Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro vs APPLE MACBOOK AIR:Better is..................................

Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro

Lenovo has swapped the Intel Core M5Y70 on the original Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro for a newer Intel Core M5Y71. The latter has a slightly higher base/boost clock speed (1.1/2.6GHz vs 1.2/2.9GHz) so you get a bit more oomph. This hasn't trickled to the UK though till now. The company has also cut the price of the cheaper model from £999.95 to £799.95 in the UK after a £200 cashback offer with places like John Lewis offering a three-year warranty. Note that there is also a new BIOS update that was rolled out only a few days ago. The Yoga 3 Pro adds a unique new hinge to be thinner and lighter than ever. The high-resolution screen looks fantastic, and the hybrid design still works great as a laptop. Lenovo's third-generation Yoga laptop is as versatile as ever, except it's noticeably thinner and lighter -- so much so that it's now one of the slimmest Ultrabooks on the market. The battery life has improved too, but it still lags behind the competition, no doubt because that slim design doesn't leave room for a bigger cell.                                                           But,This first outing with Intel's new Core M processor fails to impress, with mediocre performance and battery life.                                                                                                                                                   Specifications:                                                                                                                                          The Yoga 3 Pro gets a QHD+ display, which totes the same 3200 x 1800 pixel resolution found on the Yoga 2 Pro. You'll want to adjust the magnification settings in Windows 8.1 to 150% or higher make fonts and text clearly legible.

Sticking to higher resolutions gives you more desktop real-estate to edit multimedia files and snap documents side-by-side. In some scenarios it can be a real productivity boon, but overall the resolution still feels like overkill at 13 inches.

One option is to lower the resolution to 2048 x 1152 (16:9), a notch under the native resolution, which keeps everything looking sharp while remaining readable with magnification set to 100%.

The display's 300 nits is sufficiently bright for indoor use, but slightly too dim for outside conditions. It's an IPS panel with very good viewing angles - a crucial factor for a device designed to be used in many positions.                                                                                                                                                   The Yoga 3 Pro is one of the most portable Ultrabooks around, coming in 17% slimmer and 14% lighter than the Yoga 2 Pro, by Lenovo's measurements.

It weighs just 2.62 pounds, making it lighter than the 13-inch MacBook Air's 2.69 pounds, and it's slightly thicker along the middle of the left and right edges, as opposed to the tapered design of Apple's machine.

It's roughly the same weight as Samsung's Series 9 900X3C, and only the ageing Toshiba Portege Z930/Z935 and Sony Vaio Pro 13 come in lighter in the 13-inch category, at 2.50 pounds and 2.34 pounds respectively.                                                                                                                                                 THE BOTTOM LINe The Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro has a breakthrough design, but requires careful consideration of the trade-offs required,particularly battery  life                                                                           VS                                                                                                                                              APPLE MACBOOK AIR (13-INCH, 2015)                                                                                              Excellent battery life; Strong overall performance; Blazing flash storage; Comfortable keyboard.Thanks to a new generation of processors, the MacBook Air gets improved battery life, while maintaining its now classic thin and light metal exterior. It has a dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-5250U processor, which while not exactly potent, is still able to carry you through modest tasks with relative ease. Web browsing, document editing and light photo editing certainly aren’t beyond the reach of this machine, although the latter will be a trifle slower if you’re working with large images. We recorded results of 72, 49 and 33 in our image editing, video conversion and multitasking benchmarks respectively, with an overall score of 45. If you want a bit more performance, the 2.2GHz Core i7 chip costs an extra £130.

The fifth-generation Broadwell processors are all incredibly power efficient. The MacBook Air lasted an incredible 16h 34m when scrolling through a web page and playing a 10-minute HD video every half hour. If you don’t always have ready access to a charger, this is one perk that’s hard to replicate with the MacBook Pro.

Gaming performance is fairly capable, with the integrated Intel HD Graphics 6000 producing an average frame rate of 27fps in our 1,280x720 Dirt Showdown benchmark. If you’re happy to turn down your graphics settings and resolution, light gaming is well within the MacBook Air's reach.

The model we had on test was a little short of RAM; 4GB of LPDDR3 SDRAM is the minimum we’d expect from a laptop costing this much, and you may find yourself running low if you have lots of browser tabs, documents and emails on the go all at once. You can upgrade to 8GB at purchase for £80, but the RAM is soldered onto the board so you can't add more later. Once you've made a choice you'll need to stick with it.

THE BAD Little else has changed over the past few years, while the competition is catching up on design, battery life and usability. The low-res screen feels more dated than ever.

THE BOTTOM LINEThe latest upgrade of the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air brings a more powerful Core i5 processor and an astounding 17.5 hours of battery life. It remains our top choice for ultraportable laptops. While still a great all-around useful laptop, the 13-inch MacBook Air is stuck with a lower-res display and a design that's no longer cutting-edge.                                                                                                         Specs:                                                                                                                                                       Display size/resolution: 13.3-inch 1,440x900 screen   PC CPU: Intel Core i5-5250U  PC Memory: 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz   Graphics: 1536MB Intel HD Iris Graphics 6000   Storage: 128GB SSD  Networking: 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0  Operating system: Apple OS X Yosemite 10.10.2              Price:$999