A Concord Securities analyst has said that Apple shipped 1.1 million units of its new MacBook Air in the three-month period that ended in December.

While shipped doesn’t necessarily mean sold, the figure is about 63% higher, or 400,000 units more, than the 700,000 units analyst Ming-Chi Kuo had previously estimated.

Apple doesn't give out sales numbers for specific devices but has said that it shipped more than 2.9 million notebook systems in the quarter.

The new MacBook Air, which does away with mechanical hard disks and optical drives in favour of internet services and solid state flash storage, went on sale last October.

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On February 25th Apple launched five new models of its massively popular MacBook Pro family, which it says makes the new line "up to twice as fast as the previous generation”.