Updated MacBook Air to Offer Minimum of 128 GB SSD and 4 GB RAM?
Concord Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo today reported to AppleInsider that "industry checks" within Apple's supply chain suggest that the company is boosting the specs on its MacBook Air in the expected refresh to a minimum of 128 GB of solid state storage and 4 GB of RAM. That refresh has been widely rumored for some time, with Apple reportedly holding off until OS X Lion is released to the public to launch the new MacBook Air.
In a communication to AppleInsider on Thursday, Concord Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said his industry checks suggest Apple is no longer placing orders MacBook Airs with 2GB of RAM. Instead, those checks indicate that all new 11.6- and 13.3-inch models will include 4GB of RAM as standard, as it will improve performance of Mac OS X Lion, also due to ship on each model.
Similarly, Kuo cited the same checks in suggesting that Airs with just 64GB solid-state-drives may go away in favor of Apple shipping only 128GB and 256GB models as standard, given that the bulk of Apple's shipments have been for models containing those larger drives.
The current MacBook Air models all carry 2 GB of RAM in their stock configurations, although they can be upgraded to 4 GB for $100 on build-to-order configurations. On the storage side, Apple's entry-level 11.6-inch model offers 64 GB of solid state storage, with users able to step up to 128 GB on the high-end model. The 13.3-inch MacBook Air already offers a minimum of 128 GB with the high-end model sporting 256 GB.
Kuo also indicates that Apple will continue to use a separate board for the solid state drive rather than shifting to new technology soldered directly onto the motherboard. He also suggests that Apple will likely adopt the following Sandy Bridge chips from Intel for the updated MacBook Air models: 1.6 GHz Core i5-2467M, 1.7 GHz Core i7-2637M, and 1.8 GHz Core i7-2677M.
Kuo has proven to have solid connections when it comes to MacBook Air information, as evidenced by his revelation last July that Apple was working on an 11.6-inch model, a machine that appeared alongside a revamped 13.3-inch model in October.
Outcome: The MacBook Airs were
updated but kept 64GB SSDs and 2GB RAM as the minimums.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Top Rated Comments
"It [AppleInsider] however warned on multiple occasions not to expect the new Macs this week, despite continuous unsubstantiated claims published elsewhere on the web that have ultimately proven to be grossly inaccurate and overhyped."
:D