GoKawiilis the senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal and author of the upcoming book I AM NOT A ROBOT: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything.
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It was January 2008, and Steve Jobs had just pulled the MacBook Air out of a manila envelope onstage at Macworld.
Within minutes, Windows PC executives everywhere lost their minds. They grabbed the nearest office envelope, tried to shove in their plastic laptops, and tore straight through the paper. Engineers were summoned. Assistants were dispatched for larger envelopes.
Okay, I have no proof that happened. But we all know what did happen next: imitation. Years of it.
Apple’s history books all hail the iPod. The iPhone. The iPad. And then, somewhere between a sidebar and a footnote, the MacBook Air. But without the Air, the modern laptop doesn’t exist.
And don’t I know it. While Jobs was sliding the first Air out in 2008, I was a reporter at Laptop magazine, covering the latest Windows laptops at CES in Las Vegas, where the best offering was Lenovo’s IdeaPad U110, an 11-inch, thin-and-light plastic machine with a red cover and Windows Vista. Meanwhile, the Air — as Jobs proudly proclaimed — had an aluminum design, full-size keyboard, and display.
To be clear, I was no soothsayer. At the time, I was a proud Windows user, and laughed at the Air. The three-pound laptop didn’t have a DVD drive and had only one USB port. People complain now about the MacBook Neo’s 8GB RAM, but try 2GB. And it cost $1,799! It was a beautiful, overpriced joke. Except it wasn’t. As Tim Cook said years later in an interview with MKBHD: “The first one, it wasn’t about how many people buy it, it was about establishing the foundation.”
That foundation, as I’ve covered it over 18 years, was shaped by three big acts, each of which led to Apple reinventing the entire computer industry.
Act 1: An Overpriced Showpiece (2008–2010)
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