Smaller than small

I always had a bit of buyer’s remorse, too, having not bought the 11-inch Air in the first place. It’s smaller, lighter, and otherwise ostensibly the same thing as its 13-inch brother. And at $999, it’s cheaper to boot — even though its solid-state storage has been doubled to 128GB. So when the new Haswell-powered model crossed my desk, it became more than a review unit. It was a tryout.

As Nilay mentioned in his review of the larger model, there’s really nothing aesthetically new with the latest Air. The one miniscule change is the same between models: there’s a second microphone on the left edge, designed for noise cancellation. (I can’t say I had a problem with audio before, but the new setup does cancel out ambient noise impressively well.) For all intents and purposes the 11-inch model looks the same as always, with black keys and accents on a silver body. I still love the wedge design, and there are few things I’d like Apple to change about the Air’s hardware.

The 11-inch Air weighs six-tenths of a pound less than the 13-inch model, and would fit inside the larger machine with an inch or so to spare on either side. That’s its advantage, really its sole reason for existence — it’s small. And it is small, noticeably more so than the 13-inch Air. Of course, at 0.68 inches thick (the same as the 11-inch) and 2.96 pounds, the large model isn’t exactly my old E1505.

Small is good. But in the time I’ve been using the 11-inch Air, I’ve found a handful of sacrifices you make by choosing the smaller model. The first is an SD card slot — this might not matter to most people, but I’m constantly using SD cards to offload photos or share files, and I hate always needing another dongle, in addition to the USB-to-Ethernet cable and USB hub I already have to carry, because the Air is pretty sparse on ports to begin with.

The second diminutiveness-related loss is a shrunken palmrest and trackpad. When the keyboard’s the same size and the whole thing’s an inch shorter, something else had to give, but the big, roomy trackpad is one of the things I most enjoy about the Air in the first place.

The 11-inch Air’s trackpad is still smooth, responsive, and easily the best in its class, but it’s not as good as the larger model just because there’s not as much room to roam. I can’t scroll as quickly or move around the screen in a single swipe anymore, and the whole computer just feels slightly cramped in a way a larger machine doesn’t. I found myself sitting closer to it, hunched over 12 inches away from the screen, staring into the bright display.

Performance

This is the ongoing story of the 11-inch Air: tiny computers require tiny sacrifices. Though its 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display is actually slightly sharper than the 1440 x 900, 13.3-inch display on the larger model (135ppi vs. 128), that doesn’t change the fact that the smaller display makes multitasking harder and isn’t as good for watching movies. Plus, both screens start to look old-fashioned next to the super high-res screens on the MacBook Pro with Retina display, or the Sony VAIO Pro, or the Toshiba Kirabook.

Even battery life is great without being quite as good as the larger Air. I got 10 hours, 23 minutes on the Verge Battery Test, which cycles through popular websites and high-res images at 65 percent brightness, while in Safari. In Chrome, that number was 8 hours, 51 minutes. Both are class-leading numbers, except when compared to the larger Air and its astonishing 13-plus hours of longevity.

Performance is otherwise roughly what I expected — very slightly better gaming and graphics performance, and better compatibility with the latest Wi-Fi standards thanks to a small upgrade from Apple. But it's basically identical in everyday use — it's fast and smooth, though there's the occasional stutter and scrolling jump — and nearly equal in GeekBench scores as well (6,113 on the current model). Since they both run the same 1.3GHz Core i5 Haswell processor with 4GB of RAM, there’s no obvious difference between sizes, either. Or even between Haswell and Ivy Bridge, except for that ridiculous battery life.