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10 Years of the MacBook Air (theverge.com)
Ten years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air. "Apple's Macworld 2008 was a special one, taking place just days after the annual Consumer Electronics Show had ended and Bill Gates bid farewell to Microsoft," The Verge recalls. "Jobs introduced the MacBook Air by removing it from a tiny paper office envelope, and the crowd was audibly shocked at just how small and thin it was..." From the report: At the time, rivals had thin and light laptops on the market, but they were all around an inch thick, weighed 3 pounds, and had 8- or 11-inch displays. Most didn't even have full-size keyboards, but Apple managed to create a MacBook Air with a wedge shape so that the thickest part was still thinner than the thinnest part of the Sony TZ Series -- one of the thinnest laptops back in 2008. It was a remarkable feat of engineering, and it signaled a new era for laptops. Apple ditched the CD drive and a range of ports on the thin MacBook Air, and the company introduced a multi-touch trackpad and SSD storage. There was a single USB 2.0 port, alongside a micro-DVI port and a headphone jack. It was minimal, but the price was not. Apple's base MacBook Air cost $1,799 at the time, an expensive laptop even by today's standards.
When I say *laptop* I use it for email, presentations, business operations and demonstrations. I don't use it for software development or any kind of network or processor intensive tasks.
It's thin, light, rugged with a good screen. Works well with projectors with 6+ hours of battery life (after four years). Microsoft Office's operation is fair (but I think that's more of Microsoft's issue than Apple's OS X).
I'm not an Apple guy (although I am a vehement Win 10 hater), just that this laptop has done what I've needed of it for years for my business, in a variety of different locations (and countries) without a glitch or problem of any kind.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Who could forget the purse of adapters and USB hubs Air owners had to carry because the device had no ports?
They really don't give a damn about anything that runs OS X these days and it's a shame. You'd think with all the money they have they'd be willing to take some risks and innovate.
I use a mid-2011 Air for almost everything that doesn't require a huge amount of power to run. Battery could use replacing as it's tough to go 4-5 hours, but it's by far the best laptop I've ever owned.
VNC, SSH w/X, or RDP to connect to beefier desktop or workstation machines completes it.
Trolling is a art,
I remember all the stupid jokes from my fellow nerd buddies. They didn't get it.
The MB Air was the first full powered portable work PC that you could carry around without breaking your back. 1.5 kg, 6 hours of battery time, sometimes more if you dimed the backlight and turned off wifi. I still have mine and it still is usable and useful. Although it does boot rather sluggish with macOS Sierra.
I hope they continue the line and make cheaper mac laptops again. 1500 Euros for a regular MB pro is just too much,
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Has Apple released anything since Steve Jobs died that hasn't been a total flop?
I write for a living, so I "open" "save" and sometimes even "Print". The most video I'll ever use is Thunderbolt to a 1080 monitor. I bought an 11 inch Air, and pounded on it every day for five years. When it died (J and K didn't work any more, and the screen joint was loose), I tossed it and bought a 13 inch...the 11 being out of production. I was disappointed to see I was buying basically the same machine with a bigger screen and a touch more memory......but it was a bit cheaper, and for open-save-print, still great. The alternative in Windows is half the price, but the time spent keeping Windows 10 running, removing malware, etc pays back quickly. I didn't consider the new Pro, only because the USB was missing. There was room for a USB port, guys....
So an article talking about something that happened ten years ago? Where's the news?
Uh.. this part implies that current laptops are more expensive. What did he mean by this?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I bought the refreshed version with the original curvy form factor (and the port access flap). It was the first laptop I ever had with a solid-state drive... and taught me never to buy a laptop without one, ever again.
But much as I loved that one, I prefer this 2015 13" MacBook Pro - it's probably the best laptop Apple's ever made (and, unfortunately, will ever make). It's only 1/2 pound heavier than my Air was, and it's got lots of ports, a better screen, and a much better processor.
#DeleteChrome
MacBook Air (2008):
1280 x 800 display, 802.11 a/b/g (draft N), 12.8" x 8.94" x 0.76", 3.0 lbs
ThinkPad X40 (2004):
1024 x 768 display, 802.11 a/b/g, 10.5" x 8.3" x 1.0", 2.7 lbs
Considering they had four years, it's a pretty modest improvement over IBM's lightweight notebook.
I remember when the announcement came out. Myself and some IT friends basically used the Air as a punchline that week. It was missing so many standard laptop features and so underpowered, it seemed like such a bad idea.
for the following reasons:
i worked hp notebook and compaq notebook support for 18 months, the horror stories i'm privi to are phenominal! can you say moses called?
my first daughter went off to the university of alberta - billingual nursing, we gave her a mb air ... had absolutely ZERO problem. she's an alum now and it still works fine!
my second daughter went off to the thompson rivers university - nursing, we gave her a mb air ... had one problem. she's four months from being an alum now. the one problem, she let some russian guy install some software for her, he added a few extras and we reformatted after adding a bios pasword. it still works fine.
my third daughter went off to prince george university - tree hugger (doesn't like blood), we gave her a mb air, with four month to the end of her first year, it's a stalwart machine. no problems.
we gave each an assortment of patch cords, an external dvd drive, hard shell, carry case and made sure each unit was fully loaded ram / ssd / etc - about 2300 per kid and well worth the coin!
my forth child is looking at university of british columbia - engineering. he's a gamer, but he's getting a mb air. if he wants a gaming notebook, he can work part time and buy his own!
your mileage may vary, but on the whole, well worth the coin!
I think the Pentium M, spinning HD, and shorter battery life kept it from being as much of a love affair as the MacBook Air (at least the rev I got). You're right that there wasn't any huge technology advancement, but sometimes you have to hit a certain sweet spot. I just remember this thing felt faster than any laptop I'd used before (primarily from the SSD subsystem), and the battery lasted so long I literally never had to think about it any more. I fell in love. It still feels like fast modern laptop all this time later.
there where several notebooks thinner than a MacBook Air long before it came out. Sony Vaio had a few in 2004
I don't think that Apple has sold nearly as many iPad Pro's as they wanted to,
Signs point the opposite way, since they may a slightly smaller model of Pro and also been pretty good about updating the larger Pro with some decent speed and display increases.
I have really liked mine; my next trip I plan to travel with just an iPad Pro for working with photos, no laptop. Much lighter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My son just bought one and that thing is a tiny dangerous wedge.
Stick a bat to it's spine and you could chop down a tree.
It's also faster than my office MacBook Pro 2014. Jelly.
The entire *remaining* smart watch market is a flop.
Fixed it for you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They really don't give a damn about anything that runs OS X these days and it's a shame.
What makes you say that? They've redone the MacBook Pro line with USB-C, the Touch Bar, super fast SSD storage, and still continue with excellent displays. On the desktop they just released the iMac Pro which is really powerful and actually has a decent cooling design, and we know they are working on an totally revised Mac Pro desktop.
You may not like some of the changes they made, but I don't see where anyone could reasonably say Apple does not "give a damn" about OSX hardware.
The only thing that really languishes is the Mac mini - and to some extent the Air (although what they have now is decent).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Macbook Air made thin and light trendy but it also marked the beginning of the end of serviceability. Glued in batteries, soldered down RAM and flash storage are all complicit in the prime example of planned obsolescence.
Back then, there were clear differences between their 3 laptop lines. These days, MacBook and MacBook Pro use almost the same body design and have almost the same limitations (no ports, no user-replaceable RAM and disk) as the Air.
When it's time to replace my 2012 MBP, I may have to get me a Hackintosh.
I had many notebooks and always preferred portability over horsepower. I mostly ran Linux on them - IBM, Asus, HP, Dell - and it took me a bit to move to MacOS. The under-the-hood BSD was good enough to ease my apprehension leaving Linux to make the change, but the hardware was the closer. Now I still prefer Linux (my desktop is Fedora, don't judge) but you'd only pry my Air out of my hands with a newer, better Air. Give me 16G RAM and a better screen resolution and I am never leaving.
At the time the mac air came out, few people noticed that the case would taper to a thin edge, creating the *impression* that it was thin, when it was actually much thicker.
Toshiba had a laptop that was thinner (in terms of actual thickness, not fake apparent thickness along the edges), and the Toshiba had a real ethernet port, and the Toshiba had an integral dvd player shoehorned in.
The Toshiba was much more impressive from an engineering standpoint, but of course no one cared.
It was the Portege R500:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
And Toshiba kept coming out with thinner laptops than the mac air:
http://www.mactrast.com/2011/0...
http://www.dailytech.com/Toshi...
The Toshiba R-100 was thinner and more powerful.
They were lucky with timing and PR of the first iPhone ..but all they really made and still make ...is overpriced shit that some people thinks is pleasing to look at
Id rather buy REAL gear... If that gear also happends to be beautiful then its just a bonus
Apple fans are delusional
Just because hardware improvements are small doesnâ(TM)t mean users should not have the chance to replace it. It is very difficult to foresee ones future and Iâ(TM)d rather buy extra ram/ssd/wifi/gpu than a new laptop, if possible.
I had that problem with a macbook air (running arch) for scientific computing and replaced by a future-proof alienware 13r3
That was the caption on a funny pic from back then. It cracked me up.
Why? I have money. I work for a living in the IT sector and not even I care to do this kind of crap anymore. It's not *worth* my time. It's limited and valuable and I'm hardly gaming these days. I can pay Apple money, get a well supported *NIX system, get access to certain applications (like MS Office) that don't run well on Linux, and if something breaks I can take it in to a store and get it fixed. I have the Applecare plan too so if some liquid gets spilled - no biggie. A few bucks and it's fixed. Peace of mind. I no longer care to go out and research whole desktop builds or go scouring the web for that ONE compatible motherboard that works with the rest of my laptop components. That's probably what 80-85% of the population does.
And anything extra would be done with hobby machines and definitely not my main one. Ones whom I can afford to leave in a dust pile until I have the inclination to pick back up the work.
Hot air.
1.36kg seemed pretty light back then, and the 2010 version came in a hair lighter at 1.35kg. Of course, the 13-inch MacBook Pro was a whopping 2.04kg. But then the 13-inch MacBook Pro (Retina) came out at only 1.48kg, and now the second generation (sans Menu Bar) is down to 1.37kg - only 10 grams more than the original MacBook Air.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
My current Air 11" is the nicest computer I ever bought. It is my home computer, good enough for hobby photo and video editing, and so deliciously portable. Only dongle I have is one for SD cards. I use wifi at home and 2 usb ports are sufficient.
Because it is so portable I didn't mind bringing it along on my business trips next to my work computer - though my iPad Pro 10.5" has now taken that role. I splashed out a bit when I bought it in january 2014 - an i7 processor with 8gb ram and 512gb add was top of the line then, and it still works smoothly with the current OS.
I need to replace the battery though, it holds like half the original time now. So that will happen in the next month or so, and I should be ok for another few years.
What if it breaks? I would probably buy the Macbook 12", not the Pro.
I hate the Air. It's a great machine for its purposes, sure, but it stole the "low end" position from the MacBook a few years later. While it definitely has "low end" components, miniaturized to achieve its size goals, that miniaturization does not lead to a low-end price. Apple does not make it easy to get into Mac hardware on a budget. The Mini suffers the same problem. Shrinking components to hit a size goal leave me with an underpowered machine at the price point I'm looking at. Smallness is not a feature I'm particularly interested in. It's like paying a double Apple premium. It's frustrating to be a "bang for the buck" shopper and every option available is dressed up with glitz I don't want.
Constitutionally Correct
Rather outdated now at least for the price Apple wants. Screen is a nice TN screen but still a TN screen and not a IPS or a retina screen. I owned three Macbook Air's over the years, but wouldn't even consider one today.
Sure. I'm not saying it wasn't *any* better. Just that it wasn't the revolution that some people make it out to be. This article calls it a "remarkable feat of engineering," which I think is a stretch. Reading it, you'd think there had never been a laptop of that size.
As far as battery life goes: the X40 had two available, and you could swap it out whenever you wanted. You could choose to take on a little extra weight for more battery life. Or you could carry several batteries. Go nuts. Whatever you want. You had choices that you really didn't get from Apple.
Anyone who says that is an insufferable idiot hipster millenial
Or they could be Irish. (Yes, Irish people really do say that sometimes ... but not all the time.)
We're allowed do whatever the f**k we want with the English language. Call it payback :-)
You can get that with any computer... the point is?
The point is that you get something stabler than Unix that just works. Despite what people might tell you, it Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD still have got a long way to go and Windows is a shit to maintain. It used to be better and more stable TBH, but still is better than any MS infected shit.
weâ(TM)re not talking about linux here, that i put in the alienware with no hassle. With a macbook air (like most ultraboojs) you cannot change much hardware, so if it becomes not fit for the job you need another laptop. With other computers like the above alienware you can change almost everything other than cpu. Including the graphic card (not to play games but for CUDA-powereddara crunching).
Mid 2012 Air 11 inch, 8GB/250GB. Bought it very lightly used at a year old for $450, still with 2 years of AppleCare. Best damn computer. Dual boots Win10 and runs SolidWorks beautifully. As I like to say, âoesmalls on size, bigs on performance.â