The new 11 dies about 10% faster than last year's model in this test. The new 11 also loses out in the battery life department, but the drop isn't nearly as significant. There was something unique about that model that has since been lost. It lasted more than 60% longer than the 11-inch Air despite only having a 42% increase in battery capacity. I'm not entirely sure why the 2010 13-inch MacBook Air did so well in our test. If you're used to using your Air as a glorified typewriter, expect less battery life with the new model. While the new Air still delivers a respectable 6.9 hours of battery life in our lightest test, it's no where near what last year's model provided. The new 13-inch MacBook Air doesn't fare as well. Last year's 13-inch Air did amazingly well in our light web browsing battery life test, shattering even Apple's own expectations for the system. The results here are comparable to what you'd see typing a document in TextEdit or reading documents.

This test represents the longest battery life you can achieve on the platform while doing minimal work. The wireless connection is enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away. Each page forwards on to the next in the series after 20 seconds.Īll screen savers are disabled, but the hard drive is allowed to go to sleep if there's no disk activity. Here we're simply listening to MP3s in iTunes on repeat while browsing through a series of webpages with no flash on them. It wasn't too long ago that the 15-inch MacBook Pro only had a 50Wh battery so this new 13-inch MacBook Air should be a good upgrade for users of older MacBook Pros even from a battery life standpoint. The new Air models retain the same battery capacities as their predecessors: 35Wh for the 11 and 50Wh for the 13. On top of that there's also power gating and architectural efficiencies to take into account. The CPU and GPU are both on 32nm compared to 45/40nm for the previous generation. The 2011 Air gets the benefits of integration. The Core 2 is a very mature architecture that uses very little power under load. Last year's MacBook Air used a 45nm Intel Core 2 Duo CPU paired with an NVIDIA chipset. We've already established that the new MacBook Air lineup is significantly faster than its predecessor, but what does that do to battery life? Interestingly enough with a couple exceptions, not too much.

Macbook air 11 inch mid 2011 battery