Sandy Bridge MacBook Pros on Track for March Release - Report

A well-placed source is telling AppleInsider that Sandy Bridge-equipped MacBook Pros are on track for early March shipment, with production actively underway, the source reports.

Apple presumably wanted to have the systems shipped in February, but a design flaw in the chipsets that support Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors postponed their launch.

Intel itself said in January that the company had identified the design flaw.

"As part of ongoing quality assurance, Intel Corporation has discovered a design issue in a recently released support chip, the Intel 6 Series, code-named Cougar Point, and has implemented a silicon fix," was the company’s official statement.

"In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives," Intel said.

The chipmaker confirmed that computer vendors and other Intel customers that had already bought what could potentially be affected chipsets or systems would not be left in the cold.

This led to speculation that any Macs featuring the chipset were unlikely to hit the market for at least the following couple of months.

Citing a person familiar with the matter, AppleInsider claims that Apple currently anticipates the introduction of new MacBook Pro models within about two weeks.

A refresh to Apple's MacBook Pro line is long overdue, as the Apple-centric site itself points out.

The last hardware update was in April 2010, whereas Apple does not typically wait a whole year to give its popular notebook computers a hardware refresh.

Apple will not only equip its new line of MacBooks with better processors, standard solid-state-drives (SSD), and more memory, but is also very likely to drop optical drives completely.