Thunderbolt MacBook Airs Coming In June – Report

Appleinsider’s Kasper Jade reports that a MacBook Air refresh is on the way, with production to ramp up late next month, according to Concord Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo’s sources in Apple’s Far Eastern manufacturing subcontractor community.

The updated Airs are expected to be equipped with Core “i” Sandy Bridge porcessors, Intel integrated graphics displacing the current models’ Nvidia graphics chipsets, and Thunderbolt ultra high-speed I/O ports, bringing them into line with the recently revised MacBook Pro family of notebooks.

Kuo predicts that the revamped MacBook Airs will begin production in late May and ship to consumers starting in June.

The report notes that sales of the gen 2 MacBook Air, which hit in the neighborhood of 1 million units during their first quarter of production, moving at a robust ratio of two-to-one relative to MacBook Pro sales, fell off sharply in Q1 2011 to the tune of 51 percent, including a 40 percent month-over-month plunge in February after Apple rolled out refreshed MacBook Pros with Sandy Bridge CPUs and Thunderbolt.

Apple hopes (I think it’s a pretty lively hope) that MacBook Air sales will be re-invigorated by the specification upgrade. It’s not really surprising that MacBook Air fans planning an elective system upgrade or switch would logically deduce that a MacBook Air revision replacing the current model’s long-in-the-tooth Core 2 Duo processor silicon and future-proofing with Thunderbolt compatibility would be in the channels in the not too distant future, and resolve to make do with their old hardware until the new models are available.

The MacBook Air remains a seductively appealing device, probably the best laptop option for most laptop users, and sales should be on the upswing again when the revised models become available.