Reports indicate Apple Inc. will be releasing a new MacBook Air model in the next few weeks and the new model will be significantly faster than the $999 currently available in the market.

The new MacBook Air's flash drives may feature 400MBs of flash storage, allowing the notebook to have speed 150 percent faster than the current model. The new models may feature NAND chips soldered directly onto the MacBook's motherboard, according to 9to5 Mac.

The site Macotakara in a separate report stated that the new MacBook Air will feature NAND flash memory with up to 400Mbps performance. The Japanese site added that Apple plans to use flash memory chips that sport the new Double Data Rate (DDR) 2.0 interface. Macotaraka cited an Asian electronics component company person in its report.

The new MacBook Air that will use "Toggle Mode Double Data Rate NAND Flash" 2.0 (Toggle DDR 2.0) are set to launch on the same day as the Mac OS X Lion operating system.

Unlike most notebooks, the MacBook Air has no hard drive or optical drive, instead using a flash board -- also referred to as solid-state drives or SSDs -- to provide 64 Gigs or 128 gigs of internal storage in present models. The current MacBook Air uses Toshiba's Blade X-gale NAND flash board.

Computerworld notes that the upgrade would come as no surprise, since the next MacBook Air has moved to using Samsung's flash memory. Samsung announced in May that it is producing DDR 2.0 multi-level-cell memory chips based on its smallest 20-nanometer circuitry. The chips boast a performance improvement of three times over the current chip technology and have 64 gigabits of capacity, twice the DDR 1.0 technology. The new flash memory also triples the performance over 133MB/sec toggle DDR 1.0, 32Gbit NAND flash memory, which Samsung and Toshiba have been producing since 2009, according to Computerworld.

In March, the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) Working Group, the organization dedicated to simplifying integration of NAND Flash memory into consumer electronic devices, computing platforms, and industrial systems, today published the new ONFI 3.0 standard. By using the non-volatile DDR2 (NV-DDR2) interface, the newly ratified standard reaches speeds of up to 400 megabytes (MB)/sec, doubling the current NAND interface transfer rates.

The current MacBook Air features an 11.6-inch or 13.3-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache; 64 GB or 128 GB of flash storage; NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory; and up to 5 hours of battery life on the 11-inch model and up to 7 hours on the 13-inch model.