14 DAY TRIAL // Primate Labs’ Geekbench 3 search yields new scores from MacBook Air models introduced earlier this week, indicating that the fourth-generation Haswell chips inside these babies are not much faster than their predecessors. The change in pricing remains the key focus of this upgrade.
Tests carried out using Primate Labs’ Geekbench 3 benchmarking tool churned out 32-bit single-core scores of around 2532 and multi-core scores of around 4781. For comparison, 2013 MacBook Air averaged scores of 2379 single-core and 4480 multi-core, respectively.
However, the list of Core i5 processors up on Wikipedia reveals that Intel’s newest Haswell chips used in the new-generation MacBook Airs are actually cheaper to produce. Apple undoubtedly also gets a considerable discount on top for being such a faithful customer, and with Flash and RAM prices dropping every year, we now know why the $899/€899 price tag was possible.
Pricing aside, the actual flagship feature of the new MacBook Air is battery life, thanks to Intel’s low-power chips.
“Power-efficient fourth generation Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors work in conjunction with OS X Mavericks to give the 13-inch MacBook Air up to 12 hours of battery life and the 11-inch MacBook Air up to 9 hours of battery life,” says the Cupertino giant. “iTunes movie playback times increase to 12 hours on the 13-inch notebook and 9 hours on the 11-inch notebook, adding up to two hours of playback time to the updated MacBook Air.”
The design is virtually unchanged, but Apple is expected to introduce a new model later this year featuring a redesigned body and a 12-inch Retina display.
Apple heavily markets the MacBook Air’s new entry-level price point, and it actually calls the computer “The Perfect Everyday Notebook,” a tagline also used by the company’s SVP of worldwide marketing in his statement from April 29 (the day Apple debuted the new MacBook Airs).
“With MacBook Air starting at $899, there’s no reason to settle for anything less than a Mac,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Macs have never been more popular, and today we’ve boosted the performance and lowered the price of MacBook Air so even more people can experience the perfect everyday notebook.”
Both the 11-inch model and the 13-inch version ship with OS X Mavericks pre-installed, while all the iLife and iWork apps come free with the purchase of any one of these Macs.