Apple's new range of MacBook Airs is out and they include the latest Haswell processors from Intel as well as a variety of other tweaks and improvements. Unfortunately the new models don't include Retina displays or, indeed, improved memory and storage, as the benchmarks are showing. MacWorld have got their hands on the new MacBook Airs and have compared the 2013 model to the 2014 model, and the results are mixed. Processor-wise, the new models are slightly improved due to the new Haswell chips from Intel. In terms of flash storage, however, the new Airs are slower than the old Airs, with some benchmarks showing that the new laptops were twice as slow as the old ones.

To see how the new MacBook Air performed in comparison to its predecessor, we turned to our overall system performance benchmark suite, Speedmark 9. We tested the $899 11-inch MacBook Air with 128GB of storage and the new $1199 13-inch MacBook Air with 256GB of storage, and our results show that the new laptops were 2 to 5 percent faster than the mid-2013 MacBook Air in tests involving Photoshop, iTunes, Handbrake, Cinebench CPU, Aperture, and PCMark 8's Office application test (running in Parallels).

Interestingly, the new MacBook Air turned in slower test results than the mid-2013 MacBook Air in our storage performance tests. (The mid-2013 MacBook Airs we have on hand are an 11-inch 1.3GHz model with 256GB of flash storage and a 13-inch 1.3GHz model with 128GB of storage.) Copying 6GB of files and folders took 28 seconds on last year's 11-inch MacBook Air, but took nearly twice as long (54 seconds) on this year's 11-inch model. With solid-state storage, lower capacity drives are often slower performers, and last year's 11-inch had the higher capacity 256GB of flash. However, the new 11-inch model was also slower than last year's 13-inch model with 128GB of flash storage.

Compressing a 6GB folder also took quite a bit longer on the new MacBook Air and Unzipping was just plain slow, with the new 11-inch taking nearly three times as long to perform the task as last year's 11-inch MacBook Air.

We simplified the 6GB data set we use in our copy, compress and uncompress tests to use fewer but larger files (1765 versus 8797) and ran the trials again. Both the 2013 and 2014 vintages of MacBook Airs were faster at manipulating this data set. The performance differences narrowed considerably, as well, but the 2014 11-inch MacBook Air with 128GB of flash storage was still the slowest of the group in these three tests; it was 35 percent slower than the mid-2013 13-inch MacBook Air with the same flash storage capacity when copying files, and 53 percent slower than that system when uncompressing the files. Zipping the files was only 3 percent slower on the 2014 11-inch MacBook Air.