MacBook Air(2008 Early)

Background

Announced in January 2008, the MacBook Air was the thinnest Apple laptop yet released. It was positioned as a high-end ultra-portable system, and Apple had to make some sacrifices to get it there: At 1.6 GHz (1.8 GHz BTO), it was slower than other contemporary Apple laptops, its 2 GB of RAM was non-upgradable, it had a smaller, slower hard drive, no firewire ports, no ethernet port, a single USB port, no optical audio output, no audio input, and, for the first time since the PowerBook 2400, no internal optical drive. There were sacrifices Apple did not make: the MacBook Air included a full-sized keyboard and screen, and an oversized trackpad, which supported many of the same multi-touch gestures introduced by the iPhone. To mitigate the connectivity and hardware tradeoffs necessary to make the MacBook Air so thin, Apple offered various accessories: an optional external 8x SuperDrive, a USB-to-ethernet adaptor, a USB 56kbps modem, and various micro-DVI adaptors. The MacBook Air shipped in a single retail configuration, with a 1.6 GHz dual-core processor, 2 GB of RAM, and an 80 GB hard drive, for $1799 U.S. BTO options included a 1.8 GHz processor ($200 U.S.), and a 64 GB solid-state drive ($999 U.S., later dropped to $599 U.S.)