Apple may poised to restore a feature and address one of the most widespread complaints about the second-generation MacBook Air. Jade reports that “people familiar with the matter” tell him the backlit keyboards are back in with the next-revision 11.6- and 13.3-inch Apple notebooks, along with ultra high-speed Thunderbolt I/O ports, an upgrade to Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture, and possibly high-speed 400MBps flash memory.

According to Taiwanese IT industry watching site Digitimes’s Yen-Shyang Hwang, Yenting Chen, and Adam Hwang, the Taiwan-based supply chain for Apple products will begin shipping refreshed 11.6″ and 13.3″ MacBook Air models featuring Sandy Bridge Core “i” CPU silicon and supporting the Thunderbolt I/O interface in late May for launch in June or July.

A few days ago, Appletell reported that new iMacs may be coming soon. It now looks like the MacBook Air is going to get a June refresh as well. The rumor is that the new MacBook Air models would use Intel’s Sandy Bridge microprocessors, integrated Intel graphics, and the Thunderbolt I/O port—all features the MacBook Pro received when it was refreshed earlier this year. It’s also likely that there will be news soon concerning the MacBook and whether it will be refreshed as well or dropped entirely.

We’re already pretty sure that we’ll be seeing a new, 11.6 inch MacBook Air at this week’s Apple event. However, some new and very interesting information has been brought onto the scene by a couple of different sources. According to them, the new Macbook Air won’t have a normal hard drive or even an solid state drive, it will have an “SSD Card.”

Apple is set to hold a press conference next week dubbed “Back to the Mac.” The invitation indicates that the next iteration of Mac OS X—Lion—will be unveiled. But how about Mac hardware? Specifically, the seemingly neglected MacBook Air? Well, some reliable sources are reporting that Apple is, in fact, set to announce a new “smaller and sleeker” MacBook Air. How small? Rumors say we’ll be looking at an 11.6 inch screen.

Phonenews.com may not be the most appropriate site to be spreading this rumor, but we can’t discount the fact that it still is a reputable site that won’t spread rumors which have no certain extent of possibility to it. Anyway, the site is reporting that a new MacBook Air’s release is imminent, even citing that national retailers are being alerted to prepare for the upgrade. As this is a non-disclosure announcement, Phonenews.com could not disclose their source.

Jump past the break to learn what to expect from the new MacBook Air.