Tech Titans: Apple Laptops

Stuff’s top Mac portables from across the ages

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01 MACBOOK AIR

Say what you like about Apple founder Steve Jobs, but the man could put on a show. And that job was made a whole lot easier if the hardware he was unveiling allowed for a little on-stage magic.

In 2008, he performed the trick – miraculous at the time – of pulling an entire super-thin laptop out of a standard office envelope. The crowd went wild – even more so than usual at an Apple event.

Not everyone was so easily won over, though. The second the specs were revealed, pundits countered the jolly mood with a keyboard-bashing flurry of rage, explaining why the MacBook Air was a disaster. It was too expensive, they said. The SSD storage option meant you’d barely be able to save anything before the machine displayed a ‘full now’ sad face. The CPU was too slow. Users wouldn’t be able to replace the battery. There was just one USB port. (OK, they might have had a point with that last one.)

What they’d all failed to notice – yet again – was that Apple had ushered in the future. Before long, rival brands clamoured to offer laptops with the same skinny form factor. The era of the Ultrabook had arrived.

Little did we know then that, for Apple, ‘thin’ would become an obsession that would undermine a host of subsequent laptops. But for a brief moment in 2008, skinny was ‘in’ – and the first-generation MacBook Air was unbeatable.

RELEASED 2008

02 MACBOOK PRO 14IN