mid 2013 13" mac air buy or wait?

Hi should i buy the mac air now or wait to see if the pc haswell laptops got better resolution than 1400 x 900?
I am looking for a light, portable laptop that has 6+ hrs battery life, 1600x900 or better resolution and 8 gbs of ram...

 

most of the revealed models of ultrabooks got a higher res than the mba

 

If resolution matters to you wait for igzo display fujitsu or samsung 3200x1800 but it will be like 600$ more expensive than top of the line mba specs.

 

MBA 13 is so close to meeting your requirements. There isn't much difference between 1600x900 and 1440x900. The vertical real estate counts most.

It's highly likely that the next round of ultrabooks from Asus and Samsung will include a top model with 8GB and they already have 1920x1080. With Haswell they will break 6 hours, but the MBA will still probably have the edge in battery life.

So I guess it depends on your priorities: resolution, battery life, or OS?

 

New Samsung ativ book 9 Plus is 3200 x 1800.

Sent from my SGNote2 using Tapatalk

 

Man. That's an awesome display. I hope that Haswell iGPU is up to the task of driving it.

 

actually aside that the acer s7 is getting a IGZO panel, the cheaper model will keep the 1080p though, then we have the zenbook infinity and a lot of others, including fujitsu in the middle.

For sharp its going to be a very good year

 

I just looked it up. With 8GB (finally!!) and 256GB and claimed 12 hour battery life it's looking pretty sweet.

I will be very curious to see how Windows 8 and Windows applications handle the scaling.

 

Are they using special drivers for display scaling on that high res of a screen? seems like it could lead to compatibility problems down the road if you aren't able to update the drivers with something generic.

 

AFAIK, no.

the kirabook had some things going on, but not on driver lvl

 

I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that it's equivalent to running four 1600x900 monitors, which is much easier than running a single hi resolution panel. Go read through the anandtech comments about the laptop, because they go into all of this with more detail. From what I read, it should be a breeze for this thing to handle. Also Windows 8.1 should take care if the dpi scaling.

Edit - I hope everyone knows that I'm aware of the fact that 1600x900 times four equals 3200x1800. What I meant to say was that the panel on this Samsung laptop has four panels that make up one bigger panel or at least is treated as such and that's what people commenting over at anandtech were claiming.

Sent from my SGNote2 using Tapatalk

 

Standard off the shelf drivers for any GPU that supports 4 or more screens

that is exactly how it works. it is the same as my external 4K screens ( they are 3840 x 2160 though ) each corner of the screen is running as an independent monitor tiled together. upper left is screen 1, upper right is screen 2, lower left is screen 3, lower right is screen 4, and you have an onboard 2X2 MUX to combine the inputs when drivers are not loaded.

It is a fun gag to actually flip screens 1 and 4 to confuse co workers and the scaling is fantastic to work with, also faster if you are only running fast moving action on one or two screens since the system does not need to worry about pixel pushing everything, just the quadrant(s) needing it.

here is a 2 screen by 2 screen in externals for an example. imagine it shrunk, no borders and combined into a single panel

 

Buy now I would say. Anything else that comes out will be in beta stage and we all know what that means....unrealiable.