Sony Prepping MacBook Air Rival Featuring Thunderbolt Tech, Say Rumors

To be perfectly honest, attempts to develop a product that will rival something already existing on the market instead of creating a completely new niche are not really a very good idea, but it seems that this is exactly what Japanese company Sony might be up to as we speak.

So, as Electronista reports, it seems that Sony is, once again, plotting to take on the Apple MacBook Air, much in the same way they did when the Vaio X Series netbooks were released.

However, in this case, reports indicate that Sony's actually planning to up the ante by making their new ultra-portable system a lot more powerful than the Apple super-slim machine.

For this reason, Sony plans to built their notebook around a speedy Core i7 CPU, accompanied by a solid-state drive for storage purposes, as well as plenty of wired and wireless connectivity options, including here HDMI and WiDi.

Another big surprise brought forward by this new Vaio would apparently be the fact that the notebook itself will be accompanied by a docking unit (this being the reason why it's known, for the time being, under the Hybrid PC moniker), that will not only recharge its batteries, but also provide plenty of interesting extras, such as more graphics horsepower via the Radeon HD 6700M GPU, a Blu-ray burner, Ethernet and VGA connectors, etc.

Last, but certainly not least, one of the main selling points the future portable computing solution from Sony will have in store will be the presence of a Thunderbolt interface, already found in Apple's MacBook Pro (2011 edition) notebooks.

It is yet unclear whether the Thunderbolt connector will be implemented within the notebook itself or the aforementioned docking solution, but whichever the case might be, it's interesting to see that Apple's supposed exclusivity for this tech might really not be that...exclusive.

Of course, these are all rumors and speculations for the time being, but, to be perfectly honest, we really hope that they prove to be true, because they would really make up a great Vaio notebook.