Macbook Airs to cross Sandy Bridge over River Core-i, soon

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 15 June 2011 00:36

Your IT - Mobility

The long-awaited updates for Apple's MacBook Airs to Sandy Bridge technology is reportedly due to bear fruit at the end of this month, with sales of 1.5m per quarter expected and actual sales to start in July.

With Apple making the thinnest notebooks on the planet thanks to its MacBook Air range, many have been waiting for Intel's Sandy Bridge 2011 Core-i technology to make it to the Air range.

Promising more power, and hopefully a boost in storage capacities, Apple's MacBook Air range is expected to be highly popular, especially with Intel's 'ultrabook' concept still a long way away from in-store retail availability.

If Apple can make the MacBook Air's keyboard backlit as well, it would add to the sweetness that a more powerful MacBook Air would bring to both the 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch models, with slightly more 11.6-models due to be produced due to their high popularity.

The news comes from Apple Insider, which previously reported Apple placing an initial order this month for 380,000 Sandy Bridge-based MacBook Airs.

Apple's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is also expected to make Macs in general even more popular, especially as they deliver a user experience that is above and beyond anything any of Apple's competitors are currently offering.

Indeed, Apple Insider's article quotes an analyst now suggesting his forecast sales of '18 million Macs in calendar year 2011' may now be too conservative.

Of course, there's still no word of any MacPad Air hybrid device, even if the idea of an iPad that used both iOS and OS X simultaneously while being able to easily snap onto a keyboard is, to me at least, very, very cool.

Hopefully that device comes next year sometime, with plenty of learnings to come from the fully multi-touch enabled OS X Lion and whatever Apple is cooking up with its iPad 3.

Until then, the world awaits not only the new MacBook Airs, but the introduction of both OS X 10.7 Lion and iOS 5, the next steps in Apple's journey of magic and revolution for all that care to join it.