MBA 2012 v 2013

[palpatine]

I have an 11" MBA 2012 / 4GB RAM / 128 GB Storage. I am looking for a comparison with the 2013 model using specific tasks.

OCR
For example, I regularly OCR PDF files using Adobe Acrobat Pro. Is anyone seeing faster times with this on the 2013.

PDFs
I also read through a lot of PDFs of scanned materials, and the pages can take some time to load. Is anyone seeing this go faster?

DATABASES
What about database stuff like processing changes in Evernote, DevonThink, etc.?

I am tempted by the extended battery life in the 2013 model, but I am unclear if there would be any other noticeable benefits for my use case. I have read conflicting reports that seem to show the 2013 faster at some tasks, but slower with others. I would have upgraded in a heartbeat for a retina display, but I am unwilling to trade performance for battery life.

[Edit:] By the way, my 2012 MBA runs with the fan a lot of the time, because I've always got three or four things processing in the background. Right now DevonThink is indexing a massive cache of emails, Adobe is doing OCR on a PDF, and I am writing in Pages. I'm definitely pushing this thing right now, and the point with a 2013 would be to get more stuff done faster.

 

[palpatine]

I bought an i5 / 128 GB / 4GB 11" MBA. I see no discernible difference in performance between this one and the 2012 model. I will have to see how battery life does.

Doing OCR for one PDF file I have 2.6 million Page Ins, 1.2 million Page Outs, and 9MB free. I could probably benefit from having more RAM and the i7 processor, but it isn't like I am doing OCR all day every day, so I may stick with what I have.

One thing I've noticed is that the fan seems more quiet and come on less often. It is currently at 3056 RPMs and I can barely hear it, so unless I am imagining things (do I just want my new computer to be better?), then that is a nice improvement

 

[KPOM]

It appears that apart from graphics the main improvements in Haswell are related to power consumption rather than performance. It isn't that Apple has chosen slower processors relative to last year. Haswell is slightly faster on a per clock cycle basis, much like Ivy Bridge relative to Sandy Bridge. But Intel has used that to lower voltages and get the same performance with better battery life. Remember that these chips will be used in Ultrabooks and Wndows 8.1 tablets.

 

[maflynn]

It appears that apart from graphics the main improvements in Haswell are related to power consumption rather than performance.

From what I've read I'd say that's the case. Haswell brings some improvements to the table, but most of the bang for your buck is the GPU and the power savings.