MacBook Air (2008)

Jobs slid it out of a manila envelope on stage, which is the part everyone remembers. January 15, 2008. The thinnest notebook anyone had built, tapering from 0.16 inches at the front edge to 0.76 at the back, with a full-size keyboard and a 13.3-inch screen inside a wedge of aluminum. Getting there cost almost everything else. There was no optical drive, which no mainstream laptop had done before and which people argued about for a year, one USB port, no Ethernet, and a battery you could not remove. All of it started at $1,799. The processor was a custom underclocked Core 2 Duo at 1.6 or 1.8GHz, and you could option a 64GB solid-state drive instead of the 80GB spinning disk. Almost nobody did, because of what SSDs cost in 2008, and it was obvious even then which way that would go. Reviewers divided exactly as you would expect. The engineering impressed everyone and the compromises annoyed the people who had to use it: constant port juggling, a separate external SuperDrive, unremarkable battery life, and performance behind the ordinary MacBook. It sold modestly and it mattered enormously. Intel coined the word ultrabook years later to describe PC manufacturers copying it.