MacBook Air review (13-inch, mid-2012)

If I held up last year's MacBook Air and this year's, you'd never know the difference — until you turn them on, that is. The new Air comes with Intel's latest Ivy Bridge chips, starting with a 1.8GHz Core i5 processor, plus 4GB of RAM, integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics, and 128GB of flash storage.

Both in benchmarks and in regular use, there's a genuinely noticeable improvement in overall performance. Apps launch faster, especially intensive ones like iMovie; it's also hard to get the machine to slow down and present the dreaded Spinning Rainbow Wheel of Death. Lots of tabs, Flash videos, managing lots of photos — all these things used to slow down the Air, and now it breezes through them with ease. Anyone who's tried importing video or RAW photos on an Air will definitely appreciate the extra punch.

Our benchmarks and tests back up that experience. Geekbench shows about a 20 percent bump in the Macbook Air's overall performance, and every individual test we ran was much improved as well. We transferred a 2.68GB movie file from a Seagate SSD to the Air’s internal storage in 25.1 seconds over USB 3.0, compared to one minute, 15 seconds on the previous model. Transferring 455 photos? 17 seconds on the new model, 51 on the old. Importing that same 2.68GB video into iTunes required 19 minutes, 50 seconds — it took 24:45 on the 2011 Air. It still can't measure up to the Pro lineup, which nearly doubles the Air's Geekbench scores, but it's a markedly more impressive piece of machinery now.

I'd guess that for many people, the most obvious upgrade is going to be the jump to USB 3.0, but across the board the 20 percent improvement feels about right. It's enough to be noticeably better, without feeling like you've upgraded to a new class of laptop.

The computer boots in 14 seconds, and I went from totally off to watching a YouTube video in 21 — the flash storage really sings here. Last year's device was about seven seconds slower in both tests, and it's still among the faster machines we've tested. Whether booting, shutting down, sleeping, or waking, the computer pops to life remarkably quickly.

Graphics are clearly improved, too: we played Portal 2 on the new Air, and never dropped below 29 frames per second at native resolution — that's a very playable number. The Air is easily capable of streaming 1080p video at full screen, though it stuttered pretty heavily trying to play back 4K footage. This is still no gamer’s machine, but it’s plenty capable for simple gaming or watching movies.

All that extra power does take its toll on battery life, though. In our battery test, which cycles through a series of websites and high-res images with the screen at 65 percent brightness, the new Air lasted five hours, 34 minutes. That's more than an hour less than last year's Air. In practical use, the numbers are a little more even: heavy usage seems to strain the battery a bit less than on the previous model, so if you're gaming or using Photoshop the newest Air might even last slightly longer — the Air I own drains really quickly with iPhoto or Aperture running, and that's not the case on the new model. Still, for light use the old model is still a better bet.. I typically do a bit of both throughout a day, and I got about seven hours of regular use out of both machines.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEr5yrn5VjsLC5jmtnampfa3xzfY5sZ3JuYmqBcLnAnJmop5tirqq%2BjKucr6GVrHpyf4yipZygXaK2pXmRaWhr