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When is the MBA refresh coming?

I

i-sidd

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 27, 2006
575
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I have been holding of buying the Macbook air since I heard about the new refresh coming in 2012, but does anyone know by when can we expect?

Also, coming from a 2006 white macbook I was first thinking of getting the macbook pro but now I am leaning more towards the MBA as i don't do any heavy app stuff or graphics, just regular surfing, watching movies, editing movies in imovie etc.

I should be fine with the MBA right?
 
When is the refresh coming?

Nobody knows for sure, we can all speculate all we want, based on Intel release schedules and past apple behavior. However, none of it is fact, and all of it is speculation. This question has been asked a bajillion and one times (i've counted), you can search for these threads.

That being said, I'd eat my left shoe if there was a "retina" display ivy bridge MBA (as people are hoping for) before Mountain Lion comes out, which is going to be later Summer or Fall 2012. I'd wager the next major MBA refresh won't be until sometime in 2013.
 
Remember, the current MBA generation is not that old, especially since there were 2 new updates to the MBA's in less than 18 months. So there's still a lot of juice left in the current MBA's.

My bet is on a release in October: Mountain Lion equipped Retina-MB-Airs with 8GB Ram, 128GB SSD as minimum, up to 512 GB SSD optional, of course Ivy Bridge.

Expect a refresh of the MB Pro models before, perhaps as soon as May-June. They'll be the first to adopt new Ivy-Processors, they will lose the optical drive, but they will DEFINITELY ship with OS X Lion, not yet Mountain Lion.
 
I don't think you'll have any issue doing the same tasks if you're moving from a 2006 laptop of any sort to the current gen MBA. The only exception might be gaming as the iGPU is, kind of, blah.
 
supposedly if you have macbook air 2010 with updated boot camp with lion, you can't load windows 7 on a thumb drive. it has to be an optical. that's what i was lead to believe. can anybody confirm this?
 
asianjabba said:
supposedly if you have macbook air 2010 with updated boot camp with lion, you can't load windows 7 on a thumb drive. it has to be an optical. that's what i was lead to believe. can anybody confirm this?
Click to expand...

I was able to just fine... not sure where you're getting the info.
 
aoifeee said:
I would say after mountain lion comes out.
Click to expand...

They don't necessarily delay releases on popular products. If everything was ready today, we'd probably see it prior to ML. If it's summer either way (given the ivy bridge rumors), then you're most likely correct.
 
Most likely this July. Or August, whenever Mountain lion comes out. That would be on the one-year release schedule that they seem to be moving to for all their products.
 
I'd say anytime after mountain lion release in summer time :D
Well I hope they do, I'm pretty sure they will just like what they did last year. I sold my MBP for this update! I'm going to get the new Air if there is no changes on the MacBook Pro line up.
 
Refresh will come anywhere from April to July. My guess is earlier rather than later due to Ivy Bridge Ultra Book competition on the horizon, but I don't think anyone really knows.

I'm also not sure why people think the release will be tied to the next iteration of OSX. Apple will do whatever is best for its product cycle regardless of the OS release.
 
mrogersscf said:
Refresh will come anywhere from April to July. My guess is earlier rather than later due to Ivy Bridge Ultra Book competition on the horizon, but I don't think anyone really knows.
Click to expand...
We can forget April or May, because the mobile Ivy Bridge processors (other than the 45W TDP quad core ones that they almost certainly won't be using for the Airs) are only due for release on June 3. I haven't found the original Intel confirmation of this yet, but the reports of the confirmed release dates published on the Internet since yesterday are very detailed now, precisely outlining the CPU models that will be available and when.

Based on past performance, it's unlikely that Apple will release a product range within the first few days (not like with Dell, HP and co., where this is almost a dead cert...). The only thing that may work in our favor is that the OEMs were originally planning on the Ivy Bridge release occurring much earlier (e.g., early April), so may be much further down the road than one would normally expect them to be at this time. For this reason, the delay in Ivy Bridge CPU production will benefit the OEMs that are relatively slow to market (like Apple :)), whereas fast OEMs such as Asus that could have launched in April now have to twiddle their thumbs for nearly two months waiting for Intel, thus losing a lot of their traditional time advantage.
 
Fleet would mac said:
We can forget April or May, because the mobile Ivy Bridge processors (other than the 45W TDP quad core ones that they almost certainly won't be using for the Airs) are only due for release on June 3.
Click to expand...

That doesn't mean that Apple didn't pay some extra bucks to get them early ;) I think the Airs will come out before the release of Mountain Lion. A lot of users will upgrade from Lion to ML and ka-ching.
 
But lower-power chips suitable for the MacBook Air will not arrive until June 3 based on the claimed timetable.
Click to expand...

Emphasis mine. From Macrumor's story today about Ivy Bridge release dates: https://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/28/ivy-bridge-quad-core-desktop-and-mobile-processors-reportedly-launching-on-april-29/

So, probably sometime over the summer. I wouldn't be surprised, based on this new timeline, if the Air refresh will coincide with the retail window for "back to college/school".
 
Just MacBook?

There are different rumors... What do you think Is it possible that Apple will merge the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lines and only produces a thinner MBP respectively light thicker MBA which is just called MacBook in future?
 
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