Intel’s Sandy Bridge Recall Might Mean Delayed Next-Gen MacBook Pros

By

_DSC7079sm

Yesterday, Intel announced a massive hardware recall that surely stopped the hearts of a few investors: the Cougar Point chipset used for their cutting-edge Sandy Bridge CPU had a hardware bug that caused the SATA 3GB/s port to degrade over time, potentially harming hard drives and other devices connected to it.

All things considered, it’s not actually a huge issue. Intel expects that over 3 years of use it would see a failure rate of approximately 5 – 15% depending on usage model. Still, at the end of the day, Intel expects to spend a billion dollars recalling and replacing the chipset. Oof.

The good news, of course, is that a Mac owner, this won’t affect your current system a whit: there aren’t any Macs available with Sandy Bridge just yet. Here’s the bad news, though. That imminent imminent Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro refresh? That might get delayed.

Here’s the problem: while Intel’s already aware of the problem, they don’t expect to start shipping new chipsets until late February. If the next MacBook Pro uses one of those chipsets, that means Apple won’t actually be able to really build them until early March, most likely.

What this means is that if you were expecting new MacBook Pros to drop next month, you should probably think again: late March is probably the earliest we can expect to see them.

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.