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When did Apple first intruduce SSD in Macbook Air?

S

supersaeed

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 20, 2014
1
0
Hi
I would appreciate if someone can tell me when did Apple start shipping macbook air with SSD? I intend to buy a used macbook air 11 from a person and it is from Mid 2011, warranty has expired. It is core i7, 250 GB with 4GB RAM.

I'll have a look at it in the evening before getting it but thinking if this does not have SSD then it is not worth buying...

Thanks

Saeed
 
The current form factor of the MBA was introduced in late 2010 and always came with an SSD or flash storage, thus a 2011 MBA will have an SSD or flash storage.
Even the first MBA in 2008 could be configured with an expensive SSD.
 
Very first MBA in 2008--a 13"--had a 64GB SSD option for $1100.00. I bought it and found it to be worth every penny. The first truly fast feeling laptop. But, admittedly, a huge amount of money for what it was. Price of being cutting edge, though.
 
happyslayer said:
Very first MBA in 2008--a 13"--had a 64GB SSD option for $1100.00. I bought it and found it to be worth every penny. The first truly fast feeling laptop. But, admittedly, a huge amount of money for what it was. Price of being cutting edge, though.
Click to expand...

The add-on price was 1100$? Jesus.

Edit: I just looked it up, and it was 1000$, then 7 months later the upgrade dropped to 600$.
 
My first-gen MBA (64 GB SSD, 2 GB RAM) is still running along nicely, although these days I don't use her as much since I have other machines which are faster or have more capacity, are able to handle Mavericks, etc., etc. At the time the MBA was first available in February 2008, I decided that I would go with the SSD and never regretted it. A friend bought the 13" with the regular "spinner" hard drive a few months later and it was interesting to see the difference in speed of the two machines.

My current rMBP, of course, has SSD and it runs circles around my 2012 iMac and my 2009 Mac Mini, each of which still has a "spinner" HD, too. My next iMac will definitely have SSD. I'm hooked.....
 
Just for a little price check - the Dell Latitude D620 was one of the first from Dell with an SSD option. Price started at $899 for the basic laptop, and the option (late 2007, I think) for a 32GB SSD added about $550. Quite a chunk to add at the time, too… Technology moves ahead, with prices typically dropping - sometimes dramatically, as that technology matures.
 
Yep, I remember the sticker shock of those early MBAs. I think it was a couple of years ago when Apple totally nixed the HDDs on them that the prices dropped enough where regular people could consider affording them. I remember the first time I tried one in a store and the speed was amazing. Now I've finally got one and spent $900 on 128GB.

The caveat is I wouldn't be able to use 128GB as my only computer. I've got about 100GB of music and who knows how much in photos on my iMac. Then I have tons of video on external drives. iTunes in the Cloud changed needing to actually store the music and many of my movies/TV shows on here, and it sounds like iCloud is about to get closer to that for photos. Maybe I could do without the iMac, but likely not yet.
 
Let's go back even further. My first Macintosh was a Mac Plus. I bought it sometime in 1986. A little later, I bought my first external HDD, a Conner SCSI 100MB (that's MB not GB) and it cost me $800.00. That would be $1,705.75 in todays dollars.

With that drive, I thought I had the world. Little did I know:eek:

Lou
 
The first MBA - in 2008 - was offered with a HDD of 80GB or a SSD of 64 GB. The original models came with 2 GB RAM as standard - which was not the industry norm at the time, although it soon came to be seen as the standard. Anyway, I remember reading about them with fascination, and inspecting one, awestruck, when it appeared in my local Apple store, a good few weeks later.

Commentators - here on these fora and elsewhere - wrote and spoke highly of the speed and stability of the SSD from the very beginning. My problem was size of the memory, which was not sufficient for my needs - not cost (which, admittedly was high).

Within a year, Apple was offering a 128 GB SSD on the MBA and subsequently, as I travel a lot and loved the form factor, I bought my first Air in 2010, and instantly decided that I would never again have a computer with anything but the SSD drive. Last year, a few months a before the Applecare was due to expire, I replaced it with a CTO maxed out model from 2013, with 512 GB SSD, and 8 GB RAM (which is a stunning machine).
 
Scepticalscribe said:
The first MBA - in 2008 - was offered with a HDD of 80GB or a SSD of 64 GB. The original models came with 2 GB RAM as standard - which was not the industry norm at the time, although it soon came to be seen as the standard. Anyway, I remember reading about them with fascination, and inspecting one, awestruck, when it appeared in my local Apple store, a good few weeks later.

Commentators - here on these fora and elsewhere - wrote and spoke highly of the speed and stability of the SSD from the very beginning. My problem was size of the memory, which was not sufficient for my needs - not cost (which, admittedly was high).

Within a year, Apple was offering a 128 GB SSD on the MBA and subsequently, as I travel a lot and loved the form factor, I bought my first Air in 2010, and instantly decided that I would never again have a computer with anything but the SSD drive. Last year, a few months a before the Applecare was due to expire, I replaced it with a CTO maxed out model from 2013, with 512 GB SSD, and 8 GB RAM (which is a stunning machine).
Click to expand...

Remember back then when everybody thought Apple NEEDED to create a netbook? Between iPads and MBAs, I think Apple did well at killing those pieces of junk. The worst of all worlds to save like $100. Apple now sells tablets at $299 and ultra books at $899, and they're good.
 
Passed down my mid 2009 MacBook Air with 120GB 4200 rpm HDD that I traded out for work from a client, to my daughter, who then passed it down the line to her little brother. It was only 6 months old at the time of the trade, but she (the client) quickly upgraded to the SSD model after realizing the difference was actually worth the money and gave me a smokin' deal on the HDD model (less than half of what she paid new just a few months before).

I upgraded the PAINFULLY SLOOOOOW 4200rpm HDD (which also ran very hot) to a 120GB OWC Aura Pro SSD. WHAT A DIFFERENCE! Like a whole new computer. Put Mavericks on it and it works perfectly. Only has one USB 2.0 port but he has a port hub he connects. He'll get a couple of years out of it before my daughter passes down the late 2010 MBP I just passed to her, to him and she will get my 2013 MBA Ultimate. That's how we roll in this Apple family LOL.

Anyway, my point is that even the 2nd generation Air base model with it's incredibly slow and hot running 4200rpm HDD seemed a revolutionary machine with its jaw-dropping ultra thin and feather light design but adding the SSD made it a stunningly different machine to anything on the market at that time.

5 years later, we're STILL using it and it works perfectly with the SSD upgrade. Amazing.
 
Last edited:
SmOgER said:
wow. just WOW. :)
Hard to imagine anyone else but Apple being brave enough to offer such a expensive option.
Click to expand...

At the time, the MacBook Air was also a "premium" product, priced well above the "plain MacBook," nearly at 15" MacBook Pro pricing. ($1799 was the Air, where the 15" Pro was $1999, and the launched-later-that-year Aluminum "plain MacBook" was $1299 for a much higher-spec machine than the Air that came out at the same time.)

If you wanted the ultimate in portability at maximum speed, that $999 upgrade was worth it. Even the MacBook Pro didn't have an SSD as an option yet.
 
Anonymous Freak said:
At the time, the MacBook Air was also a "premium" product, priced well above the "plain MacBook," nearly at 15" MacBook Pro pricing. ($1799 was the Air, where the 15" Pro was $1999, and the launched-later-that-year Aluminum "plain MacBook" was $1299 for a much higher-spec machine than the Air that came out at the same time.)

If you wanted the ultimate in portability at maximum speed, that $999 upgrade was worth it. Even the MacBook Pro didn't have an SSD as an option yet.
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Yes. The "design" alone (ultra-thin, ultra-light) was truly an innovation. Add the SSD and it was a revolutionary product for Apple. I remember telling friends at the time Steve first introduced the MacBook Air, that the days of the "built-in" optical drive in Apple computers are numbered...I gave it three years. My friends said I was crazy and that this latest "ultra-thin" Apple design was just a passing fad as people needed optical drives...They don't think I'm so crazy anymore (well, at least not as far as technology goes LOL)
 
It was the original MBA that seduced me to the Apple side :D

Couldn't justify the SSD option though, but after the warranty had expired installed a Runcore SSD and the machine was faster than the day I bought it. My girlfriend carried on using it for 3 years and then when she got my cast off 2010 model I sold it on eBay for just over £300 :D

It was a superb machine and still zipped along with a fresh install of 10.6.8!

All of my machines have SSDs now and couldn't imagine computing on a machine with the OS running on spinning discs.
 
Crazy Badger said:
It was the original MBA that seduced me to the Apple side :D

Couldn't justify the SSD option though, but after the warranty had expired installed a Runcore SSD and the machine was faster than the day I bought it. My girlfriend carried on using it for 3 years and then when she got my cast off 2010 model I sold it on eBay for just over £300 :D

It was a superb machine and still zipped along with a fresh install of 10.6.8!

All of my machines have SSDs now and couldn't imagine computing on a machine with the OS running on spinning discs.
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That 4200rpm HDD was REALLY slow. Did all the original Airs with HDD only have the 4200rpm discs or was that just the base models?
 
Your answer is attached.

Lou
 

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Ronnoco said:
That 4200rpm HDD was REALLY slow. Did all the original Airs with HDD only have the 4200rpm discs or was that just the base models?
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Yes, the hard drive also was not a 2.5-inch normal laptop drive.
Those first MBAirs used 1.8-inch HDD, which standard speed was 4200 rpm.
Same hard drive size as used in an iPod, so shows how small it was.
And, the upgrade for that was an SSD.
 
Thank you both for the replies. I remember while being floored by the incredibly thin and light design, it was slow to open programs and ran very hot. I still thought it was about the coolest computer I'd ever seen/owned, but that iPod HDD was really slow and of course when running anything HDD intensive, that thing ran very hot.
 
Ronnoco said:
Yes. The "design" alone (ultra-thin, ultra-light) was truly an innovation. Add the SSD and it was a revolutionary product for Apple. I remember telling friends at the time Steve first introduced the MacBook Air, that the days of the "built-in" optical drive in Apple computers are numbered...I gave it three years. My friends said I was crazy and that this latest "ultra-thin" Apple design was just a passing fad as people needed optical drives...They don't think I'm so crazy anymore (well, at least not as far as technology goes LOL)
Click to expand...

Yeah, all manufacturer's ultra-light designs were premium back then. Sony's X505, Dell's thin Latitudes, etc. They all cost way more than a "consumer" notebook of similar/better specs, often on par with the ultra-high-end "desktop replacement" notebooks in price, but at way lower specs.

Apple's big innovation with the Air was that it was only about a 20% loss in specs compared to the standard consumer notebook (which, since Apple's standard consumer notebooks were already higher-than-minimum spec compared to other manufacturers, was saying something.) Most other ultra-thins were literally using a 1-2 generation old CPU. (I had a Sony ultra-light with a Pentium MMX processor when the Pentium 3 was just coming on to market for mainstream laptops.)

Even after the Air came out, other manufacturers used current-gen, but ultra-low-power, low-clock-speed CPUs for their Air-equivalents. The first Air (early 2008) came with a 1.6 or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo. The Dell Adamo that came out over a year later used a 1.2 or 1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo.
 
Interesting how "the industry" reacted to the Air. They seemed to think going super low power, tiny screen, reduced function "NetBooks" were where Apple was going, which of course was NOT where Apple was going with the Air. Instead, Apple's idea was to go super light and thin, ultra portable but still full functioning, not some way under powered tiny "web-surfing/email" machine.
 
supersaeed said:
Apple first intruduce SSD in Macbook Air?
Click to expand...

You are asking the wrong question. You should be asking, when did the Air stopped offering HD in the Air.

The first Air, 2007(8?) came with HD standard but Apple sold you SSD if u had the dough.

2011, top of my head, was all SSD but to be 100% sure, go WIKI, bro.
 
Mrbobb said:
You are asking the wrong question. You should be asking, when did the Air stopped offering HD in the Air.

The first Air, 2007(8?) came with HD standard but Apple sold you SSD if u had the dough.

2011, top of my head, was all SSD but to be 100% sure, go WIKI, bro.
Click to expand...

The "late 2010" models (the redesigned chassis, which included the introduction of the 11" model,) were the first to completely do away with the spinning-platter drives.

But the "mid 2009" model had two lines: a 1.86 GHz/spinning-platter system and a 2.13 GHz/SSD system. The SSD wasn't outrageously priced any more, either. The upgrade that got both the SSD and the faster processor was only $300 over the base model.
 
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