APPLE MACBOOK AIR (13-INCH, 2015)Reviw:what's bad and good?

  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