New Haswell MacBook Air review: mainstream choice over MacBook Pro

In review: Since Apple’s elimination of the standard MacBook, its laptop customers have had to choose between the thin and light MacBook Air and the more powerful MacBook Pro, both of which cost about the same in their thirteen inch incarnations. The introduction of the new Haswell based MacBook Air makes that choice a lot easier for most consumers. It’s a very fast $1100 laptop with better tech specs than any thin and light PC laptop at that price point, and more importantly, tech specs which are plenty for the typical consumer. It also has twice the daily battery life it used to. That leaves, for now, the MacBook Pro out in the cold.

That’ll change, and from a self interested point of view, hopefully quickly. I’m that increasingly rare breed of user whose computing usage pushes the limits of any hardware put in front of me. Give me the MacBook Pro. I don’t care if it’s twice as thick and heavy as the MacBook Air, or has half the battery life. But I’m not you. I spend twelve hours a day on my MacBook Pro, playing journalist with way too many applications open, pushing the processing power and even needing the archaic optical drive. I’ll be buying the new MacBook Pro when it arrives with a Haswell processor of its own. But when most consumers ask for advice on which one they should buy, we go over their needs and usually end up pointing them toward the MacBook Air instead. With the arrival of the new Air, that just got even easier.

The MacBook Pro will turn over soon enough. Apple is presumably either waiting to get a higher-horsepower Haswell chip from Intel, or working on redesigning the Pro from the ground up to take advantage of the new low power chip. For the MacBook Air, Apple more or less just dropped the Haswell into the existing Air shell which gave it more speed and twice the battery life. And that’s what it should have done. The Air was already thin and light enough. Now it’s powerful enough to recommend over the Pro for most users. Just not me.