Apple has been ahead of rest of the PC industry in adopting new WiFi standards for faster and better wireless connectivity. And AppleInsider is now reporting that the company will continue doing that with the new 1.3 gigabit 802.11 ac WiFi standard. Daniel Eran Dilger wrote on AppleInsider:

Apple is expected to rapidly deploy support for the new 802.11ac specification this year, adding so called "Gigabit WiFi" to new AirPort base stations, Time Capsule, Apple TV, notebooks and potentially its mobile devices.

The new 802.11ac standard achieves much faster wireless networking speeds than the existing 802.11n specification (in use on the latest Mac, AirPort and iOS devices) by using 2 to 4 times the frequency bandwidth (from 80 to 160MHz), more efficient data transfers through sophisticated modulation, and more antennas (up to 8; existing standards support up to 4, while Apple's Macs currently use up to 3).

The new 802.11ac isn't expected to be fully approved as a finished standard until late next year, but Apple is poised to adopt it well before then. The tremendous speed gains possible with 802.11ac will continue to make Apple's wireless technologies from AirPlay to Time Machine faster and more efficient, virtually erasing any advantage in using wired network cabling in most cases.

Broadcom has already shown their new chipsets supporting 802.11ac standard at CES two weeks back. And these chips will go in mass production in second quarter of this year. Indicating that the upcoming Apple’s computer lineup refresh based on Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors would adopt the new gigabit 802.11ac WiFi standard.