Over at Forbes, contributor Jason Evangelho states that Dell's new XPS 13 laptop makes him "seriously regret" his purchase of an Apple 13-inch MacBook Air last year.
"As of right now, at least on paper, If I was walking into a potential notebook purchase again and I was faced with an XPS 13 and a 13-inch MacBook Air, I'd choose Dell's latest in a heartbeat," Evangelho writes.
Now, Evangelho points out that Apple is almost certainly preparing a new MacBook Air, but the takeaway here is quite clear: Apple's competitors in the PC space, armed with Intel's brand-new 14-nanometer Broadwell processors, are putting out machines that in many ways make Apple's current MacBook Air lineup look quite dated.
According to well-respected Apple website 9to5Mac, Apple has completely redesigned its next generation MacBook Air. Indeed, 9to5Mac reports that the new MacBook Air is "so thin that Apple employees are said to refer to the device as the 'Macbook Stealth' internally."
9to5Mac's report also makes a number of interesting claims, including that the new Mac will offer a 12-inch display (right in between the current 11-inch and 13-inch models), as well as a radical change to the number and types of ports on the machine.
In particular, 9to5Mac claims that Apple plans to do away with the regular USB ports, SD card slot, Thunderbolt, and the MagSafe charging standard in the new design. These will reportedly be replaced with a single USB Type-C port.
PCWorld reports that Kirk Skaugen, general manager of Intel's PC Client Group, claimed that "80 percent" of PC vendor resources over the last six months "have been on Skylake anyway."
