This “MacBook Air 7,2” looks like a Broadwell refresh of the current model, not a new Retina version.
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We’re drawing near to Apple’s next product event, which means that leaks are starting to show up. Today, 9to5Mac posted screenshots from a Chinese forum that appear to confirm refreshed 2015 MacBook Airs. According to these screenshots, the “MacBook Air 7,2” is a 13.3-inch laptop that adds an Intel Broadwell processor and a slightly larger 7422 mAh battery, but it’s otherwise mostly identical to the current 13.3-inch model. It’s a fair bet that there’s an 11-inch MacBook Air 7,1 that has been upgraded in similar ways.
While the source of these images can’t really be verified and it’s certainly possible to spoof these system information windows, the images themselves have all the details right. If they aren’t the real thing, they’re very good-looking fakes.
Let’s run down the evidence in favor of them being real: first, the specs. This Mac is using a 15W Core i5-5250U processor with the HD Graphics 6000 GPU, which occupies the same space in Intel’s lineup as the outgoing i5-4250U/4260U and their HD Graphics 5000 GPU. The Boot ROM version and SMC version values increase just a little from the 2013 model’s, which is normal (the 2013 MacBook Air’s are MBA61.0099.B18 and 2.13f15, respectively). Most convincingly, the build number of OS X 10.10.2 that the laptop is running is 14C2043. The standard build number on current Macs is 14C109. Because new Macs require new drivers and other tweaks, they usually come with specialized builds of whatever the current OS X version is when they’re first released. Those drivers are then rolled into the standard OS X releases in a future update.
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