MacBook Air

Adam Banks remembers when Apple’s first ultraportable proved that a “subnotebook” could offer more, not less

At the turn of 2008, PC makers had caught on to the need to make laptops smaller to appeal to more users. They’d responded with designs like Sony’s VAIO TZ90, which used an 11.1-inch screen and a reduced keyboard to get the size and weight down to a point where Notebook Review praised it as “ridiculously small” and “the best looking laptop I have ever laid my eyes on.” The black plastic machine was 1.18 inches at thickest.

When Steve Jobs stepped out to launch Macworld Expo San Francisco on January 15 that year, it was rumored he’d address this new market. Instead, he obliterated it. The first slide introducing the MacBook Air showed the profile of the VAIO TZ, then superimposed the Air. It was visibly half as thick, tapering at the front to almost nothing.

To emphasize the point, Jobs produced the Air from inside a standard manila envelope. When he pulled it out, the innovation was all the more striking: this was Apple’s first ever aluminum unibody, a silver blade that almost disappeared when Jobs, ever the stage magician, held it up balanced horizontally on his hand. He focused on the full-size backlit keyboard, the large multitouch trackpad, and how a whole Mac had been condensed onto a board the length of a pencil. Within months, the Air was the template for many rival ultrabooks – and it stayed that way for years to come.

Later, the unibody manufacturing technique that debuted with the Air was used on other portable Macs, which have followed in its footsteps in the years since to also become dramatically thinner and considerably lighter.