MobileMark 14 is perhaps the most realistic test for measuring actual office productivity battery life around and the Broadwell chip delivers in battery life. The top-end XPS 13, with its QHD+ screen, has a resolution of 3200×1800. I’ll also point out that both Dells pack far more pixels than the competition. That’s about a 40 percent increase in battery capacity over the MacBook Air 11, and a little better than the Dell XPS 13’s 52-watt-hour battery.

The MacBook Air 13’s is a massive 54 watt hours. The MacBook Air 11’s battery is 38 watt hours. While the CPU and storage options don’t change, Apple takes advantage of the Air 13’s larger chassis to pump up the battery capacity. That’s also where you’ll see some pretty big differences in specs. That model is just slightly smaller than the XPS 13. So I reached into our locker for a MacBook Air 11 2014. In my view, the MacBook Air 13 is quite a bit larger than XPS 13, despite the XPS 13’s similarly sized panel.The fairer comparison to the should be based on size. The MacBook Air 11 is slightly smaller than the XPS13 and also has 1/5 its pixels too. Hollister tested the QHD+ version and the 1080p version of the XPS 13, getting 5 hours and 6 hours respectively, while the MacBook Air 13 gave him 8.5 hours of practical use. Over at Gizmodo, Sean Hollister was also deeply disappointed: “Dell quotes up to 15 hours of battery life, and I struggled to get even half that in the real world.” But he, too, tested the XPS 13 agains the MacBook Air 13.

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