We've been hearing about an imminent update to Apple's MacBook Air lineup that will include Intel's latest generation Sandy Bridge processors and the new high-speed Thunderbolt port. Apparently, it won't be too long before Mac Pros and Mac Minis get the same treatment. According Cnet's Brian Tong, unidentified sources have told him that the latter two would arrive by the end of July or in the first week of August – though he later clarified via Twitter that August is more likely.
The Mac Pro was last updated in late July of 2010 with Intel Xeon chips and up to 12 processing cores, while a redesigned Mac mini was released in June of that year adding an HDMI port for easy connectivity with HD televisions.
Not many details were given about the forthcoming update, though. Tong in March also correctly pointed to the launch of new iMacs, claiming the updated all-in-one desktops would arrive by early May, and indeed they hit stores on May 3.
As for the updated MacBook Air, the latest rumors suggest Apple has had the hardware ready for a while but decided to hold off a release in order to ship the ultrathin computer with its next-gen operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
Lion will be available in July as a download from the Mac App Store for $30, only as an upgrade to Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard. The eighth major release will add more than 250 features and 3,000 developer APIs to the company's operating system, including new auto-save and application restore abilities, plus a few others detailed here.