The MacBook Air arrived this week 15 years ago, weighing less than three pounds and under one inch in thickness, as the then Apple Inc chief, the late Steve Jobs, casually opened a regular office envelope to unveil a slim, gamechanger laptop. The Air has not budged from the popularity charts since.

Early Days
When the first MacBook Air was launched in January 2008, it had its fair share of critics. For starters, Apple made a rather controversial decision to do away with the optical CD drive. “Impractical” and “shocking” were some of the common reactions. But the CD and the drive itself faded away a few years later. Next, it had just one port when other laptops had several. Its storage capacity was limited for what was then an overpriced – albeit beautiful – laptop. Apple made many trade-offs in making a thin, portable laptop but those compromises slowly became the norm across the industry.

Before the Air, design wasn’t really a “thing” in laptops. But Apple, a design-obsessed company, got the whole design vibe spot on with its products. The iPod did it to music players, the iPhone to smartphones, the iPad to tablets, and the MacBook Air the same for laptops, changing 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 – at $1,799 then it was expensive even by today’s standards.

The ‘Stale’ Years
As great as it was, the MacBook Air did encounter a rough patch. For years, Apple did not make any design changes and clung to the “thinnest” laptop tagline. The focus shifted to the MacBook Pro and though the Air got upgrades, they were infrequent. There was a time (circa 2018) when tech experts thought if it was the end of the road for MacBook Air.

However, in 2020, Apple gave it a new lease of life with the M1 processor and then tweaked its design last year. 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 and true to its marketing spiel, the MacBook Air still feels like a breath of fresh air.