The MacBook Air line has seen a refresh at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, using the same chassis upgraded to the new line of Intel Haswell CPUs. The systems range in price from $999 to $1,299, and are available at Apple.com and in limited quantities at Apple retail today.
As of yet, Apple has not announced clock speeds on the new hardware. The same 11.7- and 13.3-inch models are still available, and are not being equipped with Retina displays. Apple has said that the refreshed models boast 12 hours of life for the 13-inch model, and nine hours for the 11-inch unit, improved over previous generations by four hours. All four models available at retail have a 1.3GHz i5 dual core Haswell processor and 4GB of RAM.
Haswell processors in the MacBook Air is the HD5000 integral chipset, giving the new hardware up to 40 percent faster performance than the predecessor. Flash storage available in retail configurations are 128GB and 256GB and are up to 45 percent faster than the 2012 model. Upgrades available for custom models from the Apple online store are 1.7 GHz i7 processors, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of flash storage. They also support as well the faster Wi-Fi known was 802.11ac.
Two 11-inch models are available with 128GB and 256GB of storage, for $999, and $1,199 respectively. The 13-inch model is available for $1,099 with 128GB of storage, and $1,299 for the 256GB model.
