Apple MacBook Air to get Performance Upgrade this Summer?

Tweet

Apple is set to update its MacBook Air series in the next few months, as per the usual product cycle. With an upgrade to Sandy Bridge, benchmarks suggest that performance will be close to that of the MacBook Pro.

If you’re planning to buy a MacBook Air soon, you would probably want to wait a few months. Apple is set to upgrade its line of thin and light notebook computers, and benchmarks of comparable systems suggest that the MacBook Air 11.6 inch upgrade will get significant performance improvements.

Recent benchmarks on the comparable Samsung Series 9 thin and light notebook computer suggests that an upgrade to the Sandy Bridge architecture will give the MacBook Air a significant performance boost, which might be comparable to the 13-inch MacBook Pro (particularly with the MBP’s use of Intel HD 3000 graphics instead of a discrete AMD Radeon chip).

The question here would be Apple’s actual choice of processors in the next MBA release, whether it will be the 25-watt Intel Core i7-2649M running at 2.3 GHz or something similar to the 17-watt Core i5-2537 that powers the Samsung 9. Whatever the case, this will surely be a big upgrade to the MacBook Air, which has been running on a dated Intel Core 2 Duo architecture since its launch in 2008.