Did Apple have an AMD-powered MacBook Air?

There’s a new footnote for the Apple history books, if a report from SemiAccurate is true: Apple allegedly had a prototype MacBook Air with an AMD Fusion chip ready for production — and apparently it was the favored plan — but the company scrapped it last spring to go with Plan B and use Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs instead. It’s the first time we’ve ever heard of an AMD-powered Air, but there were definitely a few shifts in power before the second-gen Air’s release, with AMD Radeon graphics pushing out Nvidia GeForce in a variety of Apple’s computers, and an Intel exec revealing that Apple threatened to sever the relationship if Intel couldn’t come up with more efficient chips.

Besides, Apple loves options, at least behind the scenes. On the day Steve Jobs announced that Intel would replace PowerPC in all the company’s computers, he famously had two different keynote presentations ready to go either way, and the company’s allegedly prototyped an ARM-based MacBook Air and a cellular MacBook Pro that were similarly never intended to see the light of day.