Macworld San Francisco 2008-The MacBook Air Intro (Pt. 1)

there's something in the air what is it well as you know Apple makes the best notebooks on the planet the MacBook and the MacBook Pro these are the standards in the industry by which competitive products are judged well today we're introducing a third kind of notebook it's called the MacBook Air now what is the MacBook Air in a sentence it's the world's thinnest notebook so what does that mean well we went out looked at all the thin notebooks out there most people think of these the Sony TZ series they're good notebooks and they're thin right this is what they look like side view there we looked at all of them out there and kind of tried to distill the best of the breed of all of them and you know they generally weigh about three pounds they're in this case in the Sony's case they're about 0.8 inches to 1.2 inches thin they're wedge shape that's quite representative they compromise though to get the weight down on things like the display they have an 11 or 12 inch display most of them at 11 they also compromise on the keyboard instead of putting full-size keyboards in they make miniature keyboards and they don't run them as fast as they could because their thermal envelopes don't support faster processors so we looked at this and we said what what do we like and and what do we think is a compromise here we think the weights a good target three pounds but we think there's too much compromising to get there too much compromising on is too much compromising on less than a full size display less than a full size keyboard and we think you could put even more performance in one of these products so let's take a look at the thinness first this is that Sony product again one of the best in the field 1.2 inches down to zero point 8 inches this is the MacBook Air point 7 6 inches down to an unprecedented 0.16 inches now I want to point something out here the thickest part of the MacBook Air is still thinner than the thinnest part of the TZ series okay we're talking thin here so it's so thin it even fits inside one of these envelopes that we've all seen floating around the office and so let me go ahead and show it to you now this is it when you take it out here this is the new MacBook Air and you can get a feel for how thin it is yeah there it is all right amazing product here full-size keyboard full-size display and this is what it looks like in that amazing so let's go explore this in more detail so again it fits inside one of these envelopes it's that small this is what it looks like incredible it's the world's thinnest notebook you open it up it's got a magnetic latch so there's no hooks or things to catch on your clothing and it's got a full-sized 13.3 inch wide screen display and the display is gorgeous it's an LED backlit display and not only does that save power and not only does that give a really bright display but it's instant on the minute you open it on top of the display is a built-in iSight camera for video conferencing right out of the box and you flip it down there is a full-size keyboard this is perhaps the best notebook keyboard we've ever shipped it's a phenomenal keyboard and it's full sized and with the ambient light sensor it's also bad we've got a very generous trackpad which is great we've also built-in multi-touch gesture support now as you know our current notebooks have some gestures built in we've taken that even further when you go to preferences in the MacBook Air you'll actually get to turn on all sorts of other types of gestures and there's actually videos in there to show you what they are so let me run through them with you now you can double tap and instead of moving the cursor around you can move a whole window around right just a nice time saver so that's great here's another one when you're in a photo a large photo you want to pan around you can pan around with just two fingers like this another nice time-saver you want to rotate a photo this works in iPhoto and all the other photo apps just rotate like this again we've taken some of these things we learned in the iPhone and now we're putting them in our notebook computers here's another one if you want to go between photographs next photo just take three fingers and pan right previous photo pan left and you want to zoom you can pinch in and out alright and that great multi-touch gestures pretty amazing and again you can see how beautiful and thin this product is now how did we fit a Mac in here how did we do it I'm still stunned that our engineering team could pull this off well let's look at the bottom take off the bottom and there's three things in here it's a battery hard disk in the electronics on the hard disk we went to one point eight inch hard drives we shipped tens of millions of these and iPods we know them well and they're great and so the MacBook Air ships with an 80 gigabyte hard disk as standard and there's an option of a 64 gigabyte solid state disk if you'd like it these are a little pricey but they are fast but the real magic is in the electronics this is a complete Mac on a board let's take off the cooling system that's a complete Mac on this board and you think well ok what's so special about that well this is how big the board is it's really tiny and to fit an entire Mac on this thing was an amazing feat of Engineering and we didn't compromise on performance MacBook Air uses the Intel Core 2 Duo this is a really speedy processor it's what we use in all of our other notebooks and our IMAX 1.6 gigahertz standard and there's an option to go to 1.8 gigahertz if you want now we've got a great relationship with Intel and both companies are engineering driven and they both love to challenge each other and Intel's got enormous amounts of Technology and so when we were building this product we asked them to consider something this is their amazing Core 2 Duo chip right it's a screamer we said we want that chip in this product but we need to Oh two smaller packaging the same dye on a smaller package it sounds easy it's not they they spend a lot of invested a lot of engineering to create this for us this is the same chip in a package that is 60% smaller and it's one of the reasons we could build MacBook Air and so I'd like to say thank you to Intel and it's my pleasure to invite the CEO of Intel Paul Otellini on stage I'd like to get around the fair

Channel: JoshuaG

Views: 3,594,567

Rating: 4.9012094 out of 5

Keywords: Apple, Macworld, Keynote, Mac, Macintosh, Steve, Jobs, Bill, Gates, Windows, OSX, Computer, ipod, imac, ibook, power, macbook, pro, vista

Id: OIV6peKMj9M

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2008

Reddit Comments

[u/lijohn]

This was one of the many Apple products that really took off with the 2nd generation. The first one was beautiful and showed what Apple was capable of, but the product didn’t fully mature until the cheaper second version.

[u/FizzyBeverage]

I worked for Apple at the time. With the 25% employee discount, the 64gb SSD model was actually competitive and under $2k. I had never seen OSX boot so fast— in 2008, flash disks were still quite a rarity outside of enthusiast use and only really found as aftermarket 2.5” boot drives in Mac Pro towers.

Agreed though, this model struck gold in the 2nd generation, particularly the Mid 2011/2012 iterations.

[u/jjdawgs84]

Damn. Steve's keynotes were always legit!

[u/[deleted]]

iSight . I haven’t heard that term in a LONG time

[u/TexasAgg1e5]

I watched a little more for nostalgia. Wow. We’ve come so far. I particularly liked “Comes with an 80GB HDD, there is a 64GB SSD as an option. These are pricey but they’re fast.” Also, everyone went crazy for the backlit keyboard

[u/Banelingz]

Actually, this might be the best Apple reveal of all time.

[u/[deleted]]

I remember reading many complaints at the time about the lack of disc drive and price, which didn’t affect it in the long run at all (and influenced the market). No one had the presenting ability to wow like Steve.

[u/ShadowDancer11]

Steve was hyped about that full sized keyboard. He mentions it about 6x. 😅

[u/izlib]

It was too expensive at launch. The HDD model was so slow, the SSD was even more too expensive and either option the disk was too small.

The intel processor suffered for under clocking itself when it inevitably got too hot when using it in the sunlight. It was the ultimate 1st Generation Apple product.

But man oh man I never lusted for a product more than this, and I attribute that partially, or mostly, to Steve Jobs' ability to just thrill me at a keynote presentation.

Later generations of the air were so much phenomenally better, but nothing beat the presentation of the original air. It ranks up there with the iPod, the unibody MacBook Pro, the iPhone, etc.

When I was at my Genius Bar training this had just been released. We had one in our classroom to take apart. Our trainer was just awestruck. The bottom case screws went in diagonally in order to save space. We didn't know what to do with this thing. It defied all traditional hardware troubleshooting logic.

Little did we recognize at the time that it was a harbinger of all Apple laptops to come in the future. That little flip down door with the micro DVI port demonstrated the challenges of every semi-proprietary port we'd experience in the future (mini-display, thunderbolt 1/2/3).

In any case, this video reminded me how much I miss Steve.