Jason Snell on the Purported Minimalist 12-Inch MacBook Air

Jason Snell:

Meanwhile, consider the trajectory of the MacBook Air. When it was released in 2008, it was a crazy design. It threw away a huge number of what we considered to be standard laptop features in order to be insanely thin and light. In my review of the original Air for Macworld, I used the word “compromise” ten times.

No optical drive. An incredibly slow processor, compared to all other Macs. A teeny-tiny 80GB hard drive (or an even tinier 64GB SSD for $999 more!). A single USB port. And, to top it all off, a price that started at $1799.

★ Thursday, 8 January 2015