Apple MacBook Air 13-Inch (2014)

 

Open up the slim laptop, and you'll be greeted by a familiar 13.3-inch, LED-backlit screen. The display has a 1,440-by-900 resolution, with brilliant colors and a glossy finish that is a tad reflective, but offers deep blacks and colors that pop. The screen looks just as good as the last time we saw it, but there are two additional elements to consider. The first is resolution; spurred on by the Retina display on Apple's MacBook Pro, competitors have left full HD resolution behind, and have ramped up much higher. The Samsung Book 9 Plus comes with a 3,200-by-1,800, Quad HD+ display.
The second element is touch. Since
the introduction of Windows 8, the number of touch-enabled Windows laptops has absolutely exploded, and it has become a must-have feature on most ultraportables and ultrabooks. The MacBook Air doesn't offer touch, but it also doesn't need to. While Windows 8 pushes the touch interface hard, Apple hasn't brought touch-screen capabilities over to the Mac OS yet, making it exclusive to the iPad$399.99 at Best Buy and iPhone$547.55 at Amazon. If you're already a Mac user, you won't miss touch because you never had it; if you're more familiar with touch-friendly Windows, however, you'll only find it on PCs.
Even without a touch screen, the MacBook Air still supports all sorts of intuitive touch and gesture controls, by way of the large, glass-topped, multi-touch trackpad. Apple's trackpad supports all of the tapping and swiping you might want, and the clickable surface is better without right and left options than any clickpad we've seen on a Windows machine. The keyboard is also quite good, with well-spaced chiclet-style keys, backlit with an ambient light sensor that turns up the glow in darker environments. A few competitors have tried to improve upon the chiclet-style design with sculpted keycaps and different finishes, but the MacBook Air keyboard is still very, very good.
A pair of stereo speakers are stashed inside, pumping sound up through the keyboard. While listening to our test bass track, the Silent Shout, by the Knife, I heard a fair amount of low-end, which is good, given the lack of a subwoofer or true stereo separation. In a few other songs, the sound offered good quality at most volumes, though it did sound a bit shrill at max.
Features
On the sides of the MacBook Air you'll find only a few ports, with one USB 3.0 port and a headphone jack on the left, and a second USB 3.0 port, an SDXC card slot, and a Thunderbolt port on the right. You won't find an HDMI port on the laptop—a useful port found on most competitors—but you can convert the Thunderbolt port to HDMI or other common ports, like Ethernet or VGA, through an adapter dongle (sold separately). Above the display is a 720p webcam, and inside the MacBook Air is equipped with 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.

Inside, our review unit boasts 128GB of PCIe-based flash storage, comparable to the 128GB solid-state drives (SSD) used in other systems, though other manufacturers may still opt to use the slower SATA connection. There's not a lot of space available, with only 120GB free out of the box, but it's par for the course among ultraportables. Apple also takes a different approach to RAM, soldering the memory right onto the motherboard, which means that there's no way to upgrade it after purchase. Our review unit came with 8GB of RAM, but the default configuration is only 4GB.
The single biggest difference between Apple's MacBook Air and the many ultraportable competitors is OS X 10.9.2 (Mavericks)—our own Edward Mendelson calls it the "best consumer-level desktop operating system." Included with Mavericks is the iLife suite (including iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand) and iWork, which includes Pages, Numbers, and Keynote; Apple's equivalents to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It also comes with iCloud, Apple's cloud storage, which lets you back up and sync to and from any Mac or iOS device.
Apple covers the MacBook Air 13-inch with a standard one-year warranty and 90 days of phone support, but you can add additional coverage by purchasing AppleCare extended protection ($249 for three years).
Performance The design may remain unchanged, but the internal hardware has been upgraded, giving the MacBook Air a bump up in processing capability and speed. Our unit came with a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4260U dual-core processor, paired with 8GB of RAM (up from the 4GB that comes in the standard configuration). With the new processor, the MacBook Air also has Intel HD Graphics 5000, Intel's integrated graphics solution.
In Cinebench R11.5, the new MacBook
Air scored 2.57 points, a significant increase over the previous iteration (2.46 points), and ahead of category leaders like the Acer S7-392-6411 (2.51 points) and the Samsung Book 9 Plus (2.50 points). The new hardware also leads the MacBook Air to faster multimedia performance, completing Handbrake in 1 minute 18 seconds, and Photoshop in 5:05 in testing. By comparison, the 2013 MacBook Air completed those same tests in 3:15 (Handbrake) and 7:07 (Photoshop).
Graphics performance is also the best of the bunch among similarly equipped systems (i.e., Core i5 with integrated graphics). The MacBook Air scored 24 frames per second (fps) in Heaven at 1,366-by-768 resolution and low detail settings, and 14fps at native resolution and higher detail. These frame rates gave it a narrow lead over the previous MacBook Air (which scored 23fps and 13fps, respectively), but put it clearly in the lead when compared with the Acer S7-392-6411 (15fps and 5fps, respectively) and the Samsung Book 9 Plus (18fps and 7fps, respectively). It's not enough for serious gaming—you might be able to get World of Warcraft running on the MacBook Air, but you'll need to pull back on the detail settings, and you'll see some stuttering whenever too many graphical elements or characters are on screen.
The MacBook Air has always offered excellent battery life, and this latest iteration is no exception. In our battery rundown test, the system lasted 15 hours 51 minutes, easily outlasting the Samsung Book 9 Plus (8:15) and the Acer S7-392-6411 (8:22) by several hours. While those other laptops may take you through your workday, the MacBook Air can also take you through your morning commute, your lunch hour, and your evening. It also boasts 30 days of standby time, meaning that you can use the MacBook Air, close the lid, and then simply open it back up to keep using it, even after days or weeks in standby mode. This not only impressive, it's actually a bit better than the previous MacBook Air, which lasted an otherwise unmatched 15:33 when we tested it last June. With the bump in overall battery life, the latest MacBook Air is still hours ahead of the competition.
Conclusion
This year's Apple MacBook Air benefits from an updated Intel processor, but sticks to a tried and true design that doesn't need to change. The result is improved performance while retaining all of the thin-and-light portability that has made the MacBook Air so popular. Windows fans and touch enthusiasts will need to look elsewhere for those specific features—the Ultrabook Editors' Choice Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus offers both, along with a high-res display—but the Apple MacBook Air offers better performance and dawn-to-dusk battery life that competitors still can't touch. It all makes the latest 13-inch MacBook Air our Editors' Choice for ultraportable laptops, replacing the previous model as our top pick.