You might want to hold off on buying an Apple MacBook Air; a new one could be just around the corner.
Apple has reportedly placed an order with its Asian manufacturers for 380,000 next-generation MacBook Airs, equipped with Intel's newest Sandy Bridge processors, Concord Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in a note obtained by AppleInsider.
Kuo said 55 percent of these new models will be 11.6-inch versions, and the rest will be 13.3-inch models. In addition, Kuo said Apple has scaled back production of current models, announced back in October 2010, to 80,000.
Kuo has been saying since April that Apple will launch its next MacBook Air in June or July. At the same time, he said he expected the popular notebook would be equipped with Sandy Bridge processors and high-speed Thunderbolt transfer technology. In early May, Taiwanese newspaper DigiTimes cited sources who said the same thing. By late May, a Japanese blog reported that Apple was testing MacBook Airs with an A5 chip inside, the same chip used in the iPad 2 (though Steve Jobs has said once that Apple has no interest in building a netbook).
With the launch last week of iCloud and a download-only Mac OS X Lion, many are speculating that Apple will turn the MacBook Air into its next primary machine. Furthermore, as Tim Bajaran extracted from Intel's keynote speech at Computex this month, ultra-thin laptops may be the next big trend; Intel's followup from Sandy Bridge is a low-voltage, high-speed processor codenamed "Ivy Bridge."
Even though the technology inside current MacBook Airs is incredibly outdated compared to its MacBook Pro breathren, the premium-priced notebooks have been a boon for Apple. In March, Kuo (again) told AppleInsider that Apple shipped about 1.1 million of the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air laptops in the last three months of 2010, making it Apple's most successful Mac product launch.
For more, see PCMag's reviews of the MacBook Air 13.3-inch and MacBook Air 11.6-inch unveiled last October. But note that in April, Apple quietly began replacing the solid state drives (SSD) in the smaller MacBook Air models with faster ones.