Apple Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi Introduces Apple's IOS X Yosemite Operating System at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco
Apple vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi introduces Apple's IOS X Yosemite operating system at the World Wide developers conference in San Francisco, California June 2, 2014. REUTERS

The MacBook Air may finally have its Retina makeover within the next few months. The ultrabook had remained largely the same since 2010 save for a few processor tweaks in between. That seems headed for a change if news coming from Taiwan is to be believed.

Component manufacturers are reported to have started shipping parts to Apple's manufacturing partners with serial production expected to begin in August itself, claims Economic Daily News. This makes October as the likely period for the eventual launch of the retina display equipped new MacBook Air, further speculates GigaOm.

However, there's some bad news for those who might have been waiting for the 12 inch version of the MacBook Air, for the laptop is not expected to be ready before late 2014 or even early 2015. A shortage of the latest 14-nanometer Intel Broadwell chips is believed to be the reason for the unexpected delay, reports AppleInsider citing a separate report in the Economic Daily News. Till that happens, it's the 11 and 13 inch versions that would be making up the MacBook Air line-up.

KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo had estimated back in April that Apple would be coming up with a new MacBook Air with a 12 inch display sometime during the third quarter. The analysts predicted a new slimmer and lighter MacBook Air with a fan-less architecture, mentions AppleInsider.

Meanwhile, in a related development, Apple has issued an EFI update to tackle sleep issues with MacBook Air devices. According to the CultofMac, the update is applicable to mid-2011 models of the Apple laptop that often suffered from delays when waking up from sleep mode. The update also aims to rectify unexpected fan behavior that often would start spinning at its maximum with no apparent reason. The occurrences of these issues were few and far between though for those who were facing these have Apple to thanks now that a remedy is finally in sight.

The update can be downloaded from the Apple website or from the Mac App Store. Another way to ring in the update is via the Software Update route.