Apple has ordered 400,000 next-generation MacBook Airs to be built this month for a July launch, and each and every one of them will ship with low-watt versions of Intel’s cutting edge Sandy Bridge processors.
While the Cupertino, Calif. company ordered both 11.6 and 13.3-inch versions, around half (209,000) will be for the smaller design more popular due to the lower $999 price. At the same time, Apple will stop making the original MacBook Air, ordering the final 80,000 in June.
Earlier this week at the San Francisco-based Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller described the new laptop akin to a sports car: “It’s beautiful, it’s thin, it’s fast.” Indeed, the “PC industry wants to copy it,” he said.
Introduced in late 2010, the thin and light MacBook Air in March reportedly sold half as many copies as the MacBook Pro, a move seen indicating consumers are rapidly adopting mobile computing. Also helping push demand is the introduction of Intel’s faster Core i5 and Core i7 Sandy Bridge processors replacing the aging Core 2 Duo used by current MacBook Airs.
Even when the Air launched, its Core 2 Duo processor was hopelessly out of date. Have you been waiting for a beefier processor on the MacBook Air before you bit the bullet on one? Will you buy one with a Sandy Bridge chip, even if that’s at the expense of slower integrated graphics? Let us know in the comments.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
