Apple Is Working On Bringing A New, Radically Different Species Of Mac To Market By Christmas [Rumor]

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According to our own dear Mike Elgan, Apple is through creating new devices and will continue to coast on the product categories they currently have.

Not so fast, though! According to a Japanese site, component suppliers are gearing up to help Apple create new Macs that are “absolute different from current products,” with a debut as early as the end of the year.

The report’s brief, and Macotakara.jp’s track record is pretty spotty: they did correctly predict the iPad 2’s March debut (which was actually pretty obvious), but they’ve gone on record saying that Apple’s testing MacBook Airs running the iPad 2’s A5 CPU, which is pretty silly.

Or is it? We’ve been hearing a lot of talk recently about how Apple will switch the Mac platform to ARM. Apple even threatened Intel that they’d be taking their business elsewhere unless Intel could get a handle on their mobile chips’ voracious hunger for battery power.

Could Apple be working on an ARM powered MacBook? I’m skeptical this is anywhere besides early “fooling around” testing: there just aren’t any ARM chips right now that are powerful enough to run OS X. Heck, there aren’t even any 64-bit ARM chips yet, and when there are, it’s uncertain whether or not there’ll be any advantages over Intel’s x86 CPUs when it comes to power management, which is kind of the only thing ARM really has going for it… especially considering the fact that OS X and every app out there would need to be reprogrammed to run on ARM processors.

So who knows? I’m struggling to see any holes in Apple’s existing Mac line-up, but the guys at Cupertino are a lot smarter than me.

Do you guys have any guesses? Let us know in the comments.

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