Core i5
- Turbo frequency (max): 2.6 GHz
- Processor number of cores: 2
- L3 cache: 3 MB\
Description of the notebook hardware specs include VGA, HDD, Display, RAM, processor, and other components related.
