2013 13 inch MacBook Air Performance Benchmarks

Updated: June 14, 2013

When it comes to the latest Apple releases, you can always expect to find the latest coverage and benchmarks over from Jonathan over at tldtoday.

He was able to get a hold of the just-released 13 inch model which is packing Intel’s latest 4th generation Core processors and a beefed up battery life which combined with Haswell’s improved power efficiency, should result in great performance results.

What we’ve learned from the video is that even while having a relatively low base clock speed of 1.3 GHz, the new Haswell ULT based MacBook Air holds up quite nicely with a Turbo clock speed all the way up to 2.6 GHz.

As we noted earlier this week, the new MacBook Airs feature PCIe based Solid State Storage which eliminate any SATA bottleneck but from the looks of Jonathan’s video, the lower capacity MacBook Airs (128GB) are slightly slower with read/write speeds of 700/400+MB/s than the 256GB and 512 GB equipped models which boast speeds of around 700 MB/s both ways.

In terms of sheer CPU performance, the 2.6 GHz Turbo boost with Hyper-Threading seems to hold up quite nicely against the higher clocked 2012 Retina MacBook Pro which dished out a 64-bit Geekbench score of 7390 whereas the MacBook wasn’t far behind at 6772. The HD 5000 graphics also seem to be a solid upgrade from the previous gen HD 4000 graphics which are found in the 13 inch Retina MacBook Pro and 2012 MacBook Air models.

The battery life is the only thing left for ultimately deciding if the new MacBook Airs are worth it, with the 13 inch model having claims of 12 hour battery life and the 11 inch model claiming to have a 9 hour battery life. We got a chance to take a first look at the 11 inch model and we’ll definitely report back on battery life once we test it a little more, so stay peeled to the YouTube channel and here on the website. If you’ve picked up a new MacBook Air, what do you think so far? Let us know in the comments below!