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.

Comments

Best *laptop* I've ever owned

[mykepredko]

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.

Re:Best *laptop* I've ever owned

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

There are plenty of people who do use the MacBook Air for development and it does well. Maybe this is more amongst web developers?

Back in 2014 I bought my MacBook Air because I needed to replace my ageing MacBook Pro that had suffered a coffee spill and I was on a tight budget, but still wanted to stay with an Apple branded computer. We are now in 2018 and it is still doing a good enough job. Certainly if graphics processing matters then it isn't a great choice, but otherwise it is a good general use computer. I am a developer and I use mine mainly for NodeJS and Java development.

Neat device. Got meself one back in Q1 2011.

[Qbertino]

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,

Re: I wish they were still trying

[TheRaven64]

The only extra cost is maintaining OSX, but I have heard there are only a few dozen employees working on it full time, and there is a lot of source duplication with iOS.

That's quite misleading. Apple's CoreOS team, which is responsible for the XNU kernel, libc, and a few other bits is very small (and 95% of what they do is applicable to both macOS and iOS). On top of that, there are a lot of frameworks that are shared between iOS and macOS, and a quite large compiler / tools team that develops XCode, contributes a lot to LLVM/Clang/LLDB, maintains Swift, and so on, which is also shared between all operating systems (XCode is Mac only, but it is primarily used for iOS development these days). I think AppKit is about the only framework that is macOS only. There are also a lot of Mac-only Apple apps, and that's where the real costs come from.