The new MacBook Air has longer battery life than the Intel models, too, despite the faster chip. I didn't notice any sort of slowdown even when I had lots of tabs open in the browser and about a dozen different apps open. But, it's more powerful than the Intel's embedded graphics.Īpps open quickly, too, but are more on par with the MacBook Air from earlier this year. That game is 2 years old, though, so I still wouldn't think of the Mac as a powerhouse compared with laptops with dedicated graphics chips from Nvidia or AMD. That's true: the old MacBook Air can barely run the game while the new MacBook Air can run it fine and on higher graphics settings. I don't think folks normally think of Macs as gaming systems, but Apple's website says the game runs 3.5 times faster than the MacBook Air. I repeated these tests in some real-world environments, like in the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider.