On our Spreadsheet test, the Air smoked the competition, taking just 3 minutes and 55 seconds to pair 20,000 names and addresses in OpenOffice. That's more than 1,000 points higher than the average (4,523), the 12-inch MacBook (4,631), and the XPS 13 (5,530) and X250 (5,259), both of which also have Core i5 processors. On Geekbench, the 11-inch Air scored 5,800. The 11-inch Air packs a 1.6-GHz Intel Core i5-5250U processor and 4GB of RAM, the same as in the base model of 13-inch Air, and more powerful than the Core M processor in the MacBook. With a Delta-E score of 4.2, it's less accurate than the MacBook (1.2) and the X250 (1.18) - numbers closer to zero are better - but is much better than the (nontouch) XPS 13's score of 8.1. The Air's color accuracy also leaves something to be desired. Still, the X250's display was even worse, at just 64.3 percent.

However, the brightness of the Air's display can't make up for the fact that it can show only 67.4 percent of the sRGB color gamut, making it a less colorful screen than those on the XPS 13 (91.7 percent) and the MacBook (101.8 percent). With a brightness of 370 nits, the 11-inch Air outshines the MacBook (322 nits) and the XPS 13 (298 nits), but was slightly dimmer than the X250. While I don't necessarily require the 2304 x 1440 panel of the MacBook in a 12- or 13-inch screen, I do like to see at least a 1080p display, as on the Dell XPS 13 and the Lenovo ThinkPad X250. However, if you're opting for a larger display, you deserve more pixels. For an 11-inch display, this resolution still works for me. The Air's 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display also remains the same.

Mac airbook 2015