It looks like Apple is readying its perfect laptop for the market. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman on Friday, Apple has ramped up testing on “new Macs with processors on par with the current M2 chip.” Test logs seen by Bloomberg seem to indicate that Apple is testing a 15-inch MacBook Air.
The tests cover validity with third-party App Store apps, which Apple conducts before a Mac is released. The chip in the tested laptop has eight processing cores (split with four performance cores and four efficiency cores) and 10 graphics cores, which fits the profile of Apple’s M2. The laptop was also tested with 8GB of memory, the standard configuration of the current MacBook Air.
Another key spec found by Bloomberg is that the tested laptop has a screen resolution equivalent to that of the 14-inch MacBook Pro. However, the 15-inch MacBook Air (like the current 13.3-inch MacBook Air) will likely use a Liquid Retina (LED) display that will not provide the sharpness and clarity of the more expensive Liquid Retina XDR (mini-LED) displays in the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Bloomberg notes that the laptop has been tested with macOS 14, the next version of macOS to be unveiled at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June. That doesn’t mean the new laptop will be released with macOS 14, which won’t ship until the fall. Apple is currently running version 13.3.1 of macOS Ventura with version 13.4 in beta.
Given that these tests take place about six weeks after WWDC, we should expect a 15-inch MacBook Air unveiling during the conference keynote. The possibility of a spring release before WWDC could still happen, but seems less likely.
Apple is also working on an update to the current MacBook Air, iMac and the 13-inch MacBook Pro, as well as an M3 chip made using the 3nm manufacturing process. However, the Bloomberg report doesn’t say these Macs or the M3 are included in the test logs they’ve seen.
