Over the years, the Apple MacBook Air has made a name for itself. It comes with excellent build quality, it is slim, lightweight and top of all, has an incredible battery life of over 8 hours on a single charge. These are some of the things that make it a desirable option for those who travel a lot. Apple has been consistent in upgrading the MacBook Air to the latest processors every year. The early 2015 model of MacBook Air is equipped with Intel’s fifth generation Core i5, Wi-Fi 802.11ac and comes shipped with OS X (Yosemite) out of the box. Today, we’re looking at the 13-inch variant with 128GB of flash storage. Priced in the Rs. 73,000 range, is it worth the MacBook Air 13 (early 2015) variant? Let’s dive straight into the review to figure out.
Design and Build
Apple hasn’t played around with the design. Even the MacBook Air (early 2015 edition) carries the same design as its predecessors. You get the same super thin and premium aluminium construction that is pretty strong and sturdy. The MacBook Air weighs just 1.35 kg, which makes it easy to carry along. Our only complaint was with the display lid’s hinge, which was a little loose. Even the slightest of jerks to the MacBook Air means adjusting the display lid again.
While the sleek and thin construction doesn't allow for adding many ports, Apple has managed to include the most prominent ones. The left edge of the base has MagSafe power connector, a USB 3.0 port and a 3.5mm audio jack. On the right side, you have a ThunderBolt connector, a USB 3.0 port and a slot for memory card.
The full-size backlit keyboard of the MacBook Air is easy to type on and it’s easy on your fingers, even if you type for hours on end. Some of the credit goes to the spacious palm rest which gives you ample room to type comfortably. The touchpad isn’t only large, but it’s responsive as well. It also supports a wide variety of gestures that make using Yosemite easy.
Features
The MacBook Air 13-inch model (early 2015) is equipped with a LED backlit display that runs a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels. The screen is bright, has good colour rendition and viewing angles are also pretty good. All thanks to its sharp and crisp display, we enjoyed watching movies, reading ebooks and also surfing the internet. Considering its price tag, we would have loved it come the MacBook Air come with a Retina display.
To run the show, the MacBook Air (13-inch, early 2015) model sports Intel’s fifth generation Core i5 dual-core processor clocked at 1.6GHz (turbo boost up to 2.7GHz). There’s also 4GB of RAM and Intel HD Graphics 6000 that is decent enough for daily usage. On the storage front, you can choose between 128GB and 256GB models. The new Wi-Fi 802.11ac standard is supported, Bluetooth 4.0 and 720p HD web camera makes for the rest of its features.
Performance
Booting OS X (Yosemite) out of the box, the MacBook Air (13-inch, early 2013) delivers a smooth performance. It hardly takes around 12 seconds to boot. Close the lid and the MacBook Air goes to sleep mode. Open the lid, it quickly wakes up and you can start using it almost instantly. OS X Yosemite added some nifty features besides the design overhaul. The redesigned interface is slick and is aesthetically pleasing. The new Photos program lets you do basic levels of tweaking to your photos, such as adding filters, cropping and playing around with the contrast, brightness, colour saturation, etc. Thanks to iCloud photo library, you can now save your photos on cloud, which will then be available on all your Apple devices.
The messaging app from the iPhone and iPad is now available on OS X. It allows chatting with friends on iMessage platform right from your MacBook Air. There’s also an option to share the conversation with other friends. Handoff is another feature that keeps all your devices, iPhone, iPad and Mac connected. For instance, if your iPhone is in a different room and you get a text message or a phone call, you can reply to it right from your MacBook Air. The OS runs without any hiccups, even while multi-tasking. To test this, we had a tab in Chrome Browser running a YouTube video at 1080p and some sites such as Flickr and Yahoo! on other tabs. Both Safari and Chrome browsers were very responsive in rendering web pages. We also had other applications such as iTunes, QuickTime, a Word document and a Spreadsheet running in the background.
We ran Peacekeeper, the browser HTML5 benchmark test, which logged a decent score of 1656. Next, we ran SunSpider JavaScript benchmark that logged an impressive score of 171ms. While trying out music and videos on the MacBook Air, the internal speakers are loud and clear. However, they aren’t very good at mids and low frequency sounds. Not that we expected the speakers to perform like external desktop speakers, but slight tuning for mids and highs would have been good. They do produce a loud enough output to let you enjoy watching movies or listen to your favourite music tracks.
The HD webcam on the MacBook Air is also worth mentioning. The kind of photo and video quality it produces is impressive. We did not notice any framing while recording videos. The Photo Booth app includes a lot of live filters that you can use, both for clicking photos and while making video calls. Overall, we liked the smooth performance that the MacBook Air 13 (Early 2015) model delivers. The battery life is something that adds to its merits. After three hours of internet surfing, listening to music and watching videos, the battery dropped from 100% to 65%. During our usage, brightness was kept at 75%.
Verdict
The MacBook Air 13 (Early 2015) sells for Rs. 73,000 for the 128GB and Rs. 87,000 for 265GB flash storage version (prices mentioned at around the time of review). Bright and vibrant screen, spacious keyboard and touchpad, smooth performance, good multimedia capabilities and a long battery life makes the MacBook Air a good option for those who travel a lot. If you are an intermediate user who doesn’t have any budget constraints and is looking for a lightweight laptop with a good battery life, buying the MacBook Air is a no brainer.
