TWELVE hours, 15 minutes. That's the video playback time the new MacBook Air delivered in our tests - conducted at 75 per cent screen brightness on a 13-inch model.
Last week, we pitted the 2013 MacBook Air against its predecessor, the 2012 13-inch model, and found it no ordinary refresh.
Placed side by side, the two models look identical and I could tell them apart physically only because the 2013 model has two small holes for dual microphones on the left-hand side. Underneath the hood, it's a different story.
The most obvious change from 2012 is the Air's adoption of new computer chips, known as Haswell, released by Intel on June 4. A couple of years ago, Intel flagged Haswell as offering greatly increased battery life without degrading overall computer performance, thanks to lower powered transistors.
This is our first try-out of so-called fourth-generation Haswell computer chips and we're not disappointed.
But that's just part of the battery story. Apple actually has lowered the speed of the processor from the 2012 model. Last year, the equivalent 13-inch Air sported a 1.8 gigahertz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor. This year, it's still dual-core i5 but rated at just 1.3GHz. That means less speed but battery savings.
We tested the two processors using the Cinebench cross-platform test suite and found there was a drop in processor performance - the 2013 Air scored 2.45, its predecessor 2.58 in the benchmark. It's not dramatic, but a drop nonetheless.
But the change is made less significant by Intel's clever turbo boost feature. Both 2012 and 2013 chips can boost their performance from 1.8GHz and 1.5GHz respectively up to 2.6GHz if the Air's resources aren't overtaxed. In English, that means if the Air isn't stressed, its processor can run a hell of a lot faster.
Apple also has done the most obvious thing to increase the battery life: it has increased the battery capacity, here by just under 7 per cent, to 7150 milliampere hours. And it has resisted the temptation to further increase display resolution. Recently we reviewed Toshiba's worthy Kira ultrabook which has a beautiful, higher than full-HD resolution screen. But battery life suffers.
In the case of the Air, Apple, which prompted a manufacturer screen resolution war with its "Retina" display marketing, has made a strategic withdrawal from it, and is touting battery life instead. It's a shrewd move as I think many users would be worried more about their Air getting through the day than with higher resolution displays.
There's another big story with the 2013 Air, and that's the new solid-state drives that, according to our tests, write data to disk at more than double the speed (120 per cent) of last year's Air.
The 2013 Air also reads data from its drive at almost 800 megabytes per second. Last year's clocked around 480MBps, according to our tests with QuickBench. This big improvement is due to the disks connecting to the processor in a new way.
Let me try to explain this simply. Those of us who have pulled apart an older computer or built one know that you traditionally slot the graphics card directly into the motherboard using what's called a PCI express slot. That's like connecting the card to the computer's data superhighway and the data flow is fast.
Traditionally, the hard drive resides in a separate compartment of the computer and the data flow occurs using a ribbon-like SATA cable or, worse, ATA cable. Data flow hence is slower. Imagine if you could slot a hard drive directly into the computer's data superhighway using a PCI express connection, just like a graphics card. Imagine the speed boost.
In about 2007-08, Utah tech company Fusion-io (a firm associated with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak) imagined exactly that and today has contracts with Facebook and Apple to supply their data centres with PCI Express-based solid-state drives.
It's these cards that store your dog and cat photos on Facebook and Apple iCloud data, and their data transfer speeds are up to 6 gigabytes per second.
Now Apple has brought this technology to the MacBook Air, the first consumer notebook we know of to have a data superhighway connection for its solid-state drive. The data transfer rate isn't 6GBps but at almost 800 megabits per second. It's a huge improvement for the little Air.
Incidentally, the company benefiting from making these PCI Express solid-state drives appears to be Apple's smartphone rival, Samsung. Teardowns of the 2013 Air confirm the SSDs, as of now, are Samsung's.
There are other improvements in the 2013 Air. The embedded Intel HD Graphic 5000 card is faster, scoring 24.15 frames per second as opposed to 21.97fps last year using Cinebench's graphics benchmark. That means smoother graphics on the new Air, but if you need higher-end gaming performance, buy a faster notebook.
There are several other improvements. The 11-inch Airs have 128GB of solid state storage instead of 64GB, and Air prices are about $100 less than last year.
Apple also has upped the speed of the Air's WiFi transfer rate, adopting the so-called 802.11ac wireless transfer protocol that promises a threefold improvement. That means faster and more reliable streaming of data and video to and from the Air. You'll need to connect the Air to routers that support 802.11ac to get the speed boost.
The ports along the sides are the same as before: a MagSafe power connector, USB 3.0 port and headphone jack on the left side, and Thunderbolt port and another USB3.0 port.
The 2013 MacBook Air introduces revolutionary consumer technology that we'll see trotted out more widely soon on Windows 8 notebooks. Overall, it is a significant improvement on the already great 2012 model yet cheaper, and with more than 12 hours of video battery life, a notebook that will last all day.
