Yesterday’s launch of Airs with M3 chips was the definitive end for MacBooks with a teardrop or wedge shape. At the same time, the Air M1 from 2020 also disappeared from Apple’s offer, which was the last to keep the design with a gradually narrowing body.
The iconic shape came with the first generation of Air introduced in January 2008. Steve Jobs then brought a thin envelope to the stage and pulled out a laptop the likes of which the world had not seen at that time. It was 19 mm at its thickest point, only 4 mm at its thinnest. It defeated the thinnest Toshiba Portege R200 at that time, which was 19.8 mm along its entire length.
The category of ultra-mobile notebooks already existed then, alongside Toshiba, Japanese rival Sony with the Vaio series was also dedicated to them. But when Apple launched an avalanche with the MacBook Air, everyone started imitating slim bodies. Three years later, Intel came up with the marketing label ultrabook, which flaunted computers with a thickness of up to 18 mm (in the case of 13″ models). At the same time, they had to contain Sandy Bridge chips, offer up to five hours of endurance and fast wake-up from hibernation (within 7 seconds). Later, conditions changed.
The advent of MacBook Air and ultrabooks, however, also prepared users for optical drives or some connectors, because they simply did not fit into razor thin devices. On the other hand, however, the SSD boom started because the hard drives were unnecessarily voracious and, moreover, slow, as smaller 1.8″ units with 4200 rpm were often used. Already the original Air gave users a choice between an 80GB HDD and a 64GB SSD.
2024-03-05 16:45:28
#straw #years #Apple #laptops #flat
