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MacBook Air Turns Four Years Old Today

The MacBook Air turns 4-years-old today. It’s old enough to eat solid food and is hopefully already potty trained. All joking aside, four years ago today, Steve Jobs unleased the MacBook Air onto th...
MacBook Air Turns Four Years Old Today
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  • The MacBook Air turns 4-years-old today. It’s old enough to eat solid food and is hopefully already potty trained.

    All joking aside, four years ago today, Steve Jobs unleased the MacBook Air onto the world at Macworld.

    The first MacBook Air was very innovative for its time. The innards fitting into the size of the Air was impressive and still is today, even with Ultrabooks gunning for its market. It featured an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive, a compact motherboard with a 1.6 GHz Intel Cord 2 Duo processor and GMA X3100 graphics processor. It also featured a 13.3 -inch LED-backlit glossy display, 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM, full backlit keyboard, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, USB port and Micro-DVI port. I’m not an Apple fan, but even I’m impressed that they fit all that tech inside of a laptop that was only 19mm thick.

    The first model was somewhat controversial though as it lacked an onboard DVD drive. Jobs explained it away by saying that the world was moving to wireless and things like DVD drives were a thing of the past. The company did offer an external DVD-drive for those who wanted it though.

    The hardware wasn’t without its problems though as the early versions were plagued with overheating issues and wireless connectivity problems. The price was a little steep for a lot of consumers too as it launched at $1,799.

    Apple has come a long way since then when they introduced the current model of the MacBook Air in 2011. It featured either a Core i5 or i7 processor, solid-state drive storage and an Intel HD 3000 processor. The pricing had gone down significantly too with the 11.6-inch model being priced at $999 and the 13.3-inch starting at $1,299.

    For those who want to relive the magic of four years ago, you can watch the unveiling of the first MacBook Air by Steve Jobs below.

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