James' World 2

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“Oooooooooooooooh,” the audience gasped at the image of a manila envelope splayed across the screen before them. It was 2008, and Steve Jobs, the digital messiah himself, was holding court at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, dressed in his signature presentation attire of turtleneck, jeans, and New Balance sneakers. At the time, laptops looked mostly like squished cinder blocks, with thick and bulky frames and about as much sex appeal as Donald Trump on a golf outing. Jobs had a tradition of saving big announcements until the end of a presentation—“one more thing” for the faithful followers—and this year was no exception. “It’s so thin, it even fits inside one of these envelopes that we’ve seen floating around the office,” Jobs said as he pulled the first MacBook Air out of a manila envelope, like a doctor delivering a baby. This, of course, ushered in more “oohs,” “aahs,” claps, and cheers from the audience as they beheld a silver laptop—the thinnest computer ever made.

A lot has changed at Apple since that day in 2008. Jobs passed away, and the company became the most valuable company on the planet, with an incomprehensible market valuation of over $2.5 trillion. Yet, some things haven’t changed, including, up until a few weeks ago, the overall design of the MacBook Air that Jobs showed off 14 years ago. For more than a decade, the design of the Air largely remained unchanged, with a few minor tweaks here and there. Until last month, that is, when Apple unveiled a completely new design of the MacBook Air, which runs on the company’s new M2 chip.

The laptop, which is the shape and thickness of a pad of paper, comes in four “colors”: starlight, space gray, silver, and midnight. (The midnight looks black to me, but Apple representatives insist it is a blueish-blackish-midnight color.) The reception among critics has been predictably gushing. “Gorgeous,” CNN declared. The Verge called it “beautiful.” And CNBC said it was “near-perfect.” I’ve used the new Air, and those adjectives are on the money. But I did find myself wondering: What took so long to change the design?

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from Bloomberg/Getty Images. 

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