It has been virtually confirmed that a new Macbook Air, as rumored, will be unveiled at Apple's"Back to Mac" event later today.  As first reported at Polish tech news site Spider's Web, Apple created forum topics to guide the event discussion and unwittingly tipped its hand a bit early.

Forum topics include "MBA" (Macbook Air), iLife '11, and a mystery "reserved" product.  The reserved product is rumored to be the next major release of Apple's operating system, OS X, which sources indicate will be named "Lion".

But even better, Engadget is claiming to have scooped the specs of the new Apple laptop from an unnamed source.

If the site's source is to believe the new laptop is starring in "Honey I Shrunk the Screens" with the diagonal dropping from 13.3-in. to 11.6-in.  Might Apple consider hanging onto its 13-in. model as a second option as well?  No one knows.

The new smaller-screen model will be smaller in footprint and lighter, but will remain relatively the same thickness.  It bumps the base level processor speed to a 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (with a 2.33GHz option).  The real disappointment is that the memory reportedly remains unchanged at lowly 2 GB (hopefully a 4 GB option is available).

The laptop adds an extra USB port (bringing the grand total to two), meaning that you can finally use a USB wireless mouse and an optical drive.  And it is reportedly adding an SD card reader.

Still undisclosed is whether the laptop might get a GPU upgrade.  The current generation packs a integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256 MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory -- not very exciting.  Dedicated memory for the GPU with a better discrete mobile chip would be a nice place to start.

So far little information has leaked on OS X "Lion", though there is plenty of speculation.  The MacBook Air was last refreshed more than a year ago, in June 2009.  Stay tuned at 1 PM EST, as DailyTech will be providing coverage of Apple's product launch.