Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs inbound
Faster sub-notebooks in June, says mole
Apple will update its MacBook Air family of ultra-skinny laptops with Intel's second-generation Core i chips in Q2.
A mole said to be familiar with Apple's plans whispered to Cnet that the update will come in June.
The 11.6in and 13.3in Air currently contain Core 2 Duo CPUs and Nvidia chipsets. Switching to Sandy Bridge processors would allow Apple to modernise the line's processor and use cheaper Intel graphics without too much of a performance hit.
The roll-out of Sandy Bridge-based systems was recently disrupted by a chipset glitch affecting the platform's Sata storage support.
The bug is being fixed, but it will knock back the released of anticipated Sandy Bridge machines like the MacBook Pro revamp World+Dog expects to take place during the next month or two. ®
COMMENTS
Give them a backlit keyboard and I'm sold.
The Airs are lovely kit but my 2009 MacBook Pro still beats them on one important thing for me, a backlit keyboard. Fix that and I'll consider them for a future upgrade - I do not want to buy another laptop without the back lighting its just so useful.
The Airs are the future of laptops, lightweight, small, good processors, unibody solid metal build (imagine what the Liquidmetal version would be like!) and SSDs.
But...
"Switching to Sandy Bridge processors would allow Apple to modernise the line's processor and use cheaper Intel graphics without too much of a performance hit."
But will the cost savings be passed on to the consumer? I hope so. About time they updated the Air to a modern processor.
Bug
I would have thought laptops like the MacBook Air could avoid the chipset bug, as two of the SATA ports work and Apply can control which ones are used.
