Lab Tested: New MacBook Air offers best battery life of any Apple laptop
When Apple revealed the new MacBook Air at WWDC, the highlighted feature was its drastically improved battery life. While Macworld Lab didn’t experience the 12-hour battery life cited by Apple, our tests do show that the new MacBook Air lasts considerably longer than before. And our results were the best we've seen from an Apple laptop.
Apple
To test battery life, we ran two different tests on the new models, last year’s models, and a 2013 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. In both tests we set the brightness to maximum and made sure that automatic brightness adjustment was off, backlit keyboards were off, and Screen Saver was set to never start.
Movie test
In the first test we looped a movie clip in full screen mode with Wi-Fi disabled. The new 11-inch MacBook Air lasted 6 hours and 6 minutes, compared to just 3 hours and 34 minutes for the 2012 model. The new 13-inch standard configuration MacBook Air lasted 8 hours and 18 minutes, 36 percent longer than the new 11-inch MacBook Air, and 65 percent longer than last year’s 13-inch MacBook Air. Compared to a 2013 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the 13-inch MacBook Air lasted 75 percent longer.
We also ran the tests on “ultimate” configure-to-order (CTO) MacBook Air models from this year and from last year. There wasn’t too much of a battery life hit on the new CTO model compared to the standard configuration; the standard configuration model lasted just 11 minutes longer than the CTO unit that has a faster processor, more RAM, and twice the hard drive capacity. Comparing this year’s CTO “ultimate” to last year’s, we saw that the new model lasted 65 percent longer.
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