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.
