mid 13 Air teardown

not many major diffrences, bigger battery wireless AC, a move to PCIe Storage and Haswell

MacBook Air 13" Mid 2013 Teardown - iFixit

 

So wish they put the retina on the air. I have never owed anything Apple but because PC manufacturers can't seem to build one W8 system without some huge compromising feature I actually walked into an i store.. which is a really big deal for me. The air has it all, great BQ, great KB and probably the best touch pad out there. But like the PC side they kill it with putting a very very dated low resolution screen. Even the sales person at the i store admitted to me he was very disappointed for the lack of retina option on the air. So now I am forced to wait yet again for Samsung to update their series 7 ultra and 9 13" ultra-portables.

Let me say that Apple lost a real opportunity to gain new Apple customers. If the air had the retina RIGHT NOW that would have been the first decent ultra-portable with good battery life. Sony's new vaio 13 pro is DOA already. Reports of excessive heat and poor squeaky BQ on deck and KB board flex.. etc.. sharp corners that dig into the lap.. Then there is the Samsung's ultraportables that are years ahead of the MB air with smaller form factor, better speakers and IPS screens etc.. but still only ivy bridge. Apple so blew it sticking with the crap display on the air. This opportunity will never come again being the PC side will have many good systems with haswell in the coming months. Tim cook is an idiot I'm sorry to say. He is worried that a retina air would cannibalize his MB pros but what he failed to realize is he could have gained many brand new customers to Apple. Especially right now when the PC side has nothing out yet for haswell and W8 still in unfavorable terms with the public in general. Bad decision making Apple.

 

The Windows ultrabook I have high hopes for is the Asus Zenbook Infinity, if the build quality is there as well as battery life it will be a nice MBA competitor. Right now, I agree that there is nothing that can touch the MBA as far as ultrabooks are concerned. The current zenbooks do come pretty close though, as do some others.

I may not be much of a fan of Apple's cooling designs on the macbooks, but I gotta say they do make very clean looking interiors as well as exteriors. Notebook manufacturers could use some of that.

 

Retina screen would have had one large negative .... killed the battery life. Remember how the retina 15" had to jump its battery capacity by 50% to maintain the same runtime?

and yes their cooling sucks. right now I hope Lenovo drops their X1C touchpad into more of their business lines and since it is synaptics we can find it in other machines too that thing is a dream to use.

 

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I'm not sure how much more power retina takes but why can't Apple think out of the box here? Who says it has to be some insane resolution. Even 900P IPS on the air would be great. Or 1080P. It would still be far better then what it has now. Best thing would be to have display options but I know Apple does not think like that. I can imagine a MB air 13 with a matte 1080P IPS like the one I saw on the new Samsung series 9 (non touch). Absolutely beautiful screen. It was so nice I would have bought it at bestbuy if it had a haswell in it and 256 SSD.

The point is, Samsung has got their series 7 ultra (touch 13 1080P IPS) and their series 9 (1080P IPS matte non touch) at around 6-7 hours battery for 7 ultra and probably a good 6 for the series 9 using ivy bridge right now. Once they drop haswell into these machines we should see 9 hours easily if not more. Sure its not 12 hours like the MB air 13 but I went to the i store yesterday and the mb air 13 screen looked like complete crap compared to the beautiful series 9 screen. I'd gladly give up a few hours and settle for 9 hours battery life for such a nice upgrade.

 

I disagree. The MacBook Pro 13'' has a 63.5 watt-hour battery. The retina MacBook Pro 13'' has a 74 watt-hour battery. That is a 16.5% larger battery. They both provide 7 hours of battery life, according to Apple. So, without that 16.5% increase, the battery life for the retina 13'' would have been around 5.5-6 hours.

Now, the new MacBook Air 2013 has a 54.4Wh battery, an increase of 8.8% compared to the MacBook Air 2012. Yet, Apple managed to increase the battery life from 7 hours to 12 hours. It seems to me that there's plenty of battery life to spare to add a retina display, and still improve battery life drastically over the past generation. The Haswell CPU largely contributes to this.

 

the Air also has a ULV processor that pulls much less power than the one in the Retina.

besides price and trying to make this their cheapest machine, I don't think they'd have power problems adding Retina, but they still want a reason for people to buy the Retina models for now.

 

MBA 13 is already 1440x900.

I'm not convinced Full HD is the way to go. I know from my VAIO Z experience that 1920x1080 on a 13" screen is too much for me using 100% scaling in Windows, and 1600x900 at 100% scaling looks better than 1920x1080 at 125% scaling. Windows just doesn't scale nicely enough to make 1920x1080 worthwhile on a 13" IMHO. And Mac OS X doesn't give you any scaling options at all, aside from virtual resolutions on the retina models.

I've switched back and forth between 1440x900 and 1680Nx1050 on the rMPB 13 and I think I'd be OK with 1680x1050 on a 13" largely because the 16:10 aspect makes the screen taller. But even that is too squinty for most buyers. And I'd like to have the choice to drop to 1440x900 when my eyes are tired.

So retina would be great, but otherwise I'd rather they stick with 1440x900. And I really wouldn't want them to switch to 16:9 displays just so they could put the "Full HD" label in the marketing.