We’re seeing a growing number of reports about the upcoming 15-inch MacBook Air. Display analyst Ross Young yesterday said that panel manufacturing is already underway, but a new report goes further and says that mass production of the new machine began in the Lunar New Year.
The Lunar New Year began on January 22 …
We yesterday rounded up everything we know so far about the 15-inch MacBook Air, including the key issues of timing and processor.
Current rumors are that the 15.5-inch MacBook Air will be released sometime this spring. Reliable analyst Ross Young has reported that Apple suppliers have started panel production for the 15.5-inch display. Based on this, Young estimates a release sometime in “early April” […]
In terms of processing power, Ming-Chi Kuo reports that the new 15.5-inch will be available with M2 and M2 Pro chip options inside. The current MacBook Air is only available in an M2 chip configuration.
The paywalled Digitimes report doesn’t get more specific on the processor than M2 (with no reference to a possible M2 Pro variant), and on timing says nothing more than “second quarter.”
However, it did say that mass production of the 15-inch MacBook Air has been underway since the Lunar New Year, aka late January. Apple will need to stockpile the new machine to meet what seems sure to be high initial demand, so this would be consistent with an April launch.
Spec-wise, it’s likely that the 15-inch model will be very similar to the 13-inch M2 one, screen size aside. This would suggest a base spec along the lines of:
Apple M2 chip
- 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
- 8-core GPU
- 16-core Neural Engine
- 100GB/s memory bandwidth
Media engine
- Hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW
- Video decode engine
- Video encode engine
- ProRes encode and decode engine
Configurable to: M2 with 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU
The 13-inch model comes with 8GB unified memory and 256GB SSD, so it’ll be interesting whether the 15-inch one matches or exceeds this.
The display quality is certain to at least match that of the existing model, with a P3 wide color gamut and True Tone. Brightness will be at least 500 nits, but we may see an improvement here.
With room for a bigger battery, then even allowing for the need to power a larger screen, we’d hope for an improvement on the 15-hour wireless web battery life.
We noted yesterday that we can expect an M3 version further ahead, but the timing of this is uncertain given a Q2 launch of the M2 model.
The 15-inch MacBook Air is likely to be a smart move for Apple, further increasing the average selling price of the MacBook lineup.
Via iMore
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