Apple's exciting mini-LED MacBook Air refresh reportedly set for mid-2022

M2 Macbook Air Concept Screencap (Image credit: Devam Jengra)

What you need to know

A new report by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has Apple's new mini-LED MacBook Air arriving in the middle of 2022.
The new machine is already rumored to have a new M2 processor and design in the works.

Apple's big mini-LED MacBook Air refresh is set to happen in the middle of 2022, according to a new analyst report by Ming-Chi Kuo. We'd previously heard that we should expect the new machine in the first half of the year, making this the most specific timeline we've seen yet.

According to a research note seen by iMore, Kuo expects the new 13.3-inch mini-LED MacBook Air to help Apple boost its MacBook shipments for the year — assuming supply shortages continue to ease as expected. If they do, Kuo thinks Apple could ship up to 22 million notebooks next year.

Apple is expected to ship the MacBook Air with a new successor to the M1 chip, potentially called the M2, with a recent Bloomberg report saying as much.

Apple's move to mini-LED continues to gather pace after it switched the 12.9-inch iPad Pro to the same technology earlier this year. Rumors of Apple also moving other tablets to mini-LED are also in the wind while new MacBook Pro notebooks are expected to make use of the same technology later this year.

The addition of mini-LED would make for a screen with improved brightness and contrast, while the potential for HDR content would also be a big boost. The same technology has already given us the best iPad ever in terms of how stunning the content looks on the iPad Pro. Now it seems it's time for the same thing to happen to the MacBook Air, too.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.