New MacBook Air Arriving in Late June

" A new version of Apple’s MacBook Air is coming in late June, Taiwan’s Economic Daily said, quoting sources familiar with the company’s plans.

The report does not bring any new specifics about the Air itself, but it says that Apple plans to sell 380,000 units of the new Air in the first shipment. This confirms (or recycles, if you will) an earlier report from Apple Insider that also claimed the new Air is coming by the end of June.

The Economic Daily also reintroduces rumors about the retina display on the iPad. Its sources claim that the next version of the device, expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of 2011, will have resolution five to six times higher than the iPad 2."

Source: New MacBook Air Coming Late June

Mr. Mysterious

 

If only Apple was shifting to ARM with the upcoming generation? No but seriously, Sandy Bridge seems to be running hot and I see very little reason for excitement, other than getting rid of NVIDIA GPUs, which were a potential source of reliability woes. Personally, I'd feel like waiting for the fanless, cool running ARM powered MacBook Airs.

 

they do.. its called buy an iPad 2 and a keyboard.

Why would you want an ARM Macbook Air? you realize it wouldn't be a Mac, it wouldn't be able to run Mac OS X or any current Mac OS X software yes?

 

How strong are ARM processors? Aren't they in netbooks and eBooks?

I'd take Sandy Bridge. Apple's not going to put a quad core SB in there anyway... it's going to be a ULV Sandy Bridge CPU. The IGP is similar to the 320m so battery life is going to go up while GPU performance takes a small hit.

 

book readers yes, but almost all netbooks use Atom CPU's or Fusion APU's not ARM

 

I don't see what the fuss is about with ARM processors, though I'm talking about its potential in the laptop/ultrabook/netbook/notebook market.

Mr. Mysterious

 

It'll be interesting to see which chip the do end up with.

 

It's almost 100% confirmed they will use SB i5/i7 ULV chips.

Mr. Mysterious

 

Is the new SB i5/i7 ULV more powerfull then the current C2D in the macbook air?

 

Yes, the Sandy Bridge line is more powerful, on a GHz for GHz comparison, than the Core 2 Duo chips in the MacBook Air. How much remains to be a mystery since I haven't come across any modern Windows notebooks rocking C2D chips along with an online review pitting the two against each other. The most I have seen are benchmark scores of a MBA in bootcamp but I wouldn't really trust those since Apple's bootcamp Windows drivers are awful.

I really wish the ARM rumor would die. It was something someone started earlier this year and it isn't going away. Apple switched computing platforms a few years ago (5?) and they aren't about to do it again especially since current ARM hardware isn't able to produce PC performance. There are chips coming out making that claim but they are still in development phase. Even then, by the time they come out, Intel will probably be pushing out Ivy Bridge and that may change things again.

ARM has its place in the smartphone and tablet markets as they are solid, power efficient performers that can supply media and smoothly run apps all under a portable OS (iOS, Android, WebOS, whatever BlackBerry's tablet OS is called, etc.).

I have no doubt that Apple, Microsoft, and others have systems running with ARM chips in them but that doesn't mean that any company is going to completely switch platforms. Hell, Apple had been developing an x86 (and eventually x86-64) version of OS X since they first released it.

 

The Sandy Bridge ULVs perform roughly 50% better on CPU intensive benchmarks running Windows. It remains to be seen whether they will have the same performance advantage in OS X.

Benchmarks of the Samsung 900x show that the version of HD 3000 graphics in Sandy Bridge ULVs is much weaker than HD 3000 in the regular Sandy Bridge CPUs. So it's likely that the new MacBook Airs will be useless for gaming. Not that a C2D MacBook Air is the best choice for gaming, but it's nice that you can play some older games while traveling.

Other unknowns are heat and battery life. The C2D ULVs were very cool running and power efficient. The Arrandale ULVs were not. The Arrandale ULVs were almost pointless because they weren't much faster than the C2D ULVs but consumed more power and ran hotter. I don't know how much better the Sandy Bridge ULVs will be in this regard. There aren't many notebooks out there yet to judge from.

 

well we'll see with ARM, there is no way Apple will ditch intel at this point.. but if ARM can build a processor that proforms on par with an intel and uses a lot less power (which I believe they can do this...), then there is potential... OS X can be rebuilt for ARM, it's not as hard as you might think... getting everyone elses programs recompiled is the challenge...

 

"recompiled" is a nice way to put it... it would take a lot more than that for most software out there. If its pure ObjC/Cocoa it might be slightly easier, but porting software to a new CPU architecture takes much more than just a recompile.

 

It may or may not. It depends.

 

If you mean Intel Atom, perhaps so. The battle between Atom and ARM is for smartphone/tablet processors and maybe netbooks, but not laptops. ARM isn't even trying to build something that competes with an Intel Core i processor (at least not being public about it).

 

I can't tell a difference between my Core 2 Duo X200t and my i3 X220i performance wise.

 

ARM themselves may not be but there are other companies that are using the ARM architecture and going after Intel's chips. For the life of me, I can't find the damn link on Engadget as their search engine sucks but, if memory serves me correct, there was a company at Computex (?) saying that they were making a ~2GHz dual-core chip that would directly compete with the dual-core Core i processors from Intel.

I think it was supposed to come out either this Fall or early next year around the time Ivy Bridge hits.

 

nVidia is also building a performance ARM chip. I also thin ARM is working on a higher performance chip that will work reasonably well in small laptops.

well, if all the lib's etc remain the same in the OS it's not as hard as your might think, I do agree it's a ton of work, but if ARM could hypothetical match and intel i3 and use 25% of the power... it may be not an option to switch.

 

ARM is pointless, it's not meant to be put in laptops just yet.

Mr. Mysterious

 

Apple may freeze new Mac introductions until release of Mac OS X Lion - AppleInsider

 

The operating system gets direct access to the CPU. Apple does not supply intermediary drivers in that case, and Apple's drivers don't affect system performance in any case.

The big quality issue of Apple's drivers comes up in terms of usability with the trackpad and power management.

 

Apple's supplied drivers for the GPU under Windows could be outdated and hence decrease performance (if driver updates happened to increase performance).