15 years of MacBook Air: Still a breath of fresh ‘Air’

Turn back the clock to sometime in 2007 and try to remember the laptops that most people lugged around. These laptops weighed — literally and figuratively — on them. Then the MacBook Air arrived last week 15 years ago bringing in tow just 0.76 inches of thickness and less than three pounds of weight. And it had all the shock and awe showmanship of Steve Jobs. Jobs casually opened a regular manilla office envelope and inside it was the MacBook Air.
The MacBook Air made thin laptops the norm and it’s one series of laptops that hasn’t budged from the popularity charts. The MacBook Air in more ways than one changed mobile computing.

Early days of MacBook Air

When the first MacBook Air was launched in January 2008, it made laptops cool but wasn’t without its fair share of flaws. For starters, Apple made a rather controversial — at least back then it seemed like — of yanking off the optical CD drive. “Impractical”, and “Shocking” were some of the common reactions”. The CD and the drive died a slow, painful death a few years later. Next, there was just one port when other laptops were swimming in a multitude of ports. The storage capacity was limited and it felt like a rather overpriced — but beautiful looking — laptop. Apple made many tradeoffs in making a thin, portable laptop but those compromises slowly became the norm.
Design wasn’t really a “thing” in laptops before the MacBook Air arrived. But Apple is a design-obsessed company and gets the whole industrial design vibe spot with its products. The iPod did it to music players, the iPhone did it to smartphones, the iPad did it to tablets, and the MacBook Air did to laptops — changed the way people looked and used those products.
The MacBook Air was peak Apple — it looked great, had all the elements of Apple’s design philosophy and cost a bomb. The MacBook Air was prohibitively expensive. Back then it cost $1,799 — which is expensive even by today’s standards. We didn’t know back then but there are millions of takers of such Apple products.

The ‘stale’ years of MacBook Air

As great as it was, the MacBook Air did have a rough patch when it became an afterthought for Apple. For years, Apple didn’t make any design changes and clung to the “thinnest” laptop tagline. The focus shifted to the MacBook Pro and the Air got upgrades but they were infrequent. There was a time when tech experts — somewhere around 2018 — actually wondered if it was the end of the road for MacBook Air.
Apple gave it a new lease of life with the M1 processor in 2020 and then tweaked the design in 2022. The M-series of MacBooks have been praised by critics as well as users. The battery life and fanless design have been the big talking points.
Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) recently revealed in a report that laptops dominate the sales when it comes to Mac devices. “Laptops account for 74% of units over the past year and have remained at around that level for the past several years,” said CIRP in the report.
When it comes to Apple’s laptop sales, CIRP pegs it to be a rather even contest. And perhaps a tad surprising that the “more powerful and expensive” MacBook Pro models outsell the “lighter, less costly” MacBook Air models. MacBook Pro accounts for around 54% of total laptop sales for Apple whereas the MacBook Air gets the other 46%.
The MacBook Air was dubbed as the “world’s best-selling laptop” by Apple when it unveiled the M2-powered MacBook Air in June 2022. That could be marketing rhetoric that just makes people sit up and take note. But then the MacBook Air doesn’t really need that as it is the one laptop that made the world sit up and take note. 15 years later, the MacBook Air still feels like a breath of fresh air — now that’s something that can’t be said by too many gadgets, forget laptops.