Apple Testing A5-Powered MacBook Air
I wrote on this topic back in November, and I’m pretty damn excited to hear it might be shaping up. The AIR already gets pretty good battery life at five and eight hours for the 11” and 13” models respectively, but the prospect of the system drawing as little as 5 watts (as opposed to 10 or 17 for just the CPU) has the potential to push battery life well past 12 hours.
Now that we’re past the already speculative concept of an A5-powered AIR, let’s go deeper into the rabbit hole. Let’s assume this fanciful product is slated for launch in 18 months. Imagine twelve months from now a new requirement appears before submitting applications to the Mac App Store:
All applications must be submitted with both Intel and ARM compatible binaries.
Suddenly the problem of app volume disappears, and they’re ready on day 1. I say Mac App Store in this case as I do not believe this product would ship with iOS: Apple has been very clear on the idea that the form factor is wrong for touch-screens, and I do not see them moving iOS away from a touch-screen-exclusive interface.
