Being able to rely on nearly 10 hours of battery life or more in most normal use cases is just ridiculous. The 11” Air, by virtue of its smaller display, is slightly more efficient than its larger sibling, but the 42% advantage in battery capacity pushes the 13” Air’s battery life into the insane range. Want to take the Air for a weekend away and not plug it in once, iPad style? Depending on how much of your usage can get pushed to a smartphone, that’s a legitimate and realistic possibility. I’ve never even thought to take the power cord with me anywhere in the month that I’ve had it. But other than that caveat, the overall power consumption of Haswell is an absolute game changer. That’s a really important corner to turn for the notebook market, double digit battery life without having to resort to an extended or secondary battery like some business notebooks have offered in the past.Īs Anand covered in his recent Haswell ULT battery life article, Intel still needs to work on the power efficiency of the Haswell video decode engine, since ARM-based SoCs still hold a sizable advantage there. And not just by a little, it’s a pretty significant step up. Granted, my 3rd-generation iPad now has a year of wear on the battery, but still-it’s longer lasting than my iPad was when new, and it’s also longer lasting than the 4th gen iPad. The 11” isn’t quite that far, but it still has better battery life than my iPad. The image from Anand’s 13” Air review showing an estimated 16 hours of battery life was awesome, even if the OS X battery runtime estimate tends to be wildly optimistic in the early part of a battery cycle. Obviously, this isn’t exclusive to just Apple-any Haswell ULT Ultrabook with 40-50Wh of battery capacity should get you 8-10 hours of battery life.īut it’s honestly amazing to use a fully fledged notebook that can battle Atom and ARM for battery life. With there being not much in the way of performance upgrades or new features compared to previous generation Airs, the battery life improvement is basically at the heart of what makes the new Air attractive. Honestly, for me, this is by far the most important part of the review.

Macbook air 11 inch 2011 battery life