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MacBook Air Turns 15 Today: 'The World's Thinnest Notebook'
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Still the best consumer laptop one could buy, 1.5 decades later. I love my M2 MacBook Air. Even more than I loved my 2015 13" MacBook Pro.
TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
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Hands down! The best Mac ever!
Stay Thin & Float in the Air 💫
And yes it was “Floating in the Air” 15 years ago.
Stay Thin & Float in the Air 💫
And yes it was “Floating in the Air” 15 years ago.
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No, they didn't.
Actually, people could fly before then, and powered flight was accomplished as well before the Wright Brothers. They were the first at sustained controllable flight. Some argue since they used a rail it wasn't truly a sustained flight. Maybe the person who invented taxiing and wheeled takeoff really "invented" the aeroplane.
Or Gottlieb Daimler.
Invention and commercialization are two different things.
or Joseph Swan
OK, the Palm has a valid claim to inventing the first usable smartphone, by our standard.
Apple has come up with some innovative designs, such was the Air, but they really haven't invented a new kind of computer.
The original Air was and is a masterful design. It showed what could be done with a conventional laptop design to make it a lot better than the existing bricks.
I have an M1 Air and M1 MBP. Both are very great machines. I like the Air's size and portability; and the MBP power and ports.
People really seem to want a 15" version, and I miss the 11-inch models they used to have. That would be a portable powerhouse with an M2 chip.
I worked for Apple during this time period. I cherish that time....It always felt exciting with the announcements. Apple was swinging big back in those days!
Owned, used, and still have this model. It needs a new battery, but I haven’t seen it as a critical buy.
Yes, it was limited, yes, you had to be smart about usage…but damn if it wasn’t a genuinely good piece of kit.
Yes, it was limited, yes, you had to be smart about usage…but damn if it wasn’t a genuinely good piece of kit.
It became a really good computer when they stuck an SSD in it a couple of years later.
the original one was the best. that flip-down port on the right side, was just perfect.
to be honest, it had more usable ports than the M1 MBA or the first all-type C MBP.
1 dedicated MagSafe charging port, 1 USB2, 1 headphone jack and 1 mDP.
but the original was a bit different, more curved. the subsequent wedge shaped ones were harder to open while holding - it tends to pinch my palm between the lid and the body. the original had some issues with ventilation, which would be completely gone nowadays with the M-series CPU.
now i hate myself for selling it when it was 7 year old.
Amazing how enduring this design has been and continues to be. Although it took me a long time to personally warm up to the wedge, I do love my gold M1 Air (acquired fall 2022) and plan to use it for years to come.
Nope. Palm themselves called their devices PDAs and they were largely unsuccessful at being the easy to use general purpose computer for everyone. Instead of being the first smartphones, PDAs were what a few crazy people had in the days of old before smartphones. They were the airships to the airplanes. And once the smartphone was invented, PDAs were completely replaced for obvious reasons.
I had a 2014 with 4 GB of RAM until last year. It was definitely still useable with Big Sur installed. Not a powerhouse, of course, but compared to a Windows laptop running Windows 10 with o lot 4 GB, I’d take the MBA.
The commercial was iconic, back when Apple & Chiat Day were nailing it.
As for 1.0, it was a mess. The iPod hard drive in the MacBook Air was very slow. Although it was the first Apple notebook to get an $1300 SSD option
As for 1.0, it was a mess. The iPod hard drive in the MacBook Air was very slow. Although it was the first Apple notebook to get an $1300 SSD option
Anyone else here like me who has been refreshing MacRumors EVERY SINGLE DAY?
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Such innovation, like the MacBook Air, that happened under Steve Jobs has never happened under that mediocre MBA suit Tim Cook. If someone cares about corporate profits and shareholders much more than innovation, then of course Cook is the best CEO that Apple ever had. But for people who care about the creation of products meant to be the most effective computing tools for the common man (i.e., not as luxury goods for the wealthy that are priced so high and with compromised functionality), then Cook is a horrible CEO.
I bought the first air and I had it for years.. I don’t know what happened to it 🤷🏻♂️ but I still have an iBook G3
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One of his best innovations. I've probably owned 7-8 airs over the years. The price point is great for what you get.
Typin' this on one now (M1). It's sure as hell evolved since the original with an 80-gig 1.8" HDD. I think the 64GB SSD option was $600 or $800 more at the time. I wonder how the current M2 would stack up against the 2007 Mac Pro.
Which was probably the best thing that could have happened to Apple. Apple being a design-led company rather than an engineering-led one.
It was sort of the last innovation in laptop design. It also brought in the still-used Unibody enclosure, essentially the peak of manufacturing. Love the 2010 model, still completely usable today.
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Apple definitely cares about marketing. You think their ads that pushed their products as fashion statements or the fact that they had a guy employed to literally create Apple followers into a cult had nothing to do with convincing people like you and others to all turn into this;
How many times have you gotten onto a subway and seen basically everyone with white headphones? CLEARLY marketing convinced the lot of you.
PDA was the nomenclature of the time, and could still apply to today's smartphones that are essentially PDAs by another name.
The Treo had what the first iPhone had - icons, mail, browser, etc, and you could add you own apps; plus workable HRW. which was why I said it would have been interesting if HP had continued it's development.
Apple deserves a lot of credit for what they did; and the air was a design breakthrough when introduced.
But to your original point, Apple did not invent the smartphone (or PC and tablet), even if they made it mainstream.
Maybe that's broadly true, but Apple did invent the modern smartphone, the smartphone as we all know it today. Before 2007 I owned a few phones that were "early smartphones" and they were very cool. I especially loved the budget Sony Ericson that was a big touchscreen (big at the time anyway) and had a numpad that flipped up over the bottom of the screen and the rubber buttons pressed into the screen to dial. But Apple set the standard with the original iPhone, by having it made of glass, multitouch from day one, IPS display from day one. Unlike what Android was cooking up to be in 2007 the iPhone didn't need or want physical buttons.
Apple didn't invent the tablet either, but they invented the modern tablet. The iPad was such a crazy idea that everyone thought it was doomed to fail when it was unveiled. Same with the PC, Apple didn't invent the modern PC, they stole it from Xerox. But they were the first to make it mainstream, they took what Xerox invented and turned it into a consumer version. This one isn't as clear cut as the iPad and iPhone because Microsoft had the exact same vision of the modern PC when they saw what Xerox had made. Xerox didn't even know what they had, only the Xerox engineers behind the project understood the magnitude of it. But Xerox wasn't the kind of company to give a damn what their engineers knew.
Oh, come on. The original MacBook Air was $1799, outrageous for a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo 13" notebook at the time. It was the pure definition of a luxury good.
Apple didn't get the Air right until the next version that started at $999.