Thank you for sharing your experience. I have learned a lot from it. Now, I think the million-dollar question is... do you find the battery life adequate at all for the tasks that you do?
I travel a lot. Daily, in fact. And I don't feel like plugging my laptop in at every chance I get, so battery life is very important to me. I have been keeping with the 13" for that sole reason.
Hmm, so far in the three cycles on the 11 inch its reached 5 hours 19 minutes (tiny bit of flash content), 5 hours 31 minutes (no flash content at all) and 4 hours 33 minutes (couple of flash videos, 28 minutes each, read below). The last one might seem quite low but to be honest seeing how bad flash is atm with Lion I think its pretty good, plus I was trying to get the battery to 0% to calibrate.
That said, I don't travel a lot, not daily at least. I mean I'm impressed with the 11 inch's battery life, but I'll definitely miss the one or two extra hours from the 13 inch, so I'd probably stick with it if I were you. But so far the MBA has met my expectations in terms of battery life. In all three cycles I've had wifi on, 12/16 brightness, no backlit keys but I've not had to be cautious about the battery life. I even tried to drain the battery today to calibrate it (turns out you don't need to, but I thought I may as well!) and from 30%, watching a flash video, it lasted another hour and 30 minutes with me having turned on the backlighting, putting screen brightness to max and running about 15 applications, just to speed it up.
Wow, what a great post OP. And what a ******** first reply!
In your testing did you try them out in various locations bus/train/sofa etc or just on a desk? The reason I ask is that I wonder if 11" is a bit small for my lap.
I've tried both on the sofa, in bed and at Costa. I had to give the 13 inch to my friend because it would have looked weird to just pull out two expensive notebooks out of my bag while he sat there using his Dell Mini. At the moment I'm sat with my legs up on the desk (yeah I'm kinda lazy) with the 11 inch MBA, I do prefer it to the 13 inch but both are great really. I remember seeing a youtube video review where the reviewer referred to the 11 inch model as "fun", and I was like "how, its just a smaller version of the 13 inch model?" but I kinda see what he means. I actually prefer the smaller palm rest, for example, when sat up like this. The 13 inch model digs into my legs a tiny bit, whereas the 11 inch seems to sit perfectly, and is of course a bit lighter.
I definitely would not rule out giving the 11 inch a try, as long as you can return it to Apple without a restocking fee.
I did this comparison in the apple store but i think it would be useful to share with others.
Would you be able to browse to the same website in safari on both machines, enable full screen browsing and press "cmd and +" to zoom on the 11 inch. Take a side by side picture.
Also could you bring up itunes in full screen on both and take a screenshot. Same with a PDF with lots of text on both?
That for me made the difference but I couldnt take pics in the apple sore I was in.
Thanks
Good ideas, I'll have to do them at the Microsoft Office screenshots for mortenandersen tomorrow. Thanks.
This review (and whole thread as a matter of fact), has been very useful for me I write a lot, do some number crunching and travel a lot. But it's the screenshots that have been most useful!
A lot of other reviews worry about how faster it is than the previous version and that kind of stuff, but what I'm I interested in, is real life use. Thats what counts!
I already own an 13" 2010 (there wasn't a 256gb option for the 11" at the time) and I'm switching to an 11" for portability, and with your screen shots I can better anticipate the loss of height, 133 pixels.
What I'm still worried about is tue stories about the battery life. On one hand I have a hypermac battery and a car charger, so if I'm on the road, I can use the MBA 11" 3x as long as it is a 60wh battery (the MBA 11" has only 35wh inside!) and I can recharge it while I'm in my car (and I hardly travel not in my car). Otoh I really liked the hassle free 7hours life of my MBA 13" because it was almost always enough for a
whole day of work. I would on long days even get a bit over 8 hours, but then the lights where on 1/4 and there was no wifi or Bluetooth used.
For the people using the 11" 2011 i7, how many hours can you get out of it when being really careful and just typing away without any other big programs?
Thanks for your post. The loss of height on the 11 inch didn't really bother me as much as I thought it would, I'll be posting more screenshots as requested by adhnoh tomorrow so do check them if you like. And so far the only issue I've had with the battery is the accuracy. According to some Apple article (that I probably misread...) I don't need to calibrate the battery, but its pretty annoying that at the moment its on 91% and it says 4 hours 1 minute remaining, much like the second cycle under similar settings, when it actually lasted an hour longer. It also tends to jump around quite a bit even when I'm not really changing anything. Saving a word document seems to set the expected battery life to 2 or 3 hours temporarily, for example. Its not really a big deal, as I'm still getting the good battery life advertised under what I consider to be reasonable conditions - no backlit keyboard, 12/16 brightness, no bluetooth.
