New MacBook Air shipments already topping 500,000 units

It seems the refreshed MacBook Air that came to light yesterday is bound to become another smash hit for Apple. According to trade publication DigiTimes, shipments of the latest MacBook Air from the supply chain already topped half a million units in June, the volume expected “to remain strong throughout July and August”. If shipments remain at this level, Apple could ship at least a million and half units of the third-generation MacBook Air during the September quarter:

The sources estimated that Apple’s MacBook series sales will reach 13-14 million units in 2011 and may even reach 15 million units, while adding that Apple is the only vendor that has provided a full shipments forecast to the first quarter of 2012 as the IT industry is being rather conservative about the overall demand in the second half of 2011.

In its latest quarterly filing Apple reported shipments of 3.95 million Macs, a fourteen percent annual increase, which is slightly below Wall Street estimates of four million units as consumers put off their planned purchases anxiously awaiting the new models. Even though Apple didn’t make it the world’s top 5 list of PC vendors, in the US the company climbed from the fifth spot overtaking Toshiba and Acer to become the nation’s #3 computer vendor. Apple also outpaced the average industry growth by a factor of four, according to preliminary figures from both IDC and Gartner.