Apple Cuts Certified Refurbished MacBook Air Prices – More Evidence Of Refresh Soon?

Over the weekend, the online Apple Store cut the price of Apple Certified Refurbished base 11.6″ MacBook Air models by $20 to $829.00. The smallest ACR Air upgraded with a 128 GB solid state drive is now $999, and tricked out with a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and the 128 GB drive, you’ll now have to pop for $1,159.00.

If anyone is still interested, Apple is offering refurb. original 13″ MacBook Airs with 128 GB SSDs for $1,069.00, and the much cooler and vastly better value current revision 13″ Air, also with 128 GB SSD for just $10 more. The newer design at those prices is a complete no-brainer.

Canadians shopping at the Apple Canada online store will have to pay CAN$869.00 for the ACR base 11.6″ unit, with the other models’ prices slightly higher than in the U.S. accordingly.

A further clue that a MacBook Air refresh may be just over the horizon was noted over the weekend by AppleHeadlines’ Brian who reported that while checking out his local Best Buy he was surprised to note that current gen MacBook Air models were on sale. He says that there were also MacBook Pro models on sale but they were previous generation models so it wasn’t strange to see them marked down, but the MacBook Air models were current-generation which leads him to deduce that a MacBook Air refresh with Sandy Bridge processors could be coming very soon.

The widely rumored next revision MacBook Airs are also expected to get the new Thunderbolt high-speed I/O port, and going with Intel Sandy Bridge Core “i” silicon will mean a switch to Intel’s in-house HD integrated graphics processor chipsets from the current Core 2 Duo machines’ Nvidia GeForce 320M IGPUs.

Another item on my wish list would be making a more reasonable 4 GB of RAM standard issue given that MacBook Air RAM is not upgradable after manufacture.