An extraordinary piece of engineering.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

Upgrading from the GTX680:

This writer, a graduate mechanical engineer, has one extraordinarily sensitive device built into his constitution, one missing from liberal arts graduates. It’s a BS Meter and when I saw this on the box of the EVGA GTX980 my BS Meter went off the scale:

And you thought only Apple did this sort of thing?

But while I cannot attest to the percentages nor see how on earth any of this BS can be tested and proved, read on and you will agree that the GTX980 is an extraordinary engineering accomplishment.

When I wrote about the Nvidia GTX680 graphics card for the Mac Pro 18 months ago it was the fastest card out there and ran natively with drivers provided by Apple with Mac OS X. The reason no separate drivers were needed is that Apple had offered the GTX680 in a ‘Made for Mac’ edition which showed the full boot screen at start and, accordingly, was obliged to include the drivers to maintain the ‘Apple supported’ story. Maximum power draw is 195 watts.

Driven to ever greater performance by computer users who devote what few brain cells they have to gaming, Nvidia rolled out the GTX780 card a while back but that was a poor choice for the Mac Pro user as at full power draw it needed 250 watts against the maximum spec of 225 watts stated by Apple for aggregate current draw from the PCI slot (75 watts) plus 2 x 75 watts from each of the PCIe boost sockets on the Mac Pro’s backplane board. Sure, 25 watts was not exactly much of an overdraw, but why tempt providence, backplane boards with fried traces costing some $450 + labor to replace.

Then Nvidia recently announced a technical tour de force, the GTX980 which claims to draw just 165 watts at maximum draw, or 15% less than the GTX680 while simultaneously offering much better performance and running much more quietly. While my measurements suggest the power savings are ever so slightly overstated, the performance boost and noise reduction are remarkable. Working video pros can benefit from upgrading to this card thanks to the brain dead gamers who pushed its development.

The reduction in fan noise in the GTX980 compared with the GTX680 is not simply attributable to a cooler running card, meaning lower fan speeds. In the case of the EVGA case design (I cannot speak for others like Gigabyte, PNY, Zotac, etc. not having tried them) attention has been paid to the design of the fan blades to provide quieter running. Recall how Apple made a big deal of this in their rollout of the cylindrical Mac Pro? Apple has long majored in claiming credit for invention of what are existing, decade old technologies and this was one of the more irritating examples. Remember the vaunted ‘Superdrive’? A dirt cheap Hitachi or LG CD/DVD reader-burner with the escutcheon removed (a 5 second job). Or the banishment of ‘vampire draw’ from its battery chargers? Please. Or want to go back to the early days of the Mac with its graphical interface and mouse? All stolen from Xerox.

GTX980 cards which come with two dual-link DVI sockets:

In my piece on the Apple 30″ Cinema Display I mentioned that there are at least five variants of the GTX980 which provide the optimum connections for two of the big dual-link DVI Apple Cinema Displays (and similar Dell, etc. 2560 x 1600 displays) without having to use the unreliable Dell powered Dual-link DVI -> MDP adapter. (Apple makes a dual-DVI to MDP adapter with an equally poor reputation).

That GPU information is repeated here:

• EVGA GTX980 Classified P/N 04G-P4-3988-KR, at Amazon here
• EVGA GTX980 Classified P/N 04G-P4-2986-KR, at Amazon here
• Gigabyte GV-N980WF3-4GD, at B&H here
• Gigabyte GV-N980WF3OC-4GD, at Newegg here
• Gigabyte GV-N980G1 GAMING-4GD, at Newegg here

All other versions I have examined from many makers offer just one dual-link DVI socket along with various mixes of HDMI, DP and MDP.

Having had nothing but great experiences with EVGA products in the past, I bought the EVGA P/N 04G-P4-2986-KR for $530 + tax:

The EVGA GTX980 model P/N 04G-P4-2986-KR.
Amazon’s illustration wrongly shows one DVI socket.

This comes with one DVI-D and one DVI-I socket (both dual-link), one DP and one HDMI, regardless of what Amazon’s confused listing states.

Preliminaries:

Before rushing out and upgrading to a GTX980, a couple of preliminaries:

• You will need one 6 pin to 8 pin mini-PCIe power adapter cable (not two, which I bought, owing to errors on Nvidia’s web site), in addition to two standard 6-pin cables for the model I bought.
• The card is long (no problem) and wide, the latter making fitting anything in PCIe slot two challenging, but possible.
• Mine had one loose alloy cooling fin rattling around in the casing when received, even though the card was shrink wrapped. I dismantled the card, removed the errant cooling fin – one of dozens so no material effect on cooling – and all was well. You may be lucky. If your mechanical skills are limited and you get one like mine, be prepared for return and exchange delays.
  
  Loose end cooling fin extricated by the writer.

• You cannot use the stock drivers Apple ships with OS X, and must download the Nvidia drivers. The Mac Pro will not boot with the stock OS X drivers.

Here’s how it compares with my GTX680:

GTX680 top, GTX980 below.

The PCI connector for the GTX680 still has its rubber protector in place. 10.7″ vs. 10″ in length, no fit issues, but remember to retract the (grey) PCIe fan when removing and refitting to properly engage the base ‘claw’ at the bottom rear of the card, visible on the GTX680 above. The GTX980 has a like claw, hidden in the image by the shipping protector.

Here’s the 6-pin to 8-pin adapter cable:

And here is the card installed in my Mac Pro:

Illuminated script, no less! The green diodes are on the Addonics mSATA boot drive.

To make sure you have properly installed Nvidia’s drivers, check System Preferences->NVIDIA Driver Manager, which must appear thus before you install the GTX980:

Nvidia drivers installed and activated.

You must have current Nvidia drivers for this card to work:

Nvidia has been doing an excellent job of updating its drivers as Apple endlessly and unnecessarily futzes with OS X changes, but what this means in practice is that as every OS X change upgrade breaks the Nvidia driver, so you must not upgrade your OS X installation until Nvidia has announced the related upgraded driver, or it’s a black screen for you. Irritating as all heck, and typical Apple maliciousness and small mindedness as they continue favoring ATI for GPU chips in their machines.

Start up your GTX980 with OS X drivers installed in lieu of the required Nvidia drivers and, in my case, you get a lot of screen flashing, a jerky cursor, a slow boot cycle if it boots at all (a ‘grey screen of death’ is not uncommon – I got it) and no selection of display definitions in Sys Prefs->Displays->Scaled. I could only get 2560 x 1600 on my 30″ ACD whereas I like to use 2048 x 1280. A curse on Apple for not including the enhanced drivers with OS X. How small minded is that? Am I likely to rush out and buy a dustbin Mac Pro just because they are adopting the petulant behavior of their founder? Especially when the nMP cannot hold a candle to the cMP?

Be aware that if you do a PRAM reset OS X will revert to using the stock OS X drivers, meaning a very unresponsive cursor and display in my case. Go into the Nvidia menu Bar icon, switch to Nvidia drivers, reboot and all is well. If you can’t even get the display working, keep and old GT120 card around (see the end of this article) install it and connect your display to it while you elect the Nvidia drivers. A real pain.

With that out of the way, you still get no boot screen, and the nice people at MacVidCards – real experts at this sort of thing – can upgrade your card to show that screen for $180. They have an excellent reputation in the industry. Those unfortunates who use Windows can DIY, but Windows is a strict no-no chez Pindelski and I prefer to trust my costly card to a professional rather than turning it into a brick.

Click the image for the MacVidCards site.

Mine is off to MVC. I have no financial interest in their business.

After installation, all is sweetness and light with the Nvidia drivers in place:

The card is properly recognized and memory is 4GB compared with 2GB for the GTX680:

Comparison with dual D700s in the new Mac Pro:

Let’s cut to the chase. Here’s Unigine Heaven running on a 1680 x 1050 display in the new Mac Pro using the top-of-the-line dual ATI Radeon D700 GPUs (dual GPUs being one of Apple’s quite especially dumb moves in recent years when hardly no software uses them); my Mac Pro is on the right:

The GTX980 is 22% faster than the very costly dual D700s in the new Mac Pro.The D700s command a $600 premium over the stock D300s (specified at purchase only) whereas the upgrade from a used GTX680 to a new GTX980 runs $300 (can be done at any time).

As for noise, the fan in my EVGA GTX680 is loud – if not roaring – when the stressful Unigine Heaven test is run, whereas in the GTX980 it is silent. Impressive.

Performance at different screen resolutions in the Mac Pro:

2560×1600 compared with 2048×1280 Unigine Heaven results.

Performance holds up well at 2560 x 1600 (the highest resolution available in the 30″ Apple Cinema Display) as well as at 2048 x 1280 which my eyes favor.

At the commonly used 1920 x 1200 the result is as follows – quite extraordinary:

Unigine Heaven at 1920×1200.

All excellent statistics, especially in view of the card’s quiet running.

Power consumption:

I was unable to quite replicate the claimed 15% drop in power use with the GTX980 compared with the GTX680, but the good news is that total power use is well within the capabilities of the Mac Pro’s massive 980 watt power supply.

In this image you see the current draw of the GTX980 in the left column at 1680×1050, and at 2560×1600 on the right; the three measurements in each column are for the PCI slot, and for each of the mini-PCI booster sockets – recall each of these three sources is individually limited to 75 watts (6.25 amps), and all are in compliance:

These data compute to power use of 140 watts at 1680 x 1050 and 150 watts at 2560 x 1600, all well within spec, and all measured with Unigine Heaven running at full bore – a very stressful test. When I tested the GTX680 the 1680 x 1050 test required power of 157 watts, so the GTX980 saves 11%, close to the 15% claimed, if not matching the marketing. Still, that is very impressive, and like percentage savings accrue at higher screen resolutions.

LuxMark data:

The jump in performance with LuxMark is extraordinary – this is a test which requires a complex scene to be rendered:

Luxmark for the GTX980 compared with the GTX680.

The gain in performance is no less than 266% (“more than 3x as fast” would be Apple’s breathless marketing prose), suggesting that video producers doing complex rendering in apps which make good use of the GPU should upgrade to the GTX980 immediately. Time is money and renders take time.

Heat:

None of my measurement apps accesses thermal sensors in the GTX980 but at least one statistic is of note. At idle, the PCI fan in my Mac Pro (the large grey fan mounted on the backplane board) ran at an elevated 1425rpm, whereas with the GTX980 installed it idles at the stock 800rpm. That can only be good news and the combination of the new chip architecture along with two fans (my GTX680 has one) does the trick.

4K displays:

I continue to defer upgrading to 4K as standards are, well, anything but standard, with much confusion about 30Hz vs 60Hz, boot screens or no boot screens, SST vs. MST, Windows compatibility (like I care), and on and on. But the 4K display user should benefit significantly from the added performance offered by the GTX980 provided he can get 60Hz refresh rates in OS X.

Who should upgrade?

Heavy video renders using CUDA? Upgrade right away if your app uses the GPU well and is CUDA dependent. The gains are easy to see and the price is under $600 with your old GTX680 selling for $300, so $300 out of pocket. A few hours work will see your cost recovered in faster render times. Popular CUDA apps include many in the Adobe CC suite (AfterEffects, Photoshop, Premiere Pro), FinalCut Pro, Maya, Avid Motion Graphics and Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve, Cinema 4D and Redcine-X.

Lightroom users? Meh. The GTX680 was already immensely capable, and while the GTX980 allows me to page through full size previews at blitzkrieg speeds and I never see any wait delays for rendering, it’s overkill. The same applies to Photoshop.

The GTX980 is a remarkable engineering accomplishment and, if you must know, Nvidia somehow manages to get over 5 billion transistors on the die which makes a top-end Intel CPU look about as crowded as Iowa.

Update June 26, 2015:

I sent the card off to MacVidCards to have the ROM modified to display the boot screen and the Option-Start boot drive selection. The card was back in my hands in a couple of weeks and MVC told me this was the first dual-DVI card they had modified. Most 980 cards have one DVI, one HDMI and one or more DP or MDP sockets.

Boot drives using Option-Start in Yosemite with the MVC modified GTX980.

I get proper function on both the DVI-D, DVI-I (both at 2520 x 1600) and DP ports, with the latter limited to 1920 x 1200, as I do not have the required Dell powered adapter. I did not test the HDMI port as I do not have the right cable.

I noted two anomalies – a singe line of code appears for maybe half a second when starting, right before the Apple logo appears. MVC confirms there’s no effect on function and I agree. It’s a cosmetic blip only.

The other is that on cold start, restart or wake from sleep, the card’s fans run up to a noticeable ‘whoosh’ which dies to silence after completion of the boot or wake cycle. Once again, no effect on function, though a change from the stock unmodified card. The speedy fans effect lasts but a few seconds.

Finally, OS X’s System Profiler displays a link speed of 2.5GT/s (PCIe 1.0) whereas I was expecting 5.0GT/s (PCIe 2.0). MVC confirms that the card is actually running at 5.0GT/s, and the only reason for the slower displayed speed is that they have not dug into the code to make System Profiler display the correct speed – the return on effort is not justified, as there is a lot of code to search through. They have a detailed technical blog entry you can read here.

Incorrect link speed shown in System Profiler – the true speed is 5GT/s.

The performance of the 980 with the Apple Cinema Display at maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600 is unchanged – there is no penalty from the upgrade.

Here are the before and after Unigine Valley speeds at the full 2560 x 1600 resolution of the 30″ Apple Cinema Display:

Luxmark shows a small 2% gain to add to the already stellar gain in rendering speed over the GTX680 noted above.

This is a good investment and I recommend the MVC upgrade.

A boot screen for less.

You can buy a used Apple Nvidia GT120 card for $80 and this will show the boot screen. While dated and slow, that’s a lot less than the custom fix above and this old but trusty card has many advantages, including:

• Takes a single slot only
• Low power consumption
• Quiet
• Requires no auxiliary PCIe power cables, deriving all the modest power it needs from the regular PCIe slot
• Option-Start will show you all bootable drives in OS X
• One MDP and one DVI socket – can drive two displays at the same time
• DVI socket will drive up to 2520 x 1600 displays (tested, functions correctly) using a dual-link DVI cable (such as the Apple 30″ Cinema Display, Dell 30″, etc.) – no powered DVI->MDP adapter required with DVI socket use

The pain is that you have to move your display’s connector to this card to see the boot screen, do your thing, then revert the connection to the GTX980. But it’s $100 saved.

Further workarounds to driver problems:

Click here.

An upgrade which adds nothing to the 2014 model.

I just upgraded my 2014 MacBook Air to the 2015 model, an annual process for me, and question the value. The CPU speed bump this year is from 1.4GHz to 1.6GHz, a 14% increase yet Geekbench reports only a 4.1% speed gain. I paid $830 at B&H for the base model, with free shipping. If you have a 2014 I would pass on this ‘upgrade’, especially when you realize the usual time wasting data migration frustrations you must endure. Keep the 2014 and spare yourself the smell of old socks emanating from the new one for the first couple of weeks of use, a ‘feature’ of almost every Apple device I have bought in the past many years.

Finder icons? Something Apple has persistently ‘lost’ for the last few versions of OS X – they seem to come and go as they please:

Finder icons gone missing.

I much prefer TotalFinder which does it right:

Finder icons in TotalFinder.

CPU speed comparisons – Geekbench:

2015 compared with 2014 – a 4.1% CPU speed gain

GPU speed? Despite the ‘upgrade’ from the Intel 5000 to the 6000 integrated GPU nothing has changed:

Cinebench GPU comparisons – 2015 vs. 2014 – no change.

Just more Apple hype. For reference, my 2009 Mac Pro which runs upgraded dual X5690 3.46GHz Xeon Wetstmere CPUs, chips which are now some 4 years old, clocks in around 32,000 on CPU performance and is twice as fast on GPU throughput.   Laptops still have an Everest to climb when it comes to CPU performance though the GPU in the MBA is excellent given the space limitations. 

However, if you are new to the laptop/notebook category, it has to be said that the MacBook Air remains the best value laptop for road use, is well made, weighs 50lbs less than a real Mac Pro and runs PS CS6 and LR6 just fine if not as fast as the behemoth. Depreciation is low and resale easy. For road trips it’s all you need. The absence of a disk drive is a welcome feature (the drive adds bulk and confers no functionality in an online world) and the speedy flash storage is a great feature. While the base model includes only 128GB that is more than enough for the machine’s intended purposes. The trackpad is perfect in every way and the quality of engineering, fit and finish are all unimpeachable.

Disk speed test – MBA 2015.

But, please, do not buy this nonsense:

“Repeat a lie often enough and the people accept it” – Goebbels

Thunderbolt? Of little use and a dying technology, but the Thunderbolt socket will accept a Mini DisplayPort cable and if you use the Apple Dual Link DVI->MDP adapter, you can happily power your 30″ Apple Cinema Display from the MBA at full 2560 x 1600 definition. The MBA’s GPU is exceptionally competent for an integrated design.

Other issues? The MagSafe magnetic power plug, in the current design, adopted four years ago, remains too weakly magnetized and falls out at the slightest provocation. The previous cylindrical design, replaced by the ugly cube one in use today, was superior in every way. But it’s not like you have a choice.

As for ‘all day battery life’ I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can get you a great price on, featuring ‘all day traffic’.

The MacBook Air commands an 80% of cost resale value after 12 months, which is outstanding, justifying annual upgrades – a new machine for $100 or so. I know, as I just sold my 2014. Try those economics with your garbage Windows laptop playing in a crowded field along with its atrocious OS and crapware.

For comparative data on the 2014 MacBook Air click here.

Recommended with the conditions noted.

Comparison with the new MacBook:

I have not tried the new MacBook – you know the one that dumps the ‘insanely great’ Thunderbolt port and MagSafe power connection, in favor of yet another connector, USB-C, so now when you trip over the cable your laptop goes crashing to the floor like the MacBook of old, that oldie with the white plastic body. But Marco Arment, a reputable Apple writer has, and his review sums up the general trend in Apple’s hardware (new Mac Pro anyone?) well. He writes:

“Now, Apple’s priorities have changed. Rather than make really great products that are mostly thin, they now make really thin products that are mostly great.

This concerns me more than you probably think it should. Not only does it represent compromised standards in areas I believe are important, but it suggests that they don’t have many better ideas to advance the products beyond making them thinner, and they’re willing to sacrifice anything to keep that going.”

And it seems like the CPU is a bit of a basset hound in the speed stakes and the GPU is one generation behind the one used in the 2015 MBA review above.

To address Arment’s issues with the new MacBook, the 2015 MBA like its predecessors has an outstanding keyboard with excellent feedback, and the ‘force touch’ track pad is notable for its (welcome) omission. In other words, the MacBook’s failings are absent from the MBA.

Guess I’ll be sticking with the MBA for a while yet. I do not think the premium $450 for a bad keyboard and worse trackpad quite works. That’s a shame as the 12″ MacBook is lighter that the 11″ MBA, but it seems that Jony Ive’s thinness obsession has gone too far yet again. Did the lad not get three squares a day when designing toilets in his youth?

Another worthwhile upgrade.

I just upgraded my MacBook Air to the 2014 model and commend it to you. Most of the press out there has cynically dismissed the CPU speed bump from 1.3GHz to 1.4GHz as irrelevant, though the drop in the price of the 4GB/128GB base model (mine!) of $100 to $899 has been rightly welcomed.

Well, those writers are dead wrong. The speed increase on CPU tasks as measured by Geekbench is significant:

2014 compared with 2013.

In my book that’s a 22% CPU speed gain despite a spec gain of just 8% in CPU speed. That’s very impressive.

GPU speed?

Cinebench GPU comparisons – 2014 vs. 2013.

A 21% speed gain. Not trivial.

The MacBook Air remains the best value laptop for road use, weighs 50lbs less than a real Mac Pro (not the poncy cylindrical version) and runs PS CS5 and LR5 just fine if not as fast as the behemoth. For road trips it’s all you need.

And it commands a 70% of cost resale value 12 months hence. Try that with your garbage Windows laptop.

For comparative data on the 2013 MacBook Air click here.

Highly recommended.

Better than the 2012.

Part I appears here.

Moving from the 2012 MacBook Air to the 2013 involves no learning curve. Ergonomically the machines are identical.

If you are moving from an earlier model, before wiping it clean for sale do remember to deactivate iTunes (limit is 5 activations) and Photoshop (limit is 2 activations). For iTunes it’s in the Store menu option, for PS it’s under Help.

As usual, I migrated applications and data using Migration Assistant, a speedy and seamless process.

In terms of start-up speed, meaning a working display after opening the lid (there’s no need to ever power the machine off) it’s very noticeable that start-up is considerably faster. The occasional 2-5 second wait (it’s not consistent) with the 2012 is gone, the screen lighting up either instantaneously or 1 second after opening. Apple mentioned this in their roll-out and it appears to be true, not their usual hype. Nice.

Some test data:

MBA 2013 and 2012, Geekbench 64.

The 2013 CPU is marginally slower but you do not notice this in practice.

Graphics, as measured by Cinebench, are far faster, thanks to the new HD5000 integrated GPU in the 2013 model; the 2012 uses the HD4000 CPU, integrated with the Ivy Bridge CPU:

Cinebench 2013 and 2012. The 2013 is 31% faster.

Temperature Monitor (from Bresink) is not yet updated and cannot graphically display the Haswell CPU’s core temperatures, though it does display all the other sensors. SMC Fan control, however, does report the CPU temperature in the status bar. The CPU in the 2013 runs 10-20F cooler than in the 2012, rarely hitting 140F. 158F in the 2012 was common. These machines run hot, owing to poor cooling in the limited space available, the upshot being you can feel the warmth on your lap with stressful processes – like Cinebench. The new machine is noticeably cooler. As usual I’m running SMC Fan Control with a minimum setting for the one poncy fan of 3,500rpm. It’s not audible in practice. The stock speed is just too low for comfort and I rather prefer my vitals unfried.

I don’t have tools to objectively measure the key upgrade in the 2013, meaning battery life, but after a day’s use I can confirm my earlier estimate that the 4 hour life in the 11″ model has approximately doubled, owing to the lower power consumption Haswell CPU. Impressive.

My 2013 MBA has the minimum 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. The Lightroom (Version 5) and Photoshop (CS 5.1) experience remains excellent and no excuses need be made for the MBA 2013 as a photo processing machine. LR starts in 7 seconds, PS in 3-4. Exporting an image from LR to PS takes a scant 2 seconds. Add an external larger display and you have a fine photo processing machine.

The new faster 802-11ac wifi is present, but I have no means of testing this as my router does not support it, so I’m running 802-11n at 5GHz from an ancient single band Airport Extreme router.

802-11ac installed.

Scrolling in the 2012 model using two fingers on the the touchpad is excellent; in the 2013 it’s not as good, showing slight jerkiness owing to response delay. I’m confident this is something Apple will fix in an OS or firmware upgrade.

Sequential disk access (both machines use a Solid State 128GB drive) is 38% faster, measured with xbench:

2013 and 2012 disk access data.

I suspect the speed increase results from the use of a PCI connection for the SSD in the 2013 machine, compared to SATA3 in the 2012 version. Strangely random disk access is far slower in the newer machine but I have not seen any subjective slowdown. SSDs are nice for fast starts from cold (irrelevant here) and application loading, but if high volume storage is required with a MacBook Air then an external Thunderbolt (costly and very fast) or USB3 (cheap but slower) traditional hard disk drive is called for. Thuderbolt enclosures seem to start at $500+, a price point which will ensure they do not gain mass market acceptance. USB3 enclosures, like the Mediasonics I use for movie storage, run $100 for a 4-bay box. However, neither of my two Mediasonic boxes is seen by the 2013 MBA, whereas the 2012 was fine, so it looks like Mediasonic will have to issue a firmware upgrade. USB2 works fine with both, and both have the latest circuit boards.

The perpendicular Magsafe2 power connector continues over from the 2012. This is most certainly not an improvement on the right-angled MagSafe1 used in the 2010 model which had a far stronger magnet. The current connector is dislodged far too easily, but Apple has refused to listen to its users, not for the first time.

There is one small error in Mountain Lion on this machine. If you have multiple apps open and quit one, the menu bar disappears until any other app is clicked. Probably an error in the kernel which, I assume, has been modified to work with the new Haswell CPU. Not a big deal.

There’s really not much more to say. For $1,000 with a high resale value, the cost of ownership is low, the machine is as light and robust as can be, and is arguably the best bang for the buck in any laptop currently on the market. Resale value one year hence will be around $700, making the annual cost of ownership just $300.

The Good:

• Runs cooler and faster than the 2012 model
• $100 cheaper than the 2012
• Very well made and robust given how slim it is
• Doubled battery life compared with the 2012 model
• Fast 128GB SSD
• Excellent Intel HD5000 graphics processor
• Retina Display is not missed in an 11″ screen
• Wake from sleep is much quicker than in 2012
• No Windows OS. Masochists can run Windows using Boot Camp or aftermarket software
• Decent speakers for its small size
• Full sized, backlit keyboard
• Fine machine for Lightroom and Photoshop, though plugging in a larger display really helps
• Familiar mechanical design has shown no major weak points over the past few years
• Excellent resale value. Compare with any Windows laptop

The Bad:

• Wretchedly weak magnet on the Magsafe2 power plug
• Two finger touchpad scrolling is noticeably jerky. 2012 model was perfect in this regard **
• Status bar at top of screen disappears when an application is exited
• SDXC card reader available on the 13″ model only
• You will have to buy two – one for your spouse

** I tracked down the cause of this. On my 3 display desktop I use an app named Mouse Locator which throws up a big green circle where the cursor last was if you ‘lose’ it. That app migrated over to my MBA years ago when I migrated all my apps over from the big machine. Disabling this app (in System Preferences) and restarting made the jerkiness go away. The app is not required on the MBA’s small screen so no loss.

Kaizen at work.

‘Kaizen’ refers to the Japanese concept of making a good machine then continually improving it. You can see it in Japanese cars where certain brands like Lexus command extraordinarily high repeat purchase rates. When you have owned one you keep coming back for more because you know that what was already very good is now even better.

The 2013 MacBook Air – appearance unchanged from 2012.

And so it is with Apple’s MacBook Air, the third version of which I will be receiving next week, the 2013. I reviewed the 2012 here.

That was barely 12 months ago so why upgrade? First, as a job related expense, the upgrade cost to me is pretty much zero. Used MBAs hold value well and I’ll net $700 on the old one. Second, the improvements in the 2013 model – I’ll be getting the 11″ version yet again – are far from trivial, including:

• Battery life up from 5 to 9 hrs (meaning from 4 to 8 hrs in real world use)
• Cooler running and lower power consumption Haswell i5 CPU
• Greatly improved graphics from the new HD5000 Intel integrated GPU
• Faster SSD now connected using PCIe rather than SATA – an industry first
• $1,000 for the 128GB SSD version compared with $1,100 a year ago
• The first computer with 802-11ac wifi

The big one is battery life and while Apple claims the credit for that it results from the use of Intel’s exciting new Haswell CPU which dramatically cuts power consumption. While the new CPU appears slower at 1.3GHz compared with 1.7GHz for the 2012 model, in practice the Turbo mode – automatically invoked when needed – doubles the speed to 2.6GHz and early Geekbench tests suggest the speed is identical to its predecessor.

As usual I’ll test the machine using Lightroom and Photoshop and will report back in Part II. I expect only improvement over the already very capable 2012 version which runs both apps fine if not super fast.

Meanwhile, a word on the new 802-11ac wifi, an industry first. You will need to buy a new router and Apple obliges with the latest Airport Extreme at the same $200 asked for the old version. Both computer and router are backwards compatible with 802-11a, b, g and n so a new router is only required if 802-11ac works in your environment. The new technology claims to seek out your computer’s location, speeding throughput.

Apple’s new router looks every bit as inept as the new MacPro as regards form factor, and I’ll wait for the likes of AnandTech to test real world speed before deciding whether to upgrade my now ancient single-band Airport Extreme.

2013 Airport Extreme, waiting to tip over.

The tippy looking shape suggests either Velcro is called for or that the device is placed horizontally. Whether the latter orientation affects antenna function remains to be seen.

Apple did not announce a Retina Display version of the MBA and nor do I expect them to. That would simply cannibalize the MacBook Pro RD and there would be little to choose on pricing. Further, current battery technology would not deliver useful life with the MBA’s thin chassis when used with the power hungry Retina Display.

Apple has shown time and again that it can do truly dumb things – the Lisa, the Cube, the Newton and now the new MacPro – but they are skillfully applying kaizen to their fine MBA product.

Part II, with performance measurements, is here.