The 2012 MacBook Air (11 & 13-inch) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 16, 2012 12:53 PM EST- Posted in
- Apple
- Mac
- MacBook Air
- Laptops
- Notebooks
Battery Life
The MacBook Air sees no increase in battery capacity over the previous generation, as a result any improvement in battery life boils down to what we get from Ivy Bridge. I'm stuck rebuilding the battery life results database from scratch now that I've built a new suite of tests for OS X. I've run all three generations of 11-inch MacBook Air through the new suite but I don't have numbers for the older 13-inch MBAs unfortunately. As I mentioned in the rMBP review, the new suite is designed to give accurate data points at three usage models: one light, one medium and one heavy. The combination of all three should give you an idea of the behavior of these systems on battery.
Across the board battery life of the 13-inch MacBook Air is actually quite similar to the Retina MacBook Pro, just from a much smaller battery and without the variability introduced by the rMBP's discrete GPU. If anything the lack of a discrete GPU makes using the MacBook Air much simpler from a battery life perspective. As much as I love Cody Krieger's gfxCardStatus application, it's nice not having to keep an eye on it to see if something silly has triggered the dGPU.
Under light usage the new 13-inch MacBook Air is easily able to meet Apple's claim of 7 hours of battery life. The 11-inch model does the same to its 5 hours rating, beating it by the same 30 minute margin as the 13.
The medium workload thins the herd a bit, with the 13-inch Air still coming out on top but at 5.35 hours. The 11-inch Air drops below 4 hours, which is an improvement over the previous two generations of 11-inch Airs. Once again we see an example of Ivy Bridge doing better than Sandy Bridge when it comes to mobile power usage.
Under heavy load is really where we see Intel's 22nm process deliver the gold. Here both of the 2012 MacBook Air models do very well. With the 13-inch MBA significantly outpacing even the rMBP with its 95Wh battery, while doing the exact same amount of work.
The 13-inch MacBook Air continues to be Apple's best notebook for those who care about battery life. The 11 offers portability but you do take a significant hit in battery life.
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Pneumothorax - Monday, July 16, 2012 - link
The only way some of the anti-apple fanbois here are going to be placated is if you filled the review with "This laptop is too expensive" "All the other PC ultrabooks including Acer is better" "Don't drink the Apple kool-aid"As a Win7/OSX user myself, I find your reviews to be the most fair and thorough in reviewing Apple products. The earlier rMBP/MBA reviews by others seemed to just read as a re-written Apple press-release.
PS Your rMBP review finally convinced me to get the rMBP, so you could be an Apple shill after all lol.
ananduser - Monday, July 16, 2012 - link
How do you like it so far ?Is 3rd party compatibility an issue with the large panel ?
Have you noticed the UI lag(from the review) when you're mulitasking ?
Does it really get that hot ?
Pneumothorax - Monday, July 16, 2012 - link
Best laptop I've owned and I've had Alienware, Dell, Asus, Lenovo, and the worst - HP. The panel still has teething issues with MS office and lightroom/CS5. The lag is there, but the screen is so good it's overlooked. Tried a buddy's rMBP that has the golden master Mountain Lion installed on it and it's much much smoother than Lion. Mountain lion is to Lion like Win7 was to Vista. Lion is a slow/memory hog.Heatwise, it's much cooler and QUIETER than my 2011 MBP 15. D3 on my 2011 MBP would remind me of Delta CPU fans on prescott CPU ages ago, D3 on my rMBP = fans barely audible.
KoolAidMan1 - Monday, July 16, 2012 - link
Sounds like you're angry because of your own personal biasLepton87 - Tuesday, July 17, 2012 - link
Sadly, I must agree. Lines like that"There's no denying that what ASUS has done is better, it's just not perfect. And as Apple has shown us in the past, it's not fond of stopgap solutions."
Seriously? 200dpi on a 11'' screen is a stopgap solution?
I'm never reading an apple review made by anand again.
KPOM - Tuesday, July 17, 2012 - link
What he means is that Apple likely won't change the screen resolution until they can quadruple it (2880x1800 on the 13.3" and 2732x1536 on the 11.6"). If they go with straight 1080p on the 13" or 11" as ASUS is doing, they would likely have to use a 1.5x scaling option to avoid small text. That isn't something that Apple is likely to do in OS X. So yes, it would be stop gap for Apple, even though it might not be a stop gap for ASUS.Freakie - Tuesday, July 17, 2012 - link
I agree with you De_Com. While Anand still adheres to relatively object testing methods, there is no doubt that the tone throughout any of these Apple products reviews clearly shows Anand's personal opinion towards Apple products. It is a bit disconcerting to come to Anandtech and have just this one little niche seemingly out of place in the large supply of amazing reviews. Thankfully it doesn't happen very often, but it does feel like it totally goes against the grain of all of the other Anandtech reviews.And I echo that I would love to see one of the other writers do one of these Apple reviews. It does seem odd that Anand is always the reviewer, when other reviewers mention owning Apple products and would seem to be able to have the ability to compare Apples to Apples just fine, as well as the rest of the market.
But in the end, this IS Anand's website, and I of course still respect him and the website he has built and while I may not agree with every part of it, I also do not understand every part of him and his opinions and decisions so there very well could just be something that we are missing from our own opinions on the matter.
De_Com - Tuesday, July 17, 2012 - link
Nice to see my comment sparked a bit of lively debate, although I did know I'd get one or two thoughtless responses i.e "oh these Apple haters" or "but it's cool to bash Apple", EnzoFX and Kpom I'm looking at you !Also nice to see Anand respond as well.
I believe Sunburn74 said it best when he likened our subconscious wish not to dismiss or deconstruct the things we use ourselves as it somehow goes against our own wishes.
It was nice to see others also call for another reviewer to be given a crack at an Apple Notebook.
One more thing :- Love the site, Love the reviews, keep it up Anand.
KPOM - Friday, July 20, 2012 - link
Thoughtless response? That describes you a lot more than me. Also, in case you didn't notice, Anand did NOT review the new non-Retina MacBook Pro.phillyry - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Precisely because he didn't care about the non-retina 15" MBP (that's my conclusion anyways).I mean, if you were the head of this website wouldn't you choose to do the reviews that you actually cared about?
I think Anand's been pretty clear about his preference for MacBooks and his absolute obsession with SSDs. Why wouldn't he have a preference (or bias, if you must) for the best excited hardware, with software that he likes, that's going in the direction that he thinks is the future of the notebook industry, namely small form factor ultraportables based on SSDs.
I really don't see the fuss and actually enjoy seeing Anand enjoy doing his work (writing reviews).
It would be nice if people could move past the fanboism debate that rages across the Internet nd just discuss the points made in the review and, imagine this, even the device itself!