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History Of The MacBook Air
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- Published on Mar 11, 2026
- Try the new CleanMyMac for free for 7 days using my link clnmy.com/Appl...
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Today, you probably know the MacBook Air as the smallest, cheapest laptop Apple sells. But when it first came out in 2008, it was one of the most expensive. With a starting price of $1,800. And if you upgraded to the solid state drive, it was $3,100. Which is over $4,500 today. For that price, you might expect the Air to’ve been the most powerful, feature-filled laptop Apple sold. But it was far from it.
Try the new CleanMyMac for free for 7 days using my link clnmy.com/AppleExplained
Nice also first!!
Paid = No buy
maybe if i owned a mac i would
I use CleanMyMac. It’s fantastic!
@Kurt.103That app is garbage
They kept returning to that 999$ price point 😂
It's because people aren't stupid and aren't willing to keep paying more when a baseline is set. Only the diehard fans will pay any price.
It’s inverted 666 and that’s what the half eaten apple is all about.
@abhishekshinde897or, ya know, apple never charges a perfect number for things. take the iphone 16 for example, its $799 not $800. that number (666) has nothing to do with apple
@CrustyHead2465 i knew it that someone will reply to my dumb comment.
@abhishekshinde897 lmao
Greg missed the opportunity to explain that the Air created a whole new category of PC called the Ultrabook. It, along with tablets, eventually replaced netbooks in the 2010s.
Don’t get clean my Mac. It’s an annoying app that does what Apple does for you automatically. If you hate notifications, clean my Mac is a nightmare
Most of these apps are unnecessary today. It seems these companies continue to target the older generation who are convinced they need these optimization apps.
agreed
I was going to ask about CleanMyMac. I thought it would be snake oil…
@VegaEclipse1096 Either Mac or Windows, modern OS are so refined that they don't need these additional tools. Even Windows come with a built in antivirus detector that would fit 99% of most users.
@tamwilfredThey're not targeting older people, they're targeting people who don't know anything.
My wife is a real estate agent and she JUMPED at the chance to buy a MacBook Air when announced because for her having something thin and lightweight to carry around in her briefcase was all that she needed. She never once complained about the lack of ports.
Apple predicts what consumers will do better than any other company
MetalJesus on an Apple explained video? What’s up dude!
My mom has the 12” MacBook and I wondered when she bought it how useful it could be with just one USB-C port. However, she loves it and the lack of ports has never been an issue for her. She’s elderly and really appreciates how lightweight it is.
Clean my mac should be called "Break my mac"
My M1 MacBook Air is still going strong. For web browsing and light productivity, it performs amazing and battery life is phenomenal.
It's only about 3 years old. People say "oh it's already 4 years old"... nop... it was released in november 2020. Months matter... most high quality laptops should keep going for 10 years. It's nothing new in the quality laptop market.
@OscarRose2 are you from 2023?
@OscarRose2isn’t it December now
broo, I'm pushing it to the limits on graphic design work on all adobe apps and still it performs so good. And not scared of SSD swap at all, because for 3 years of use SSD health dropped just by 1%
@cruelpeanutbutter7598 8GB or 16GB model? I got the 8GB myself... honestly.. some apps just work no matter the load.
Never used a 1st gen air. But I had a 13” version of the first redesign. Liked it for what it was. Currently have a M2 air and love it. Pretty solid device.
I have an M2 air as well, great laptop!
The first version was pretty terrible. I never owned one, but a client of mine did. With USB 2.0 struggling to keep up with the demands of the time (for instance you couldn't get Gigabit ethernet with the ethernet adapter because the USB port you'd plug that adapter into provided less than half of that speed), only one USB port, a noticeably slow processor and a rotating HDD (which was standard for the time, but a big energy-waster drawing from that tiny battery).
Once the redesign in 2010/2011 came, it was suddenly quite a nifty device. USB 3 made the two ports (that's twice as many) very usable for any application, and adapters including USB hubs made it possible to solve the vast majority of "missing port" issues. The SSD did a lot to make it fast in many everyday applications despite the relatively slow processor. it suddenly just felt modern and sleek and did an overall good job.
My base 2012 MBP already had 8GB of RAM. Unbelievable that they just recently moved from 8 to 16GB. 12 years later.
Ikr? I have the 2022 M2 Air, and I’m not complaining because it’s an awesome computer - but my secondary laptop is an early 2014 MacBook Air that I updated using OCLP, and it has almost exactly the same specs with 8 GB ram.
8GB of RAM was enough for most people. You can watch tests with multitasking and see for yourself. And if 8GB was enough for you in 2012 it would be enough for you even 12 years later if you just do the same stuff.
My 2011 macbook pro had 4gbs of ram and a 320gb hdd. Upgraded to a 500gb ssd as well as 16gbs of ram i had lying around
3:18 "CDs zum rippen" meaning CDs to pirate lmao
Geil endlich was auf deutsch
I remember when the MacBook Air was first released, there was a guy here on RUclips who made a channel called “I1Hate1The1Mac1Book1Air” and his only video was how he hated the MacBook Air while holding it. It’s long gone (both the channel and video) but it’s an early memory I have when I look back at the MacBook Air. It’s much better than what it was back in 2008.
why was he hating it
😂 Sorry I missed that. I would have loved to have seen that.
I worked in the Apple Store for about a year during the time of the original MB Air, and I sold exactly *one* of them. No one else was even interested. The idea of a laptop without an optical drive was considered crazy (and sure enough: he bought the optional external drive). It was a "concept car". When they a) gave it another USB port, and b) cut the price almost in half, it took off.
Loving the longer format!
They all used to be this way so glad he’s doing it again. People complained they were too long so he went shorter.
Finally you are back after 1 month 🎉
Love my 2015 11" MacBook Air. Still going strong.
My 2012 Air was my favourite laptop of all time. It kept chugging along until I finally replaced it with an M1 Air in 2020. Airs literally ruined every other laptop for me (and i tried a lot, but I always come back to air)
the last one with animations
No Füm? Hopefully we will not see any more of their adverts.
Just wanted to say, i have very fond memories from this period of time.
Thank you for making these videos. Not only is it informative, the nostalgia is wonderful. ❤
I can't believe you're still using the same music, I haven't seen your videos in like 3 years, so amazed to see you're still here and haven't changed much apart from the channel picture
I really enjoy all your videos and they are very informative as well.
This is a cool retrospective ….. Love the way you show the evolution of the pricing which is a pattern and makes way more sense but only when you look at same model to model evolution over time. Initially higher then lower.. then new model …repeat. while upping specs at same price each generation.
Just purchased an M3 16GB MBA for $850! It’s such a portable beast.
Should have gotten an M1. not needed to go any higher
@sotoninstill $850 for a M3 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM is a steal
@sotonin Yeah the M1 model is still great except for the wedge-shaped body ☹
Why did Apple delete the iPhone 14/14 Pro/15/15 Pro introducer video?
gr8 video!
My 2013 Air I got in 2020 is still going strong!
Have the macbook air m3 16gb 15 inch and O can say how impressed I am that made a laptop with these specs and light weight at 15 inch with amazing battery life and I am happy with the laptop and also that apple made the starting specs for the m3 macbook air 16gb insteed of 8 gb 😊 .
Great coverage of a great product, thanks.
Thank you so much Greg for another excellent video 😊
This was literally a computer ahead of its time to point where it was maybe too ahead of its time👏👏
I love my MacBook Air M1
Wonderful video. Watched it twice in a row
Picked up the M4 13" Midnight 16/512 MBA on 3/17/25 . Loving this speedy, beautiful machine so much. Planning to keep this for several years. Great vid!
Create a problem and sell its solution 👏👏👏 that's Apple 🤗
Excellent content
watching this on a late 2020 air
BRING BACK THE CHILL MUSIC
I am using MacBook Air 15' M2 Midnight Blue from the past 3 month.Loved its design, performance and battery life.
Yippee it’s A to the E back with another documentaree
These were the best intel machine at one point when used
Really shows how forward thinking this laptop was. Every laptop sold today follows the same form factor.
Imprecionante.
Love my M1 wedge 😂
5:02 Looks like they already do that since 2008
I've been using the MBA 13" M2 model since 2022, it was an amazing upgrade to my old 2013 MBP 13" retina thingy, which was also an amazing upgrade to my 2007 MBP 13" retina thingy. I spent more on my 2004 Toshiba Satellite Windows laptop than the other 3 combined and it bricked itself in 2007. $0.02 from experience.
I have a 13 inch MacBook Air 2017, my first Apple computer ever
13:41 yesss!
Muito prático e funcional
The end of an era…
dawg u said the start 1 video after this 😭🙏
Perfeito
Очень очень интересный видео, спасибо!
Damn, this video was made the day I got my MacBook Air m3 15 inch!
Now we have portability and power !!!
Magnífico
We have truly come a long way
Mean while the ssd being the most important upgrade that is kinda overlooked
Watching this on my M2 Air
Same bro, amazing laptop.
Agreed 😊
@EV_car2013 Same, literally the MacBook that all you need for especially if you only use it for light to medium tasks like content consumption device and light editing.
I have a 13 inch MacBook Air 2013 running High Sierra. 12 years later it still works perfectly (with AVG Anti-virus). I visited the store yesterday to see the new M4 version - wonderful but my old machine is just so good - I have no need to change. These are truly the rolls-royce of laptops.
I replaced my slow and awful battery 2020 intel MacBook Pro with the m3 air and love it.
I use a MacBook Air 15 inch I like it
Laptop technology has really come a long way in a short period of time.
Fun fact: In the 2002 TV show Star Trek: Enterprise, 16 Power Mac G4 Cubes were used to create the computer screens of the Enterprise NX-01. The cubes were used to generate the screen displays in real time. 🙂🖖
Happy seventeen years. Thank you, Steve J.
Nice ❤
I love your videos. But this one you're wrong about dongle life. Years before is when dongle life started. Look at the first Power Mac and it's monitor port. You needed an adapter then. Look at AAUI - you needed an adapter there. It wasn't the introduction of the MacBook Air that started this - it was a long time prior to it.
Some of Apple's products have maintained their original prices even years after release. For instance, when the M2 MacBook Air was introduced, the two-year-old M1 model remained priced at $999, while the M2's price increased. Similarly, the iPhone SE continues to be sold at its initial release price. Apple is often viewed as a company that meticulously manages its pricing strategies. The recent increase in base RAM across all models could be seen as a response to competitors offering laptops with 16GB of RAM as standard. I have a love hate relationship with Apple.
The M1 Air will always have a special place in my heart.
Good
Please make 2-3 videos in a month.
watching this on my mba m4
funny how the first gen macbook air and iphone air are both similar to the base models in the sense that theyre slightly underwhelming compared to base model and also more expensive
Not the cheapest anymore!
If anyone is wondering why Apple Explain isn’t around here much, it’s because they have a Spanish version of this channel and uploading more often on there
In 2008 I played some game, most were from Blizzard and I hardly used cdroms. So that wasn't{t an issue really
Removing ports for lightness and thinness made sense for the MacBook Airs, but not for the pros.
Mac sales probably stagnated and started dropping around 2016 because of the faulty butterfly keyboard and removal of ports from the pros (I got a used 2015 model in 2019/2020 because of this). The lack of repairability of the pros starting the mid 2010s (e.g. soldered SSDs, glued batteries, etc) and the 2018 price hikes certainly didn't help. The pro crowd is different from the air and Apple seemed to forget that (the pros are also more expensive and expected to last longer). Good thing some of those changes were reversed when the M1 came out.
💪💪💪💪
I remember thinking "I'll never buy a macbook air! who cares how thin it is, it doesn't have a CD drive!" little did I know that just a few years later they'd disappear from every new device on the market too.
I look back on this now and I'm more impressed than I was at the time, especially just thinking how big my laptop was in 2008 (It was a Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo) and thinking at that time that laptops had gotten so small from the dinosaurs that I would see in other people's houses, all while the Macbook Air of that time is still thinner than most modern laptops on the market now.
I have the 2022 M2 Air with 8GB of RAM and its perfect, and it's good not just for browsing the web, i do 3D modeling, while editing video, while making presentations, while having 25 open Chrome tabs + other 10 apps + Apple Intelligence and it's very fast with all that at the same time with only 8GB of RAM, no lagging. Amazing laptop.
Agreed. I have that same laptop with those same specs, and I’ve never had a moment’s problem with it.
People think that 8GB wouldn't be enough but it's more than many people actually need. The memory management on MacOS is amazing.
@DJ-yh8hm UNIX stability at it's finest.
I was surprised the M4 Mac Mini still has a wired audio output, and Apple offers wired airpods.
Not me. Apple wouldn't dare hurt their audio engineers, who still buy Apple products because idk why anymore. Maybe intertia.
Good video! I think Apple is missing a huge opportunity by not releasing an 11” M series MacBook Air. My mom has the 12” MacBook and loves it.
The M4 MacBook Air is a value. Not cheap, but a value.
I wanted to see how Apple M SoCs evolved over the years, as well as why Apple took so long to implement hardware ray tracing, as well as why some biggest AAA game titles finally ported to Apple silicon Macs, as Cyberpunk ultimate going in 2025 and still strong beyond 2025, a native Metal 3 Port, as well need to be explained
origin of iPad air: from manila envelope
🎉🎉❤
❤❤❤
I would be honored if anyone would wish this old man a happy birthday. 92 and still going strong.
Happy birthday nice age.
Happy Birthday young blood!
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday!
I love my M2 air. 0 regrets.
wont buy until i can get a reasonable amount of storage unforuntatly
this is 16 years old
Remember intel’s “ultrabook” branding that was the PC response to the MacBook Air? I member
Now the air has long since set the standard for how thin and lightweight a laptop can be and ultrabooks are no longer a separate class of laptop.
It was so confusing in 2016 when both 12 inch MacBook and MacBook Pro were thinner than MacBook air..
I would have wanted more background info on the m-series chips
no need youtube is full of videos on M1 Macs or newer which intel Macs are absent
@BLACKWELL-1 yeah, sure. But I wanted it to be in this video :D
I check in on this channel every once in a while to see if he’s ran out of ideas
m4 mini
I own a MacBook Air!! 2023, M2, 15-inch! Proud Mac User!🍎💻
I think while the current M3 MacBook Air is a very nice laptop, one thing Apple really needs to do with the upcoming M4 MacBook Air is put in a better cooling system for the M4 SoC, possibly a low-profile vapor chamber heatsink like what Samsung did with the Samsung Galaxy S22 to S24 models. That way, if you need to do the occasional more complex processing like image editing or video editing, the laptop doesn't start to heat up and the machine starts to impose thermal throttling to slow down the SoC to prevent overheating. I've noticed that if you put an M2 or M3 MacBook Air on top of a laptop cooling pad that blows cool air on the bottom of the laptop, you barely get a performance drop on the occasional use of more complex tasks.
Ah. Natalie Del Conte. Before she changed to Morris.
I don't know about the iPad offering more performance... I had an OG ipad, they only had 256mb ram... even the lowest tier netbooks had double that, and my Aspire One in 2008 had 1 GB standard /w an Atom 330 dual core. They did do a great job making the ipad responsive in spite of the low memory though. Plus, they killed Flash. That helped too.
2014-2019 were some dark times for the Mac. I think they've went through their own trial and errors post-Steve and managed to find what works, and became pretty great at it. The lineup makes sense (Air for light and affordable, but great performance. Pro for the top of the line, high end devices for professionals). They've found the formula, and Apple is having their best run since the iMac G3 era.
What Apple needs to really focus on now is software. It was the thing that made Apple stand out, and I think they've become too confident in their hardware. Their superpower shouldn't just be one entity, but the overall experience.
I’m actually watching this on a MacBook Air a MacBook Air 2020 edition which I don’t find is good anymore these days any luck with an Intel chip is rubbish running the new Mac OS but you have M chip even the M1 chip is still pretty good
my mba was the best purchase ever, until the ssd died, I used it 12 years and was faster than 2x priced mbp's