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13-Inch 2013 MacBook Air Gets Up to 15 Hours of Battery Life With Mavericks
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I think you and koppie644 are right, the retina display will be the deciding factor. The final straw was video output resolution as well.
Sorry if I was off topic....thanks for the advice. If ghettochris was right and in 3-4 years an Air comes out that is way better than todays rMPB I reserve the right to come back and whine
You don't have to go too far back to get a MBP equivalent to the current air. probably have to go on a combo on benchmarks and specs, but geekbench says current airs score higher than 2011 MBP's. Pretty crazy.
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I would say that $200 would better go towards a new machine. a macbook air in its lowest configuration is probably better spec wise in almost every area, if not every area, and $200 is 20% of the 11 inch, little less if you want a bigger screen.
My new Macbook Air 2013 13' last for 13 hours from 100% to 0% since running Mac OS X 10.9 Maverick. I just did my routine works (Safari web browsing, hacking....etc).
Last years product, with upgrades from Intel, and software efficiency gains is suddenly innovation
? I thought it was just part of the product life cycle. Let's see the iwatch, or new Apple TV ..... Or something new , and chat innovation .
A watch and a TV are innovative?Last years product, with upgrades from Intel, and software efficiency gains is suddenly innovation
I have a 2012 Air 128 SSD 8GB Ram and after the Upgrade it is running snappy and definitely an improvement in battery life ( first thing I've noticed) 
This is the only reason I updated and adopted the new OS so soon, my air rocks. Safari has some bugs I noticed already, especially when it comes to zooming, but lets hope they fix that soon.
Don't get too excited. I haven't achieved anything like that level of battery time since updating yesterday. Did a test this morning. left my June 2013 13" MBA running for 90 minutes from full charge. Only two apps running on it using, according to Activity Monitor a total of 4% CPU time, and the normal OSX background tasks. I then went and had several cups of coffee, many chats, and didn't touch the machine at all. Came back to find that the battery charge level had dropped from 100% to 79% - in just 90 minutes. so that equates to just 7 and a half hours battery life, and that's while doing nothing. If you actually try using this machine for real work (say using Final Cut or Logic Pro (both of which I use regularly)) I think you might be really, really lucky to get 4 or maybe 5 hours out of it. That's about the same (see earlier thread) life span as you'd get from an Ultra-thin Windows machine.
It's great suggesting that you'd get 15 hours from the battery life, but that appears to be only if you leave it in sleep mode, and even that cost 3% of my battery life in 20 minutes.
Oh, and that was with the default Power saving set up from preferences.
Last years product, with upgrades from Intel, and software efficiency gains is suddenly innovation
From the Oxford English Dictionary:
Innovate verb
"make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products"
This article is what will make me get a Macbook Air. My cMBP's battery life is decent, but this is just amazing.
Last years product, with upgrades from Intel, and software efficiency gains is suddenly innovation
You're right. It's not innovation. We have to wait for innovative companies to copy it, then it will be innovation.
Last years product, with upgrades from Intel, and software efficiency gains is suddenly innovation
That was Phil Schiller's quote from right after he introduced the Mac Pro at WWDC this year. It may not be for everyone but it's hard to argue that the nMP isn't innovative.
i have yet to find one that's not working. If they are free updating from SL that means Mavericks doesn't break most apps or is very compatible with previous apps too.
Are you going to game? I have the MBA you're talking about and everything runs extremely well and bootcamp games run mediocre. Getting about 20fps on medium in current games (Saints Row IV, PayDay2) and 30-40fps on legacy games (CS:GO, TF2).
On my 2012 Retina MBP (GT 650M) I was getting 40fps on current games on high, but I had to run them all at 1440x900 which made the games blurry.
I think the IRIS is an Intel HD5500 technically, but I could be talking out of my butt about that one.
I remember when I got my 15" MacBook Pro in 2008 and was amazed at the 7-8 hour battery life in a laptop that powerful and slim. It changed the way I was able to work. I still use that laptop and have no need to upgrade it until it dies. Apple laptops are incredible. I can only image what it would be like with 15 hours on a MBA
And goodness knows how many millions worth of R&D into the cooling. To get so much power in such a small space and do it so quietly is an astonishing achievement.