Apple is updating its thin and light MacBook Air notebook lineup, bringing Intel’s 4th-generation Core processors to both the 11.6 inch and 13.3 inch models. The company says that should boost graphics performance by as much as 40 percent, while providing nearly twice as much battery life.

macbook air_001

The new 11.6 inch MacBook Air will get up to 9 hours of battery life, which is a big jump from the 5 hours you got from earlier versions. The new 13.3 inch model jumps from 7 hours of run time to 12, for “all-day” battery life.

Intel’s new “Haswell” chips are likely responsible for much of that change. Intel’s latest chips use less power than earlier processors, while offering more powerful graphics and CPU performance.

Apple is also adding 802.11ac WiFi to its new MacBook Air models.

One thing the company isn’t changing is the price: Starting today you’ll be able to pick up an 11.6 inch model with 128GB of storage for $999 and a 13.3 inch MacBook Air for $1099.

via Engadget

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60 replies on “Apple introduces new MacBook Airs with up to 12 hours battery life”

  1. Everyone who just bought one of these is seriously bumming right now! Considerably better performance and way better battery life, sucks if you just missed those freebies. Of course, most people who didn’t know this was coming will probably never know what they just missed either. Ignorance truly can be bliss.

  2. Intel haswell in the mobile sector seems unchallenged and nothing AMD or ARM can do to stop it.

    1. Haswell is much more expensive than any AMD or ARM system. The AMD systems in particular give plenty of performance for most people at a much lower cost.

      1. Doesn’t matter Intel haswell in mobile will sell very well. AMD system need to do more than just give plenty of performance at a low cost. There is nothing special about AMD systems they just mediocre now Instead SUCKY that they were with Brazos. AMD still uses too much power for the mediocre performance.

        1. AMD systems do indeed do more than give plenty of performance at low cost, they do it at low power levels as well.

          You might think that Kabini uses too much power but under full load it used around half the power of the last gen intel chips, that’s pretty efficient in most peoples books.

          1. Its not fast enough to catch up to Intel Haswell which uses the same amount of power and is much faster in both CPU and GPU!!!!!!

        2. Go troll somewhere else please. ARM isn’t relevant to this conversation, and the issues AMD has keeping up with Intel have been well documented. As to Brazos, it cleans Atom’s clock in performance at similar or lower power consumption, and has for quite some time, if you don’t see a use for something like that, it’s a failure of your imagination, not the product.

          1. No you’re Wrong AMD Brazos has the same power usage as Intel ULV and performed as well as Atom.

          2. Not when you added a GPU to the Atom, then the E350 was more efficient.

          3. They were good enough for some amd fanbois. Not me or most people who actually need something out of a low power PC.

          4. Sure, Brazos wasn’t very powerful, but AMD have rectified that now with Kabini which is more than twice as powerful while also using much less power.

          5. You mean 2x cores which are so weak they don’t do anything. Kabini uses far less power but its not good enough. Kabini does NOTHING special so Intel Haswell is going to crush it into the GROUND!!!!

          6. The Special thing Kabini does is give reasonable performance at a much lower price than anything intel.

            Haswell is too expensive, I thought you were into saving money?

          7. I am but performance and low power come first. Not If Intel haswell performs well which it does. That is not special at all sorry. That is just AMD improving on Brazos and selling at the same price point.

          8. Sorry to break it to you, but you can’t have it all, you can have either performance OR low power, not both, so which is it.

            Sure Kabini is just AMD improving Brazos, but it such a big improvement that it puts other incremental improvements in the shade.

          9. Actually there is a third element and that’s price. I can have two out of the three but not all three. AMD kabini has low power and price but i’d rather have performance and low power even if it costs more.

          10. That’s only true to a small degree, to get more than a bit more performance, the power requirements will go up a lot more.

          11. Not entirely that is only true for AMD the worst CPU maker IN HISTORY!!!!

          12. LOL, your pool of knowledge is more of a puddle isn’t it!

            You never heard of Via, Rise Technology, Transmeta, IDT, Nat. Semi, Cyrix. The list of failed x86 CPU makers is very long, but does not contain AMD. AMD is probably the second most successful CPU maker in history

          13. I forgot about those that they don’t matter. Via is better than AMD at least Via actually makes a decent X86 CPU unlike AMD!!!!

          14. Trying to make up for your lack of knowledge with more trolling…. some novel “Via”-related trolling for a change… but otherwise so predictable

          15. No AMD makes Terrible x86 CPU’s and that is fact otherwise they wouldn’t so far behind in IPC and use twice as much power NO JOKE.

          16. I was mainly talking about the FX series. However it uses 22 more watts than Intel’s Core i3-3220. AMD has a faster GPU but the CPU is a power hog.

          17. The FX series is for big boxes running heavily multi-threaded tasks, great for some people, but not mainstream.

            22W??? where are you getting that figure from, the A10-6700 only uses 13W more than the i3-2110 under full load. And considering it flattens the core-i3’s at IPG gaming even you should be able to appreciate that the extra watts are going towards a vastly more power IGP.

          18. The Problem is that the extra watts go to powering the power hogging piledriver Cores. Oh I got that figure From the link you sent me but its 18 watts difference NOT 22 watts.

          19. If the extra Watts are going to the CPU cores, then AMD’s IGP must be super efficient.

          20. AMD’s CPU’s are known for hogging power like no tomorrow and wish AMD would go mobile and thus reducing their power usage at the cost of a bit of the increase in performance. Thought the PS4 is looking like a good buy I am not sure I would pick it up right away.

          21. Any evidence for AMD CPU’s hogging power? maybe they are “known” for that, but that doesn’t make it true. I’ve seen that AMD’s 19W CPUs actually use less power than intels 17W chips. And intel has nothing to match the low power at reasonable performance capabilities of the new Temash/Kabini line.

          22. Wrong Intel has Haswell and its something that AMD can’t match. Sure its expensive but you can’t beat it for the performance per watt and the IGP power. Kabini sucks power like no tomorrow for a low end APU. Above 20 watts is unacceptable for a APU of Kabini’s class.

          23. Sure, AMD can’t match the performance per Watt of Haswell, but Haswell can’t reach its lower power points and it’s much cheaper. It’s a very different proposition. Again, you’re ignoring price, Kabini will probably cost less than half of any core i3 system

          24. Price isn’t my first priority Performance per Watt is. A revision of the 3.9 watt temash to make it into a 2 watt APU would be awesome.

          25. True, that would be pretty cool, they’re going to need a few improvements to compete with next years Atom.

          26. Intel’s 22nm atom is no joke will have better power consumption than even arm has now so AMD needs to step up their game and surpass ARM as well.

          27. The 22nm Atom is an unknown quantity at this point, it intel make it too capable then it will detract from the Haswell chips, so I reckon it will be below Temash in usability.

          28. I wouldn’t worry too much because Intel haswell is a monster when it comes to IPC there is no better.

          29. Sure Haswell is an impressive chip, but the new Atom will be the real competition for Temash.

          30. And not only will Atom compete with Temash but it will downright demolish AMD temash.

          31. Intel Atom’s IGP is 3 times faster and its CPU is quad core as well so AMD has no chance. Intel 22nm Atom has a SDP of 2 watts nothing AMD has can top that.

          32. Sure, I actually believe intel that the next-gen Atom will have a 3x more powerful IGP. But that would still leave it at about half the speed of the previous generation AMD Brazos:

            https://uk.hardware.info/reviews/2700/16/cpu-shoot-out-intel-atom-d2700-vs-amd-e-450-benchmarks-integrated-gpu-3dmark

            And Brazos was well overtaken by the new Jaguar line, so all the indications are that Temash will have a much more powerful GPU.

            Again with the SDP??? Did intel just make that up so that it’s products look good and hope that less intelligent people compare it with AMD’s TDP? What’s the projected “TDP” of the new Atom?

          33. AMD’s TDP is less than meaningful because of turbo dock. AMD temash is a 14 watt chip not a 6 watt one. 3 watts from what I hear. Intel’s products are better than AMD’s. Kaveri at best is going to be a 30% boost in IGP and that is barely enough to topple Intel Iris Pro but not the refresh Intel haswell 2.0.

          34. Jebus, You still don’t understand Turbo-Dock????

            The A6-1450 is an 8W chip running at 1Ghz under battery power.
            OR
            A 14W chip running at 1.4Ghz running on mains power.

            There, that’s as simple as I can make it for you. It doesn’t “make AMD’s TDP less meaningful” if you have any powers of understanding.

            “Intels products are better” It that were true, then they would be cheaper, they’re not.

          35. Wrong, Intel likes to charge a lot for its CPU’s so they are expensive even thought they are much better than ANYTHING AMD’s got. Yes it does make AMD’s TDP meaningless because when its plugged it would use 20 watts of power instead 10 watts.

          36. AMD go to all the trouble of giving consumers an innovative dual-TDP chip, and just because you can’t understand it, it’s “meaningless”. I’m sure if intel came out with such an innovation, you’d be hailing it as the best thing since sliced bread.

            Intel likes to charge a lot for it’s CPUs because people are generally stupid and follow brand names, even when they would clearly be better off with an AMD CPU.

          37. And When would people be better off with an AMD CPU? From where I see it Intel NUKES AMD in everything CPU wise AMD can’t hold a candle in gaming. Maybe but AMD’s version sucks for me because I wouldn’t be running it on battery power so it would uses twice the power for little gain.

          38. AMD still beats intel by a wide margin in IGP gaming, most peope don’t buy discreet GPU’s these days. And the difference in multi-threaded benchmarks (most of them) are negligible.

            I’m not recommending you get a Temash system for the desktop, you should be looking at the Kabini systems though, because it”l be the only way to get a reasonable sub-20W desktop.

          39. Wrong Intel Atom 22nm and Intel Haswell at 22nm are both much faster ways to get sub-20 watt performance. Yeah that is true now in days. Intel’s IGP on Haswell is much faster than EVERY Kabini/Temash chip out there.

          40. Sure, you’ll be able to get a sub 20W Atom, but please prove that a sub 20W Haswell NUC is possible.

            Sure Haswell’s IGP will be faster than Kabini, but it’ll be at best 2x faster for 6x the price, so fine for people who don’t think with their wallet.

    1. AMD’s Kabini chips are much cheaper to produce than Haswell and will end up in much cheaper laptops. AMD will be fine

      1. No AMD won’t be fine they are in big trouble. Intel Haswell 2.0 will make sure AMD has lost its IGP lead.

        1. What’s Haswell 2.0. Do you mean the updated Haswell stepping that they have planned for the middle of next year. You think that’s going to make a big difference?

        2. Haswell 2.0 fixes a USB error that they SHIPPED. Broadwell is a year out, and likely won’t be the big deal you’re expecting it to be.

          As Haswell showed in relative performance increases over Ivy Bridge, there isn’t a lot of room left for huge IPC improvements in their core architecture, so I’d be shocked if we saw more than a nominal 5-10% improvement on the CPU side, and some more GPU increases with all that spare silicon space the next shrink will make available. But even that’s going to be hard with the conventional memory bandwidth limits they’ll be running hard up to using DDR3 or 4 over a 128bit bus, so there are serious problems that simply throwing more at the situation won’t fix for the next generations as we run out of available process improvement space in the world of silicon.

          Which all means that AMD should begin catching up as the law of diminishing returns hits Intel with the reality bat. Which is good actually a better thing for consumers than Intel running completely away from the competition, and AMD collapsing.

          I’ve been around long enough to see both companies be on top. When AMD is successful Intel competes and does wonderful things. When Intel is a monopoly without competition, it deliberately slows progress to maximize it’s return on investment, the P3 and P4 (especially the pricing before AMD came along with it’s Athlons) were examples of that to anyone with eyes.

          If you’re a hardware enthusiast, you should quit making these asinine comments which aren’t based in anything but fandom, and root for both teams to be successful and innovate so that everyone in the world can ‘win’ instead of a handful of short sighted idiots who only care about getting their daily dose of schadenfreude.

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