MacBook Air refresh brings Haswell and $100 price drop

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Apple By Russell Holly Apr. 29, 2014 7:29 am
Apple’s smallest laptops got a small bump in specs and a small drop in price last night, but those of you hoping for a Retina Display are going to be waiting a bit longer.
Despite a small army of Ultrabooks and tablet hybrids from a number of manufacturers, Apple has reigned supreme for quite a while in the tiny laptop market. The MacBook Air is a careful balance of design and power, and while they lack what the rest of the Apple lineup has to offer when it comes to display resolution and raw processing power, they more than make up for it with battery life. This new spec bump helps deal with the processing power a little, and at the same time drops the price low enough to make comparing it to the Windows lineup a lot easier.
The 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models have been boosted to a 1.4GHz Core i5 processor with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage for the base model and 256GB of storage in the top 11-inch and 13-inch models. These baseline models are configurable with upgrade options to a 1.7GHz Core i7, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. The difference in performance should be subtle, but it adds at least an hour of battery life to each of the models when watching video according to Apple.
It’s entirely possible that this change to the MacBook Air lineup is the last update before a Retina option becomes available later this year, but there’s no evidence that Apple is ready to make such a change just yet. The displays Apple uses in their other laptops consume a lot of power and are a great deal thicker than the existing MacBook Air. While it’s fun to hope, for right now these are the best ultra-thin laptops on the market today.



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