MacBook Air Tests: Good Looks, Poor Battery Life

The Air floats through our system performance tests, producing good results for a compact laptop. But its battery life disappoints.
Ultraportable laptops have a history of requiring compromises when it comes to performance. Lately, the PC World Test Center has seen some improvements in this regard—especially with respect to battery life. Unfortunately, you'll still be making major compromises with the Apple MacBook Air. In our tests, the Air produced respectable system performance, but mediocre battery life.

The MacBook Air's performance is more impressive, however, when you consider it against the nine ultraportable models we've tested with a minimum weight of four pounds or less (I selected this subset of data for comparison as these are the most likely competitive choices of someone considering a MacBook Air against its PC competition): There, the average WorldBench score is just 50.