With most people thinking that July 14 is the release date for OS X Lion, the evidence continues to pile up that Apple is holding new Mac hardware until 10.7 is released — including a new MacBook Air and a new Mac Pro.
According to 9to5Mac, model numbers have surfaced for these new machines. The Air models include:
- MC965LL/A – K21, BETTER, BTR-USA
- MC966LL/A – K21, BEST, BTR-USA
- MC968LL/A – K78, BETTER, BTR-USA
- MC969LL/A – K78, BEST, BTR-USA
This configuration suggests that Apple will continue to ship both the 11.6-inch and 13-inch models, with two stock configurations of each. These machines are rumored to include Sandy Bridge processors, Thunderbolt and possibly faster SSD components.
The current geneartion MacBook Airs, released in October 2010, include older, slower processors based on the Intel Core2Duos. They also lack Thunderbolt ports, as the technology rolled out in February of this year.
Mac Pro models are said to include:
- MC936LL/A – J40, ULTIMATE – USA
- MC815LL/A – J40, BETTER – USA
- MC816LL/A – J40, BEST – USA
- MC914LL/A – J59, BEST – USA
The rumors on the Mac Pro side of things have been a little slow recently. Earlier this summer, rumors circulated that the new Mac Pros would sport a rack-mountable chassis and a new CPU with up to 16 cores. Others suggested that only the Server edition of the Mac Pro would be rack-mountable. Thunderbolt seems like a no-brainer here.
Whatever Apple has up its sleeves, some users — especially shopping for a Mac Pro — might not be able to run OS X Lion yet due to issues with older versions of software. Pro users are generally less quick to update to new versions of their mission-critical applications.
