A Japanese blog has claimed that as the Apple is preparing to update the MacBook Air models sometime later this year, the company is testing a version of the ultraportable that uses an Apple-designed A5 chip rather than the Intel Core 2 Duo found on current models, PC World reports. The report could turn out to be false but even if it’s true, there are high chances of it being just an experiment rather than a planned product.
Apple has never manufactured a product using their own chips, the A4 or A5, that could run a normal installation of Mac OS X, but the operating system is reasonably portable, having made a trouble-free jump from PowerPC based architecture to Intel-based architecture while maintaining a high degree of compatibility.
However, Apple is much more likely to be testing the potential for OS X on future Apple-designed processors instead of particularly thinking of releasing an A5-powered MacBook Air, which would at least in the near future have to be running iOS rather than Mac OS X in order to function.
