Review of the Apple MacBook Air mid 2013 laptop on the Haswell processor
Acquaintance to the fourth-generation Intel Core mobile processors for me began with the Apple MacBook Air. On the one hand, this is very good, and on the other, it leads to inevitable comparisons in the future with this particular device. As you understand, it will be difficult to surpass Ayr =) However, for the beginning, the “apple” device needs to set the bar. As far as she will be high, I understand under the cut, where I invite you.
The box is ordinary, "apple". White, beautiful, stylish, uninformative. You can make a logical conclusion about what's inside the laptop. I won't tell you how cool he is, because it makes no sense. Those who understand and appreciate the products of Apple and so everyone knows, and haters - will not appreciate it in any way. Something tells me that those who are not familiar with the "apples" on Habré no)
Four facets of Apple MacBook Air mid2013.
')
The layout is standard for Mac. The backlight of the keyboard, as is customary, is made multi-level.
"Apple" on the lid glows :).
I don’t want to talk about appearances for a long time, the Apple MacBook Air mid-2013 is not much different from its predecessors. The screen is the same 1440 * 900 and this, for me personally, is the main disappointment. After working for MacBook Pro Retina mid2012, MacOS is perceived a little differently ... There are no more changes outside. But inside ... It's all the most delicious and interesting, perhaps it’s worth a look here and not with one eye.
Airy recently more and more resemble cell phones: 80% of the space is occupied by a battery and only 20% are set aside for electronic filling. This is quite logical when the struggle is for the “life” of the battery and any methods are good. The new Intel Haswell processors heartily help in this by combining the chips of the processor, graphics core and chipset on the same substrate. Actually, this is already SoC - System on Chip - as in most smartphones.
This kid is a MacBook Air cooling system. A small copper rectangle, a thin tube and a tiny radiator. This is all that is required for cooling the Intel Core i5-4250U. There is no confidence in the ideality of such a solution, but once Apple engineers did, then the tests were carried out.
A centrifugal fan manufactured by Delta Electronics is used to blow a radiator. It works quite quietly and does not howl even under load, like the Canterville Ghost.
And this is the Intel Core i5-4250U. It is made on the 22-nm process technology, has a nominal frequency of 1.3 GHz. It costs, by the way, significantly more expensive than its desktop counterparts. The unit price is 342 dollars against 242 dollars for a faster desktop Intel Core i5-4670K - this is the mobility fee ....
The touchpad is stuffed with electronics almost more than the rest of the laptop.
The battery is, of course, made in China. The capacity of 7150 mAh, which at a supply voltage of 7.6 V, inspires hopes for a very long battery life. The four sections are packed in a plastic cassette and, as I said, occupy most of the insides of the laptop.
The small network adapter supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g / n / ac and Bluetooth 4.0 - there is nothing to add, the most modern standards.
The SSD drive is made by Samsung (yes, and we all listen about their wars), it has a capacity of 128 gigabytes and a proprietary connector, so it’s impossible to transfer this happiness to another laptop. The controller and memory are made by a Korean company, looking ahead, I will say that the SSD is cool.
Most of the laptop (to call it an ultrabook language does not rotate) is not collapsible, in fact, only a Wi-Fi module and an SSD disk are removable from electronics. It is an understandable decision, why solder additional connectors, when you can save space and unsolder directly to the board. At the same time maintainability of the device suffers, but is this the main thing with a one-year warranty?
From photos to screenshots. Testing Air under MacOS X is somehow not our way) And so it is clear that everything is cool there, but most users cannot compare it with Windows laptops.
We put Win 7 through BootCamp and it started - the usual pictures, the usual utilities, the clear results.
CPU-Z - percent is capable of operating at a frequency of 2300 MHz, which at a nominal 1300 MHz is quite good.
Motherboard manufactured by Apple (who would have thought ...)
RAM, as we already know, is soldered to the board, operates in dual channel mode at 1600 MHz. True timings are poor ... But this is not so fundamental in mobile systems.
Graphics are identified as Intel HD Graphics 5000 and can consume as much as 1700 MB of RAM for their own needs.
GPU-Z tells more about graphics. The nominal frequency of operation is 200 MHz, if necessary, it increases to 1100 MHz.
And this is how Intel's driver control panel looks like now - inside, of course, nothing has been added, but outside there is complete order.
Short sammari: Processor, graphics, memory on one screen.
Testing performance. Here, too, the set is trivial: first, the “blue” AIDA64 test, which turned gray.
The speed of reading and writing data to RAM is good, compared to the Ivy Bridge, it has grown significantly, and dual-channel mode does its job.
The solid-state drive is stitched with the original firmware and there is no mention of Samsung here. The temperature of the controller is alarming - it is clearly not low, CrystalDiskInfo strongly warns of a dangerous SSD condition.
The speed of work is amazing, and this is a 128 GB version. No RAID, and the read speed is almost 700 MB / s, the record is almost 450 MB / s. I have only positive emotions.
Favorite test - Windows 7 - says that the weak place in the system is RAM, but it cannot be increased or replaced. I will suffer with what was given.
Comprehensive assessment of the performance of the PC Mark 7 - 4510 points, this is quite a decent result, but not a record.
So far, there is nothing to really compare, but the PC Mark 8 shows 3127 points, how well this is, we will find out together in further tests and articles.
And here is the sweetest. 10 hours of battery life on the tests, then it really will be about 12-13. Is this not happiness? Yes, of course, 3D-games or viewing FullHD will drop the battery early, but for working with documents or writing texts - a huge working capacity.
That's unpleasant. the temperature is too high, the tiny cooling system does not cope perfectly, we will consider it a blot, but a very serious blot.
Otherwise, the product is Apple, as usual at a high level. Without touching traditionally the strengths - design and OS - the “iron” filling is the most modern for laptops and the only negative is the temperature mode of the processor and SSD disk. At first, I sinned on an incorrectly assembled CO after the photo shoot, but the repeated bulkhead, as well as the drive temperature, convinced me that Apple had missed a little.
You can buy such a beast in the cybermarket Ulmart for 45,990 rubles (at the time of publication of the article)
The box is ordinary, "apple". White, beautiful, stylish, uninformative. You can make a logical conclusion about what's inside the laptop. I won't tell you how cool he is, because it makes no sense. Those who understand and appreciate the products of Apple and so everyone knows, and haters - will not appreciate it in any way. Something tells me that those who are not familiar with the "apples" on Habré no)
Four facets of Apple MacBook Air mid2013.
')
The layout is standard for Mac. The backlight of the keyboard, as is customary, is made multi-level.
"Apple" on the lid glows :).
I don’t want to talk about appearances for a long time, the Apple MacBook Air mid-2013 is not much different from its predecessors. The screen is the same 1440 * 900 and this, for me personally, is the main disappointment. After working for MacBook Pro Retina mid2012, MacOS is perceived a little differently ... There are no more changes outside. But inside ... It's all the most delicious and interesting, perhaps it’s worth a look here and not with one eye.
Airy recently more and more resemble cell phones: 80% of the space is occupied by a battery and only 20% are set aside for electronic filling. This is quite logical when the struggle is for the “life” of the battery and any methods are good. The new Intel Haswell processors heartily help in this by combining the chips of the processor, graphics core and chipset on the same substrate. Actually, this is already SoC - System on Chip - as in most smartphones.
This kid is a MacBook Air cooling system. A small copper rectangle, a thin tube and a tiny radiator. This is all that is required for cooling the Intel Core i5-4250U. There is no confidence in the ideality of such a solution, but once Apple engineers did, then the tests were carried out.
A centrifugal fan manufactured by Delta Electronics is used to blow a radiator. It works quite quietly and does not howl even under load, like the Canterville Ghost.
And this is the Intel Core i5-4250U. It is made on the 22-nm process technology, has a nominal frequency of 1.3 GHz. It costs, by the way, significantly more expensive than its desktop counterparts. The unit price is 342 dollars against 242 dollars for a faster desktop Intel Core i5-4670K - this is the mobility fee ....
The touchpad is stuffed with electronics almost more than the rest of the laptop.
The battery is, of course, made in China. The capacity of 7150 mAh, which at a supply voltage of 7.6 V, inspires hopes for a very long battery life. The four sections are packed in a plastic cassette and, as I said, occupy most of the insides of the laptop.
The small network adapter supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g / n / ac and Bluetooth 4.0 - there is nothing to add, the most modern standards.
The SSD drive is made by Samsung (yes, and we all listen about their wars), it has a capacity of 128 gigabytes and a proprietary connector, so it’s impossible to transfer this happiness to another laptop. The controller and memory are made by a Korean company, looking ahead, I will say that the SSD is cool.
Most of the laptop (to call it an ultrabook language does not rotate) is not collapsible, in fact, only a Wi-Fi module and an SSD disk are removable from electronics. It is an understandable decision, why solder additional connectors, when you can save space and unsolder directly to the board. At the same time maintainability of the device suffers, but is this the main thing with a one-year warranty?
From photos to screenshots. Testing Air under MacOS X is somehow not our way) And so it is clear that everything is cool there, but most users cannot compare it with Windows laptops.
We put Win 7 through BootCamp and it started - the usual pictures, the usual utilities, the clear results.
CPU-Z - percent is capable of operating at a frequency of 2300 MHz, which at a nominal 1300 MHz is quite good.
Motherboard manufactured by Apple (who would have thought ...)
RAM, as we already know, is soldered to the board, operates in dual channel mode at 1600 MHz. True timings are poor ... But this is not so fundamental in mobile systems.
Graphics are identified as Intel HD Graphics 5000 and can consume as much as 1700 MB of RAM for their own needs.
GPU-Z tells more about graphics. The nominal frequency of operation is 200 MHz, if necessary, it increases to 1100 MHz.
And this is how Intel's driver control panel looks like now - inside, of course, nothing has been added, but outside there is complete order.
Short sammari: Processor, graphics, memory on one screen.
Testing performance. Here, too, the set is trivial: first, the “blue” AIDA64 test, which turned gray.
The speed of reading and writing data to RAM is good, compared to the Ivy Bridge, it has grown significantly, and dual-channel mode does its job.
The solid-state drive is stitched with the original firmware and there is no mention of Samsung here. The temperature of the controller is alarming - it is clearly not low, CrystalDiskInfo strongly warns of a dangerous SSD condition.
The speed of work is amazing, and this is a 128 GB version. No RAID, and the read speed is almost 700 MB / s, the record is almost 450 MB / s. I have only positive emotions.
Favorite test - Windows 7 - says that the weak place in the system is RAM, but it cannot be increased or replaced. I will suffer with what was given.
Comprehensive assessment of the performance of the PC Mark 7 - 4510 points, this is quite a decent result, but not a record.
So far, there is nothing to really compare, but the PC Mark 8 shows 3127 points, how well this is, we will find out together in further tests and articles.
And here is the sweetest. 10 hours of battery life on the tests, then it really will be about 12-13. Is this not happiness? Yes, of course, 3D-games or viewing FullHD will drop the battery early, but for working with documents or writing texts - a huge working capacity.
That's unpleasant. the temperature is too high, the tiny cooling system does not cope perfectly, we will consider it a blot, but a very serious blot.
Otherwise, the product is Apple, as usual at a high level. Without touching traditionally the strengths - design and OS - the “iron” filling is the most modern for laptops and the only negative is the temperature mode of the processor and SSD disk. At first, I sinned on an incorrectly assembled CO after the photo shoot, but the repeated bulkhead, as well as the drive temperature, convinced me that Apple had missed a little.
You can buy such a beast in the cybermarket Ulmart for 45,990 rubles (at the time of publication of the article)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/195744/
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