When my parents bought me my first laptop, I fought tooth and nail to spend the extra money and get a bigger one. The 15-inch Dell Inspiron E1505 I talked them into buying was big and heavy enough to fill a backpack, but man, did it have a big screen.

My computer needs changed over time.

My laptop stopped being my TV, my game console, my desk, and a tray for late-night Bagel Bites. I needed a powerful computer that wasn't too big.

So I bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro, which worked well until I dropped it too many times and downloaded too many torrents. Then it clutched its chest and fell over in my living room. I bought a 13-inch MacBook Air this time.

Now, after more than two years of

liveblogging and cross-country flights, it's falling apart. One of the USB ports only works half the time, the audio output is horrible, and I always have to rush to finish a meeting before the battery dies. A new machine is needed.

1 Design

More tiny than tiny

I always felt a little bit of buyer's remorse because I didn't buy the 11-inch Air in the beginning. It's smaller and lighter than its 13-inch brother, but other than that, it seems to be the same thing.

Even though its solid-state storage has been doubled to 128GB and it costs $999 less, it is a better deal. So, when the new model with the Haswell processor landed on my desk, it was more than just a review unit. It was just a test.

As Nilay said in his review of the bigger model, there isn't much new about the way the latest Air looks. The only small difference between models is that the left side has a second microphone that is meant to cancel out noise. (I can't say I had problems with sound before, but the new setup does a great job of cancelling out background noise.) The 11-inch model looks pretty much the same as it always has, with black keys and accents on a silver body. I still like the wedge shape, and there aren't many things I'd change about the hardware of the Air.

The 11-inch Air weighs six-tenths of a pound less than the 13-inch model and would fit inside the larger machine with about an inch to spare on each side. Its only benefit is that it is small, which is also its only reason for being. It is also small, much smaller than the 13-inch Air.

Even so, the large model isn't exactly my old E1505 since it's 0.68 inches thick (the same as the 11-inch) and weighs 2.96 pounds.

Small is better. But in the time I've used the 11-inch Air, I've found that there are a few things you have to give up if you go with the smaller model. The first is an SD card slot. This might not be important to most people, but I use SD cards all the time to transfer photos or share files, and I hate having to carry another dongle on top of the USB-to-Ethernet cable and USB hub I already have to carry because the Air doesn't have a lot of ports.

The trackpad on the 11-inch Air is still smooth, responsive, and easily the best in its class, but it isn't as good as the one on the larger model because there isn't as much room to move around on it. I can't scroll as quickly or move around the screen with a single swipe, and the whole computer feels a little tight in a way that a bigger one doesn't. I ended up sitting closer to it, slouching over 12 inches from the screen and staring at the bright screen.

2 Performance

This is the story of the 11-inch Air: small computers have to give up small things. Even though its 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display is slightly sharper than the 13.3-inch, 1440 x 900 display on the larger model (135ppi vs. 128), that doesn't change the fact that the smaller display makes it harder to do more than one thing at once and isn't as good for watching movies. Plus, when compared to the super high-resolution screens on the MacBook Pro with Retina display, the Sony VAIO Pro, or the Toshiba Kirabook, both screens start to look old.

The best battery life in its class, but Apple has already broken that trend.

 

Even the battery life is good, though it's not quite as good as the Air. On the Verge Battery Test, which cycles through popular websites and high-resolution images at 65 percent brightness while in Safari, I got 10 hours and 23 minutes. That number was 8 hours and 51 minutes in Chrome. Both are the best in their class, except when compared to the Air, which has an amazing 13+ hours of battery life.

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