Taiwan’s Economic Daily News is reporting that the long awaited 12-inch Retina MacBook will likely not ship this year. The report blames the delay on Intel, which has recently delayed the 14nm Broadwell chips. Broadwell is expected to have lower power usage than Haswell, therefore extending battery life. Performance is also expected to increase by as much as 30 percent over comparable Haswell models.
Because of these delays, the 12-inch MacBook might not ship until 2015, when Broadwell chips are in greater supply. Currently Intel is only giving out samples (i.e. only a few hundred chips maximum) to hardware partners.
The 12-inch MacBook is a popular idea. It would offer the portability and convenience of the 11-inch MacBook Air, but have the power and productivity of the larger 13-inch model. One previous report claims the product is designed to give a clear size difference between their smaller laptops and the iPad Air.
