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

It was January 2008, and Steve Jobs had just taken the MacBook Air out of 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 laptops, and tore up the paper. Engineers were summoned. Assistants were dispatched for larger envelopes.

Okay, I have no proof of what happened. But we all know what did comes next: imitation. Years.

Apple’s history books all hail the iPod. The iPhone. The iPad. And then, somewhere between a sidebar and a footnote, the MacBook Air. But without the Air, the modern laptop doesn’t exist.

And I don’t know it. While Jobs was releasing the first Air in 2008, I was a reporter at Laptop review, covering the latest Windows laptops at CES in Las Vegas, where the best deal was Lenovo’s IdeaPad U110, a thin and light 11-inch plastic computer with a red cover and Windows Vista. Meanwhile, the Air – as Jobs proudly proclaimed – had an aluminum design, a full-size keyboard and screen.

To be clear, I was not a soothsayer. At the time, I was a proud Windows user and scoffed at the Air. The three-pound laptop didn’t have a DVD drive and had only one USB port. People are now complaining about the MacBook Neo’s 8GB of RAM, but try 2GB. And it cost $1,799! It was a nice, priceless joke. Except that wasn’t the case. As Tim Cook said years later in an interview with MKBHD: “The first one, it wasn’t about how many people would buy it, it was about establishing the foundation.” »

That foundation, as I covered it for 18 years, was shaped by three great acts, each of which led Apple to reinvent the entire computer industry.

Act 1: An expensive masterpiece (2008-2010)

What I remember most clearly about the first Air, only 0.76 inches thick at its thickest point, was the small drop-down port door. To make this incredibly thin design work, Apple has hidden the three ports – USB, headphone and micro-DVI – behind a small flap on the side. It was sleek and ridiculous, as if the laptop was running a small black market operation out of his jacket. Oh, you want some of those good ports? I have exactly what you want. But it was also saying it. If you’ve spotted 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 were paying for a long list of no’s. No DVD player. No Ethernet. No FireWire. No easy way to change the battery. No upgradeable RAM. The original model even used an extremely slow 4200 RPM hard drive, unless you paid $1300 more for the 64 GB SSD option. What an era!

Yet that was the goal. While the Windows world was still selling ultraportables with legacy ports and spinning drives, Apple was selling a thinner, more mobile vision of the future – one where optical drives die (they did), wireless wins (it did), and aluminum replaces plastic (it did).

One of the most fun parts was watching everyone race to get lean. The $1,800 Adamo XPS was Dell’s answer to the Air. It was just 0.39 inches thick and was a gloriously impractical machine with a weird pop-up hinge that lifted the keyboard. Dell killed the Adamo line in 2011, probably because it sold zero of them.

Act 2: A general public marvel (2010-2018)

It’s hard to overstate the importance of Apple’s 2010 MacBook Air redesign. Reading the press release always excites me. There have been so many significant changes:

The latter was huge. Air was no longer just a luxury item reserved for first class passengers. It was a true consumer laptop. “We think this is the future of laptops,” Jobs said at the launch event.

Apple had had its way with the iPhone and iPad and brought the best of them to the Air, including faster boot times, longer battery life, and the multitouch magic of the trackpad.

And once again, the Windows PC market responded. This time with “ultrabooks,” a term coined by Intel to describe a new category of thin and light laptops. None were up to par. I know, because I’ve looked at them all for The edge. The Asus Zenbook UX31, for example, was a near-perfect Air clone, except the trackpad was a problematic nightmare. (I wrote almost 500 words explaining how bad it was.) The Lenovo U300? Even. The Toshiba Z835? Same again. It became a Edge even. Every review ended the same way: “For $200 or $300 more, you could just get a MacBook Air.”

I even installed Windows 7 on a MacBook Air to prove this point. Under Windows, the Air still had a better trackpad than any Windows laptop I’d tested.

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

Act 3: A Silicon Savior (2020–present)

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

The vertical integration was complete, and Apple used it to erase many of the last remaining compromises from the laptop. Now absences were the selling points: no fan, no heat, no trouble finding a charger in the middle of the day. It almost looked like an iPad in laptop form – except, of course, still no touchscreen.

And once again, the PC industry is trying to catch up. Laptop makers have partnered with Qualcomm to build similar machines, while Intel has pushed its own vision of thinner, cooler, more durable PCs.

So there you go. No, the MacBook Air may not have had the same cultural buzz as the iPod or iPhone, but its story is, in many ways, Apple’s. The Air was never just a laptop. It was Apple’s favorite manila envelope magic trick: turn compromise into aspiration, then get the rest of the industry to copy it. Again. And again. And again.