The 2013 MacBook Air Review (13-inch)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 24, 2013 12:01 AM ESTMore GPU Performance Numbers
The next set of benchmarks are taken from our 2013 Laptop Bench. Here we're comparing to HD 4000 and HD 4400, both using Acer S7s. Compared to HD 4400 the HD 5000 in Apple's 2013 MBA ends up being around 15% faster in most tests. Compared to Ivy Bridge/HD 4000 the gap ranges from lower single digits in thermally constrained environments to 25% or 40% in the best case scenarios.
3DMark GPU Performance
We close out our look at Intel's HD 5000 performance using a historical collection of 3DMark data. The comparison gives us some more data points to characterize Intel's HD 5000. The data here is all best case scenario for HD 5000 as there are no situations where we hit thermal limits.
On average, Intel's HD 4400 ends up being 18% faster than HD 4000, while Intel's HD 5000 is 31% faster.
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sunman42 - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
"Until OS X Mavericks arrives, you'll have to make sure to pay attention to things like background web browser tabs running Flash from killing your battery life." Or you could just do without Flash, or use Click to Flash, and avoid many very nasty bugs, constant security patches, and battery vampirism. Just, as they say, sayin'.jcbottorff - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
The use of a 64K TCP window may be a feature not a bug. I say this because there often is a need to minimize latency of small packets, like used for Voip or other streaming media. With a TCP window size of 64K, on a 6 Mbps DSL connection, a packet queue of 64Kb takes about 85 milliseconds to drain. This means if you did a 64K TCP send (which optimally is one request to the NIC, with the NIC doing TCP segmentation), followed by a Voip UDP packet, it could be 85 milliseconds before the Voip packet goes out the DSL modem. If the TCP window were 256K, the latency would climb to 85*4=340 milliseconds, an unacceptable delay for Voip. It is possible to use varying TCP window sizes based on the current mix of network activity. Like for example, if you have a Voip call active and you have a TCP connection to a server on the Internet, over DSL modem, you may want to limit the TCP window size. If you only have a file sharing connection to a server on the local subnet, you can use a large window size. It's a lot more complex than just changing one number, unless you don't care about things like streaming media working correctly. OS designers often have to compromise, such that nobody is totally happy, but nobody is really upset either. I think the real question is how well the OS dynamically adjusts things under varying conditions to always give the most optimal user experience possible.SimonO101 - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Can we expect even greater battery life once OS X Mavericks comes online?darwinosx - Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - link
Yes. But if I said I knew this for sure I might be violating an NDA.trip1ex - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Also they should let you sync your MBA to a Mac/PC like an iOS device to help mitigate the 128gb storage in the base model. Or even let you sync to an external drive. I would love an elegant way to offload media particularly.darwinosx - Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - link
There are MANY ways to do this.niico - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I run Windows 8 in a Parallels VM on Mac OS 10.8 - this is my usual setup. If you're looking for a more strenuous battery test I suggest a VM. This often keeps the CPU at 30-50% even when both OS's are idle.It is an increasingly common use case - and many users would be interested to see the battery performance, specially on Haswell.
ctwise - Monday, July 1, 2013 - link
I run Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion on OS/X 10.8 as a SQL Server provider for development. I'm not sure if it's a difference between use cases for VMs or a Parallels vs. VMWare, but I rarely see even a single percentage of usage by my Windows VM.Oscarcharliezulu - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Good review, usual d$&khead comments from apple haters. I love hardware, all brands and watching it improve, it never gets old. Have recently switched to OSX on a 27" iMac at home for the fun of it and have to say now I'm familiar with it I prefer it to windows. Might switch my work laptop to a MBA, use it rather than my iPad+keyboard that I generally also carry around.akdj - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
Lol...exactly how it started for me...some 8 years ago now. Twenty years on PC (first computer was actually an Apple IIe)--& my wife was graduating with her masters degree. She'd been talking about a friend's MacBook for a few months...for her grad gift, I got her one of the old, plastic white MacBooks...my 8 year old son is still using that computer...in stock form daily!That first month...it was hard for me to give it up to her. I loved it. Loved OSx. Within six weeks I'd bought my own 15" MBP. Haven't bought a Windows machine since. For a couple years, I used bootcamp as there were a couple of programs that were only on Windows that I needed. They've since been ported to OSx and I've no need any longer for anything other than OSx
Kinda bums me out I waited as Long as I did. It's amazing having a house full of computers that NEVER need support!