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

It was January 2008, and Steve Jobs had just pulled the MacBook Air out of a manila envelope onstage at Macworld.

Within minutes, Windows PC executives everywhere lost their minds. They grabbed the nearest office envelope, tried to shove in their plastic laptops, and tore straight through the paper. Engineers were summoned. Assistants were dispatched for larger envelopes.

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

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 don’t I know it. While Jobs was sliding the first Air out in 2008, I was a reporter at Laptop magazine, covering the latest Windows laptops at CES in Las Vegas, where the best offering was Lenovo’s IdeaPad U110, an 11-inch, thin-and-light plastic machine with a red cover and Windows Vista. Meanwhile, the Air — as Jobs proudly proclaimed — had an aluminum design, full-size keyboard, and display.

To be clear, I was no soothsayer. At the time, I was a proud Windows user, and laughed at the Air. The three-pound laptop didn’t have a DVD drive and had only one USB port. People complain now about the MacBook Neo’s 8GB RAM, but try 2GB. And it cost $1,799! It was a beautiful, overpriced joke. Except it wasn’t. As Tim Cook said years later in an interview with MKBHD: “The first one, it wasn’t about how many people buy it, it was about establishing the foundation.”

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

Act 1: An Overpriced Showpiece (2008–2010)

What I remember most clearly about the first Air, just 0.76 inches thick at its thickest point, was the little drop-down port door. To make the impossibly thin design work, Apple hid the three ports — USB, headphone, and micro-DVI — behind a tiny flap on the side. It was sleek and ridiculous, like the laptop was running a small black-market operation out of its jacket. Oh, you want some of those good ports? I’ve got just what you want. But it was also the tell. If you spotted that silver wedge on a plane or in a coffee shop, you knew: that person definitely drives a nicer car than I do.

At $1,799, you were paying for a long list of nos. No DVD drive. No Ethernet. No FireWire. No easy way to swap the battery. No upgradeable RAM. The original model even used a painfully slow 4,200rpm hard drive, unless you paid an extra $1,300 for the 64GB solid-state option. What a time!

Yet that was the point. While the Windows world was still marketing ultraportables stuffed 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 fun parts was watching everyone else race to get thinner. The $1,800 Adamo XPS was Dell’s answer to the Air. It measured just 0.39 inches thick and was a gloriously impractical machine with a bizarro pop-up hinge that lifted the keyboard deck. Dell killed the Adamo line in 2011, presumably because it sold A-zero of them.

Act 2: A Mainstream Marvel (2010–2018)

It’s hard to overstate how big a deal Apple’s 2010 MacBook Air redesign was. Reading the press release still gets me excited. There were so many important changes:

That last one was huge. The Air was no longer just a luxury object for people in first class. It was a real mainstream laptop. “We think it’s the future of notebooks,” Jobs said during the launch event.

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

And again, the Windows PC market reacted. This time with “ultrabooks,” a term Intel coined to describe a new category of thin and light laptops. None measured up. I know, because I reviewed them all for The Verge. The Asus Zenbook UX31, for example, was a near-perfect Air clone — except the trackpad was a glitchy nightmare. (I wrote nearly 500 words on how bad it was.) The Lenovo U300s? Same. The Toshiba Z835? Same again. It became a Verge meme. 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 the point. Running Windows, the Air still had a better trackpad than any Windows laptop I’d tested.

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

Act 3: A Silicon Savior (2020–present)

There was still one essential part of the laptop Apple didn’t control in the earlier 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 laptop’s last remaining compromises. Now the absences were the selling points: no fan, no heat, no scrambling for a charger halfway through the day. It felt almost like an iPad in laptop form — except, of course, still no touchscreen.

And again, cue, the PC industry trying to catch up. Laptop makers teamed up with Qualcomm to build similar machines, while Intel pushed its own vision of thinner, cooler, longer-lasting PCs.

So there you have 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 was never just a laptop. It was Apple’s favorite manila envelope magic trick: turning compromise into aspiration, then getting the rest of the industry to copy it. Again. And again. And again.