The World’s First Thinnest Laptop MacBook Air Turns 10

On January 15th, 2008, Steve jobs introduced something which changed the face of the laptops forever. Opening a tiny manila office envelope, jobs uncovered what he dubbed as the “world’s thinnest laptop”. It was MacBook Air.

The audience of Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco roared in applause at the sight of MacBook Air. It was thin, sleek, had a great design and didn’t look like a suitcase. We had never seen anything like that. It was truly an amazing engineering endeavor and ushered a new era for the laptops.

Of course, Apple had made certain changes to make it work. The CD drive and range of ports had been replaced with a single USB 2.0 port, along with a micro-DVI port and a jack for headphones.

The company also introduced multi-touch trackpad and SSD storage in the Mac Book Air. It weighed just about three pounds with a wedge shape. It had minimal features but was very pricey even by today’s standard.

At the time, the rival laptops which came somewhere in the league had 8 to 11-inch displays, weighed more and most didn’t even have full-size keyboards. Windows took nearly a year to catch up to the game of thin laptops.

Ten years later, the MacBook Air’s Design hasn’t changed much, instead introduced the 12-inch Mac Book. The MacBook Air’s had a pretty good run even though it’s destined to fade away.