The Apple product that really changed the industry: the MacBook Air

It was January 2008, and Steve Jobs had just quit MacBook Air from a manila envelope On stage at Macworld.

Within minutes, Windows PC executives everywhere were losing their minds. They grabbed the nearest office envelope, tried to insert their plastic notebooks, and ripped right through the paper. Engineers were called. Assistants were sent for larger envelopes.

Well, I have no clue what happened. But we all know what an act Happens next: imitation. Years of it.

All Apple history books praise the iPod. iPhone. iPad. And then, somewhere between the sidebar and the footnote, the MacBook Air. But without Air, there is no modern laptop.

I don’t know him. While Jobs was taking out the first Airplane in 2008, I was working as a reporter at… Laptop magazine, Covering the latest Windows laptops at CES in Las Vegas, where the best show was the Lenovo IdeaPad U110, a thin and light 11-inch plastic notebook with a red lid and Windows Vista. Meanwhile, the Air — as Jobs proudly announced — featured an aluminum design, a full-size keyboard, and a display.

To be clear, I was not a fortune teller. At the time, I was a proud Windows user, and laughed at Air. The three-pound laptop did not come with a DVD drive and only had one USB port. People are now complaining about the MacBook Neo’s 8GB of RAM, but try 2GB. And its price is $1799! It was a beautiful, exaggerated joke. Except it wasn’t. like Tim Cook said years later in an interview with MKBHD“The first thing, it wasn’t about how many people would buy it, it was about creating the organization.”

This foundation, as I’ve covered it over 18 years, was shaped by three big actions, each of which led Apple to reinvent the entire computer industry.

Chapter One: An Expensive Masterpiece (2008-2010)

What I remember most clearly about the first Air, which was only 0.76 inches thick at its thickest point, was the small drop-down port door. To make this ultra-thin design work, Apple has hidden the three ports – USB, headphone, and micro-DVI – behind a small cover on the side. It was sleek and silly, as if Laptop was running a small black market operation out of his jacket. Oh, want some of those good ports? You got what you wanted. But it was also telling. If you see that silver wedge on a plane or in a coffee shop, you know: This person definitely drives a nicer car than me.

At $1,799, you’re paying for a long list of numbers. There is no DVD drive. No ethernet. No FireWire. There is no easy way to replace the battery. No upgradeable RAM. The original model even used a very slow 4,200 RPM hard drive, unless you paid an extra $1,300 for the 64GB solid-state option. What a time!

However, that was the point. While the Windows world was still marketing ultraportables filled with archaic ports and spinning drives, Apple was selling a thinner, more mobile vision of the future—one in which optical drives die (it’s happened), wireless wins (it’s happened), and aluminum replaces plastic (it’s happened).

One of the fun parts was watching everyone race to get thinner. The $1,800 Adamo XPS was Dell’s answer to the Air. It was just 0.39 inches thick and was a wonderfully unwieldy machine with a strange pop-up hinge that raised the keyboard surface. Dell discontinued the Adamo line in 2011, probably because it sold zero of them.

Chapter Two: Mainstream Marvel (2010-2018)

It’s hard to overstate how significant the redesign of Apple’s 2010 MacBook Air was. Reading the press release still excites me. There were a lot of important changes:

This last one was huge. Air is no longer just a luxury for first class passengers. It was a true mainstream laptop. “We believe this is the future of laptops” Jobs said during the launch event.

Apple has come a long way with the iPhone and iPad, and has brought the best of them to the Air, including faster boot times, longer battery life, and multi-touch magic on the trackpad.

And once again the Windows PC market reacted. This time with “ultrabooks,” a term coined by Intel to describe a new class of thin and light laptops. Nothing is measured. I know, because I’ve reviewed them all Edge. the Asus ZenBook UX31The Air, for example, was a near-perfect clone — except that the trackpad was a glitchy nightmare. (I wrote nearly 500 words about how bad it is.) Lenovo U300s? same. the Toshiba Z835? Same thing again. became a edge Mimi. Every review ends the same way: “For $200 or $300 more, you can just get a MacBook Air.”

So I installed Windows 7 on a MacBook Air to prove the point. The Air runs Windows, and still has a better trackpad than any Windows laptop I’ve tested.

The story was Apple’s vertical integration: it controlled hardware and software, while Windows makers were stuck with third-party trackpad drivers and no one at the top cared enough to fix them. At least not for a while. Eventually, computer makers found their way with devices like these redesigned ones Dell XPS 13 in 2015of Microsoft Surface laptop in 2017.

Chapter 3: Silicone Savior (2020-present)

There’s still one essential part of the laptop that Apple didn’t control in previous versions: the chip. That changed in 2020, when the company replaced Intel processors with its first M-series processors.

Vertical integration was complete, and Apple used it to erase many of the laptop’s last remaining compromises. Now the absences are the selling points: no fan, no heat, no scrambling for a charger in the middle of the day. It looked almost like an iPad in laptop form—except, of course, for the lack of a touchscreen.

Once again, the computer industry is trying to catch up. Laptop manufacturers have teamed up with Qualcomm to build similar devices, while Intel pushed its own vision of thinner, cooler, longer-lasting PCs.

So this is it. No, the MacBook Air may not have had the same cultural thunder as the iPod or iPhone, but its history is, in many ways, Apple’s history. The Air wasn’t just a laptop. This has been Apple’s favorite magic trick: turn compromise into ambition, then convince the rest of the industry to copy it. once again. And again. And again.