Amusing. If the new model - whenever it comes - has all the features being suggested for it, it's likely to be a very expensive piece of kit!
Since no-one has much of a clue what the next MBA models will contain and which upgrades it'll get, the idea that you should wait until an unknown date for an unknown product is not necessarily the best advice. And given that whenever the next MBA comes out, it'll only be a year until the next one after that, why stop at waiting until Spring/Summer/Autumn for a new one when you could wait until next year?
I would jump now, and enjoy it. Then when a new model comes out, find a Apple dealer and try the new one out. If it is noticeably better, sell your MBA on ebay where you'll take a relatively small loss, and buy a new one.
Chances are that as in the past with the incremental revisions in Apple products, the next MBAs will look notably better on paper, but offer relatively minor improvements in real-life performance, so unless you're an ardent believer in must-have-the-newest-thing, the MBA you can buy now will remain more than adequate for your needs well beyond the next model and the one after that. If you needed something that much better, you'd be better off with a MBP anyway.
I was planning on buying an Macbook Air for school soon, my 3 years old Vaio is falling apart and only works as a desktop attached to an external screen....
This guy got the facts straight.
I got a friend using a 2005 macbook and Its not even slow. Nobody would honestly notice the difference between ivy and sandy until they put them next to each other.
Some of these guys are using somewhat of leveraged solutions where the laptop replaced tasks that would have previously been covered by the use of a desktop. It can make sense for people who have to take the computer with them that wished to consolidate two computers to one.
As a correction, there was no 2005 macbook. Did you mean a powerbook G4? Laptop drives of that era and the lack of ram were the things that irritated me. Lacking ram meant you often had to wait as it paged to a very slow disk. Ivy and Sandy will probably be very close. The big improvements came in nehalem. It's just that some of the higher clock speeds and stuff started to trickle down with Sandy. Ivy seems like more of a boost on the low end graphics than anything. If they wanted to play games on it, it might be worth waiting.
Not to mention the gen after next gen! And don't even get me started on the following one...