Apple’s MacBook Air turns 15 — ahead of 2008 standards

Fifteen years ago, on January 15, 2008, the late Steve Jobs, the then CEO of Apple, during a conference of The first generation of “MacBook Air” unveiled In those years, the laptops on the market had exactly the same approach as MacBook Air, and if we say that the laptop world is divided into before and after “Air”, we are not wrong.

MacBook Air – the thinnest laptop of 2008

Before the introduction of MacBook Air, Apple had two portable Mac series in its portfolio; MacBook and MacBook Pro. Both series of devices did not have anything special to say about the thickness and their thickness was equal to the standards of that time. Other “thin and light” laptops of those years include Sony’s TZ series laptops, which were between 0.8 and 1.2 inches thick. For comparison, the 13.3-inch MacBook Air was between 0.16 and 0.76 inches thick, making it the thinnest laptop of its time. In fact, the thinness was the most important feature of the MacBook Air compared to the competition, and even Jobs took the Air out of an envelope for the first time during the conference to further emphasize this feature.

On the right side of Apple’s MacBook Air, there was a folding port compartment that contained a USB-A port, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and a micro-DVI port for connecting an external hard drive. Regarding the technical performance of the first generation MacBook Air, we must say that Apple tried not to reduce the technical performance of the Air as much as possible due to its thickness and equipped this legendary notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a frequency of 1.6 GHz. . Of course, such a processor was too much for the small size of the Air, and the small chassis of the Air had created many thermal limitations for this powerful processor (by 2008 standards); To the extent that Air had to turn off one of the cores of this processor and use only one of its cores due to the high temperature during long uses.

And the price…

The first generation MacBook Air was not only a legendary notebook, but also had a legendary price tag. The base model MacBook Air M2 as the latest generation of MacBook Air is available today with a base price of $1,199, and the base price of the MacBook Air M1 is only $999, but Apple had set the base price of the MacBook Air 2008 at $1,799, considering Adjusted for inflation, that equates to more than $2,500 today. The base model of this notebook was equipped with an 80 GB 4800 hard drive, which was used inside the iPod because there was not enough space to install 2.5-inch drives. Of course, a 64GB SSD could be ordered for it, which alone cost $1,000.

MacBook Air 2008 may not have much to say about technical performance due to its low thickness, extreme weakness of the cooling system, 2 GB of RAM and inadequate storage space, but it had a lot to say about design and build quality. As the world’s first ultrabook, the design language of the MacBook Air was ahead of its time and later became the standard of the MacBook family and all slim and light ultrabooks after it.

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