Tech

How Apple remade the MacBook Air: ‘It has always been provocative’

Fourteen years after its iconic unveiling by Steve Jobs the MacBook Air has an all-new look. GQ speaks to the team behind a dramatic and delightful redesign.
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There are some product designs that it’s a cardinal sin to mess with. Omega will never redo the Speedmaster because it’s the watch that first went to the moon. The colour of Heinz’s Baked Beans cans is so iconic that the company actually trademarked it, and the Wimbledon men’s winners trophy has a tiny pineapple on top of it because that’s how it was made in 1887. Of course, Apple doesn’t tend to go in for this kind of pearl-clutching. Most of its products came to exist because they killed off their predecessor in utterly unflinching fashion, kind of like Stranger Things’ supervillain Vecna if he’d gotten less into eye-gouging and more into creating the iPhone out of an MP3 player.

Since its introduction by Steve Jobs in 2008, the MacBook Air has proved an emphatic exception to this ethos. It’s thin, it’s grey, it’s lightweight, it's shaped like a wedge and – to borrow a phrase from Britain’s most famous rule-abiding citizen – them’s the breaks. Such was the industry-shaking impact this ultra-portable computer made when it was first pulled out of a brown paper envelope onstage. “It has always been a product where it's a bit provocative,” says Evans Hankey, Apple’s vice president of industrial design. “The first MacBook Air started in the studio when we put display housings together from what I guess would have been the PowerBook at the time.”

Evans is fronting up to us today, alongside a couple other of her colleagues, because a decade and a half after its iconic introduction the Air has gotten a near-total makeover. If you’ve been following the company’s pace of computing reinvention of late, this development shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Since ditching Intel’s chips for the dramatically improved power and efficiency of its own M series equivalents in late 2020, every major Apple-made laptop and desktop has been redesigned from the ground up. The most surprising part of all? From those poppy new iMacs to an oh-so-suave slate of MacBook Pros and this year’s beast of a Mac Studio, the results have been widely acclaimed as near-on flawless. “The new MacBook Pros are incredible,” said famously meticulous tech bible The Verge, while Wired called the iMac “pure, colourful bliss”.

Steve Jobs introduces the MacBook Air at Macworld 2008.

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Even though the Air was designed in tandem with last year’s new MacBook Pros, there’s a reason why this sacred cow was slain last – it’s Apple’s best-selling laptop. Given the company sold an estimated 28.96 million Macs in 2021, up 28 per cent year-on-year, that is no mean feat at all. As such, this is a re-do that had to be done right at the first time of asking, and that meant really dialling back into the Air’s core ethos. “I think the Air requires a lot of courage, because it's like, ‘What are you going to keep?’” says Hankey.

In the beginning, the sheer size of the Air was the divining force behind it. Onstage at the quaintly-named MacWorld 2008 event, Jobs would proclaim it to be “the world’s thinnest notebook” with a five-point checklist detailing how Apple had met his own exacting standards for success. “Going in shaping the product around that 1.8 millimetres hard drive was a big step for us,” says Kate Bergeron, vice president of hardware engineering at Apple. “Then there was the crazy IO hatch, tiny little fans, an integrated battery and just so much invention.”

As much as the Air might be a runaway success today, that principled focus on its size meant that it came with plenty of compromises too. Most owners would get under four hours of usage out of it before running out of power – ”The MacBook Air's battery life sucks” declared a particularly sniffy Ars Technica review – while the custom Intel chip used to power it was 60 per cent smaller than those found in previous MacBooks and would be outperformed by most iPads nowadays. “If you go back, that product was world-changing in the sense of shape, but it wasn’t going to be the computer for everybody,” says Bergeron. “It was the computer for people who were like, ‘I absolutely need portability.’”

Apple would spend a further decade striving towards this platonic ideal without fully encapsulating it. In 2015, it created a new 12-inch ‘MacBook’ that was completely fanless, just 13mm thin and lighter than even the 11-inch Air at the time. The one major problem? “I think it was polarising for a certain group of folks,” says Bergeron. “It was ahead of its time, on the cutting edge of the USB-C transition and it didn't have MagSafe. There were definitely some things that we weren’t able to fit into the product, because of its size.”

The new MacBook Air range is just 1.13cm thin with a weight of 1.24kg.

While the MacBook was discontinued just four years after its introduction, 2022’s Air does a lot to vindicate its legacy. It has a completely fanless design, is both lighter and thinner than its 2020 predecessor, and naturally comes with MagSafe charging in addition to USB-C. By far and away the most significant change is the introduction of Apple’s latest M2 chip to power the whole setup with enough oomph to handle multiple streams of 4K (or 8K) video editing and a claimed 18 hours battery life. If M1 was the chip that sent Apple’s computing rivals scrambling to catch up, M2 further cements those gains with an emphasis on unparalleled stamina. “It just takes those key areas even further all with this ruthless design where above all else, we’re seeking to deliver more performance in the most power-efficient way,” says Laura Metz, from Mac product marketing at Apple.

If this all sounds a bit esoteric, it actually goes a long way to explaining why the Air finally got a glow-up. “We don't really have to play any kind of games with shape or form to make it look thin,” says Hankey. “And I think that's one of the most lovely and remarkable things: it's quite honest and simple.”

That simplicity of outcome relied on a whole lot of collaboration to achieve what Bergeron calls a “tour de force of integration”. Take the bottom off the laptop’s case and you’ll see just how tightly its components are packed together, with that ample battery carefully layered alongside a full-sized Magic Keyboard and trackpad. To make sure this particularly expensive jigsaw all fits together as intended Apple’s mechanical and engineering team created a spreadsheet for every single part’s intended sizings. Such is the product’s sheer density its centre of mass was routinely measured so that it didn’t stray too far to the left or right, while a succession of “extreme” reliability tests saw the product stretched and dropped on a brutal succession of materials such as particleboard and granite to ensure everything remained in place, even under duress. “We measure the parts, we trace back to our model and make sure that all the way down to the tiny little screw, that everything has been accounted for down to the minute details,” says Bergeron.

All of this was done in the middle of a supply chain crisis for tech, that’s affected everything from the production of new Tesla cars to Sony’s PlayStation 5. Apple’s chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, recently stated supply constraints related to Covid-19 could hurt its overall sales by between $4 billion and $8 billion as it strives to meet customer demand. “Everyone is working as hard as they can with our supply chain as we know these products are more important to people than they ever have been,” says Metz.

MagSafe charging returns to the MacBook Air after a four-year hiatus, alongside a full-sized keyboard.

For all of the redesigned Air’s focus on performance and stamina, perhaps the most important marker of its success is the sense of personality it has retained in its transformation. That raised backside and tapered playfulness might be gone, but it’s replaced with a couple of extrovert flourishes of its own – including a beguiling new ‘Midnight’ blue colour variant that’s particularly beloved by its makers. “So that one came from the volcanic rock Basalt,” says Hankey. “Do you know this rock? My dad was a geologist.”

Having taken charge of Apple’s product design following Jony Ive’s departure from the company in 2019, Hankey has been responsible for the look and feel of all of its devices since – from the iPhone to the AirPods. It’s a workload that she compares to “drinking from the fire hose” but even accounting for that vast portfolio of responsibilities, the Air’s redesign has been a unique challenge. “It was the first time we ever set out to do a family of products together,” she says. “We didn't design the Air in isolation, but we designed it in tandem with the MacBook Pro.”

If you look at the two laptops side by side their similarities are immediately apparent. Just like the Pro, this new Air has a flatter, more industrial vibe. Its 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display shares the same notch-shaped cutout in its centre for a Full HD webcam, while there’s a surprisingly generous array of ports for users to take advantage of. What makes this laptop an Air though? It’s all in the feel of the thing. Even after all these years, there’s something faintly anarchic about a laptop that weighs just 1.24kg. A computer that you can squeeze into the most tightly-packed rucksack and still run your life from, now for well beyond a working day. Using one feels a bit like a cheat code for your nine-to-five, which is probably why prices for the thing start at £1,249.

Considering the creators of this latest Air, it was never likely to lose its rebellious streak. Although little was publicly known about Hankey before she stepped into her mentor’s shoes, there were a few clues as to what might follow. Most notably, her weathered iPhone appeared in 2016’s Designed by Apple in California photo book with Ive commenting on it to Dazed, “Isn’t it cool? She destroys her objects.” As for Bergeron? She’s been ripping apart computers since college, starting with her 1989-made Mac SE/30. “This is so funny,” she says. “The hard drive was like a 20 megabytes stick, so my first upgrade was to actually take my Mac apart and install a 100-megabyte internal hard drive. It was massive.”

Don’t be fooled by its all-new look, old habits still die hard with this Air.

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