MacBook Air Reviews (13-inch, mid-2013)

• CPU: Intel Core i5 Haswell, 1.3GHz (Turbo boost up to 2.6GHz)
• Graphics/display: Integrated Intel HD5000, 11.6-inch display, 1366x768 (2560 by 1600 pixels on external display)
• Memory: 4GB, 1600Mhz LPDDR3
• Storage: 256GB
• Ports: 2-USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, audio out, dual microphones
• Camera: 720p Facetime camera
• Connectivity: Wi-fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, 802.11 ac, Bluetooth 4.0
• Battery: 39WHr, 9 hours
• Height: 0.11-0.68 inch (0.3-1.7 cm)
• Width: 11.8 inches (30 cm)
• Depth: 7.56 inches (19.2 cm)
• Weight: 2.38 pounds (1.08 kg)

This is just ridiculous. Apple claims 12 hours, we tend to test a little more strenuous than Apple does and ended up with just over 11 hours of battery life on a single charge. These highly idle cases end up dominated by display power, which is why we actually see the smallest improvement in battery life over the previous generation here (~35%, normalized for battery capacity).
If you drop brightness down to something more reasonable (~100 nits) you’ll get some truly insane numbers:

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Even normalizing for battery capacity changes, the new 13-inch MacBook Air increases battery life by 65% over the previous model.

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Peak random read performance is roughly comparable to the previous-generation Samsung controller. Random write performance took a bit of a hit but it's still more than fast enough for client workloads. Sequential speeds are much improved but the gains are really only visible at high queue depths. Low queue depth sequential transfers can’t be split up enough in order to really require PCIe.

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What does this mean in the real world? The new SSD is definitely snappier in system use. Wake from sleep is a bit quicker, as are application launches. The funny thing is that with the exception of high-speed Thunderbolt arrays, most external sources aren’t fast enough to even stress the new storage subsystem in the MacBook Air.

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