New MacBook Air production rumored to begin this month
MacBook Air fans who are anxious to have the latest Intel Sandy Bridge chips in their thin and lovely laptops don't have much longer to wait. Wall Street analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, in a conversation with Apple Insider, noted that Apple has placed orders for nearly 400,000 MacBook Airs containing the Core i5 and Core i7 chips.
Slightly over half of the new MacBook Airs being produced this month are expected to be the 11.6-inch model, which has proven to be a bit more popular than its 13.3-inch sibling due to the $999 price for the entry-level device.
The new ultra-low-voltage Core i5 and Core i7 chips contain between 3 and 4 MB of Smart Cache and can support a theoretical 8 GB of RAM. The present MacBook Air models use two-year-old Core 2 Duo chips that can only support a maximum of 4 GB of DDR3 SDRAM. It's unknown, but likely, that the new MacBook Airs will also support the new Thunderbolt I/O technology.
