The rumors are rife that Apple is about to refresh its MacBook Air lineup this year. The Air series has not been updated in a long time, and the specs and design overhaul for the laptop is very much overdue. However, in spite of the new features that the Mac Air will receive, the laptop is not expected to get more expensive. If ever, the price is going to be cheaper compared to the current model.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo was the first to predict that Apple will launch a new MacBook Air sometime in 2018. Furthermore, Kuo believes that the new Mac Air laptop will become the cheapest MacBook model yet from the Cupertino-based tech firm. As of now, the cheapest Mac variant available in the market is the entry-level MacBook Air, which is priced at around USD $1,000.

There is no exact estimate yet regarding the new price of the MacBook Air 2018, although it is likely that it will be slightly less than the current Air model. Meanwhile, reports suggest that the new Mac Air will get a Retina display. This will be the first time that the Air series will have this high-level display feature, as the Retina display has only been available to the MacBook Pro selection.

With the Retina display, the new 13-inch MacBook Air could get maximum screen resolution of 2,560x1,600. To compare with the current MacBook Air of the same size, the laptop only has 1,440x900 resolution. In terms of the under-the-hood specs, the MacBook Air 2018 is likely to ditch the older Intel processor generations. The current Air model has the 5th generation Intel chip known as Broadwell, and there is a chance that Apple will finally use the 8th generation Coffee Lake chipset for the uocoming MacBook Air.

The MacBook Air 2018 is expected to appear at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2018 happening on June 4 at Apple's headquarters in San Jose, California. The company has yet to reveal the lineup of new hardware to be unveiled at the WWDC stage this year, although the event is no stranger to MacBook update announcements and it is possible that the refreshed Mac Air will be presented this time around.