Apple Fixing To Build Nearly 400K Next-Gen Macbook Airs This Month – Report

Rumors of a MacBook Air refresh have been building in intensity for the past six weeks or so, and with more than eight months having elapsed since the debut of Apple’s phenomenally successful redesign and expansion of its smallest laptops, an imminent upgrade can be reasonably anticipated. Especially given that the still-current MacBook Airs have been lagging behind their MacBook Pro stablemates in that they’re still powered by 2008 technology Penryn family Core 2 Duo Intel processors while the Pro models got the latest Sandy Bridge Core “i” silicon five months ago.

That might do for the also still Core 2 Duo powered entry-level white polycarbonate MacBook (whose future prospects remain cloudy) and the Mac mini, bit it’s increasingly inappropriate for a marquee machine like the MacBook Air. Happily, that seems likely to change in the near future.

Appleinsider’s Kasper Jade and Neil Hughes report that according to Concord Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who’s been on something of a roll with recent, accurate iPad 2 and iPhone predictions, has now turned to the Mac, issuing a new research report claiming that Apple is planning to manufacture 380,000 units of an Intel Sandy Bridge-based second-generation of Apple’s revitalized MacBook 11.6 and 13.3-inch Air notebooks this month.

Kuo estimates that roughly 55 percent of the new MacBook Airs will be 11.6-inch units, which have been slightly more popular sellers than the 13.3-inch model, presumably attributable to their more attractive entry-level price point of $999 along with their trim size. Kuo anticipates that Apple will concurrently wind down Core 2 Duo MacBook Air production this month with a final run of 80,000 units, bringing total MacBook Air production for June 2011 to 460,000.

Jade and Hughes observe that in the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote last week, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller pointed out that that the Mac has outgrown the PC market in every quarter over the past five years, and singled-out the revitalized MacBook Air as a major reason why Apple has found such success while the rest of the market continues to struggle, summarizing that “It’s beautiful, it’s thin, it’s light, it’s fast. The whole PC industry wants to copy it.” Schiller also noted that Apple has been leading in the notebook category for some time, being the first major PC maker to achieve a majority of computer business with portable machines, and that today, almost three-quarters of Mac systems shipped by Apple are notebooks. An Apple supply chain insider told Appleinsider that the two MacBook Air models sell at roughly half the volume of MacBook Pros, with more than a million units of the revised MacBook Air sold in its first quarter of availability.

The article predicts that the new revision MacBook Airs entering production this month will sport Intel’s’ latest ultra-low-voltage Core i5 and Core i7 chips with between 3MB and 4MB of Smart Cache, supporting a theoretical maximum of 8GB of internal system memory.

CNET’s Brooke Crothers also notes that as CNET reported in February, a new MacBook Air revision will get Intel’s Sandy Bridge silicon and finally drop the older Core 2 Duo chips that have powered the Air since it debuted in January 2008.

However, Crothers observes that a remaining question outstanding is whether the new Airs will get the, high-performance Thunderbolt I/O port that now comes with all MacBook Pros, but he expects it’s a lock that the Air will return to an Intel integrated graphics chipset, displacing the Nvidia GeForce 320M IGPU that’s used in the current model Airs. Intel’s HD Graphics IGPUs that are integrated with its Core “i” processors is widely rated less powerful than the 320M, but with the 13″ MacBook Pro the performance boost that came with the Core “i” processors has more than compensated in real world use.

So when will we see the new MacBook Air models? If Kuo’s June production forecast is accurate, we can expect them soon, and the timing in this particular instance would seem to favor a simultaneous rollout with OS X 10.7 Lion in July. It would be cumbersome for early MacBook Air revision B adopters to be obliged to install an OS upgrade a week or three after buying their new computer. Just my 2¢.