The MacBook Air: A Revolutionary yet Flawed Device

The introduction of the MacBook Air in 2008 was a game-changer for Apple, introducing features that would become standard in MacBooks going forward. It was revolutionary not only for an ultra-portable device but also marked a new direction for MacBooks. The multi-touch gestures introduced were particularly noteworthy, setting a new standard for interaction with notebooks. The black chiclet keyboard, often cited as one of the best notebook keyboards ever shipped, was another major innovation.

The concept of a unibody design that would become the standard for not just Macs but most notebooks also made its debut in the MacBook Air. Despite these revolutionary features and designs, the device made numerous compromises to fit into its tiny frame, raising questions about whether it was worth it. For Steve Jobs fans who believe that nothing ever went wrong during his tenure at Apple, this section may come as a surprise.

One of the notable problems with the original generation MacBook Air was that it was too small to fit certain components that most laptops relied on, namely ports and hard drives. The port problem was eventually addressed through the introduction of the "funky little hatch" that provided an alternative means of connecting peripherals. However, the hard drive problem was solved rather poorly, using 1.8-inch hard drives that were used in the iPod at the time. These drives were small enough to fit within the frame but were extremely slow, spinning at just 4200 rpm. The lack of upgradeability and the soldered RAM (2GB of DDR3) severely limited the machine's capabilities.

The cooling system on the MacBook Air was another major issue. It used a tiny heat sink that could hardly be called one, with a thick foil serving as the primary cooling mechanism. The fan, which was positioned near the processor, struggled to keep up with the device's demands, leading to overheating and thermal throttling. This meant that as soon as the machine needed a dual-core processor, it would shut down and become a single-core processor, rendering its use of two cores pointless.

The construction of the MacBook Air proved to be another challenge. When taken apart, the display was found to be very loose, requiring significant disassembly to tighten the hinge screws. The process of disassembling the machine was deemed so difficult that Apple later introduced a replacement program to fix the issue, which could have been prevented with a more conventional hinge mechanism.

In conclusion, while the MacBook Air may have been revolutionary in its time, it was also plagued by numerous flaws and compromises. Its small size came at the cost of portability and upgradeability, while its cooling system struggled to keep up with the demands placed upon it. The construction issues that arose during disassembly only added to the frustration experienced by users.

Ultimately, buyers who purchased the original MacBook Air may find themselves regretting their decision. While it laid the groundwork for future innovations in MacBooks, it was not a machine suited for 2019 standards. As such, this device is best avoided by anyone looking for an affordable and reliable notebook experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat I have here is a mid 2009 MacBook Air and as it turns out it is the cheapest MacBook Air on ebay that I bought by accident before we get started I'd like to thank inti go Mac antivirus for sponsoring today's video ante goes Mac premium bundle includes everything that you need to keep your device safe clean and free from internet threats it includes world class Mac antivirus two-way firewall bootable backups disk cleanup and for the parents out there parental controls to keep your family safe online to learn more and also receive 40% off the entire bundle head down to the link in the description and protect your Mac from hackers and malware today what I decided to make this video I wanted to make a retrospective on the first generation MacBook Air why it was simultaneously a huge innovation and a total design failure so I picked up this 2009 model for 130 dollars with free shipping and because I bought it sort of on a whim just with an inkling of the video I wanted to make I decided to double check the pricing to make sure I didn't overpay or anything and as it turned out there was not a single fully functioning MacBook Air that was less expensive than this one it's kind of crazy to think about that this was a hundred and thirty dollars yikes this is the second revision of the first generation MacBook Air and it comes with a Core 2 Duo SL 9400 at 1.8 3 gigahertz 2 gigabytes of ddr3 RAM and an NVIDIA 9400 M graphics processor with a quarter gig of VRAM my unit has the upgraded 128 gigabytes solid-state drive considering how little I paid the unit I bought is honestly not in bad shape it has a few scratches and dents but it's really not too bad soon after I unbox the laptop itself I used the dusted won Mac OS moment all Mac OS Mojave which runs pretty poorly I must admit the performance is passable but it just feels old although I won't lie it is impressive that you can even run the latest operating system on this 10 year old machine also impressive given the age of this device is the design it definitely looks dated make no mistake but you can see how this design was revolutionary when it first came out this is the new MacBook Air if we compare it to the MacBook Pro that was current when this design was introduced in 2008 you can see the drastic difference even compared to unibody MacBook Pros that came out later in 2008 this device is felt and sleek the whole thing is tapered including the sides this is an interesting design choice as everything had to be fit into that ultra-thin tapered design this MacBook actually necessitated a new MagSafe charger because the port is weirdly placed at an angle on the bottom the ports are also tucked into this funky little hatch on the side you can tell Jony ive had his way with this design before anyone told him it needed to have ports and be able to charge speaking of the iconic design remember those manila envelope ads that were everywhere when this MacBook Air came out and then remember the parity ads that came out shortly after that this was the appeal of the MacBook Air it was incredible in 2008 to see a machine that was so light and so portable but was classy and well designed the whole point of the MacBook Air was to have a thin light device that didn't have any compromises if you remember 2008 was the height of the netbook craze it was clear that people wanted portable laptops the whole first like 20 minutes of the MacBook Air announcement was comparing to a standard netbook that had a cramped keyboard tiny trackpad low resolution 11 or 12 inch display and realistically wasn't all that thin they compromised though on things like the display they have an 11 or 12 inch display most of them at 11 they also compromise on the keyboard the MacBook Air purported to solve all of these problems by including a full size 13-inch display full-size trackpad and a full sized keyboard as well as five-hour battery life it also promised better performance by cramming a Core 2 Duo into it whereas most netbooks at the time we're using Intel Adams I'll tell you when this thing came out in 2008 I was so jealous at the time in my family we had an MSI wind netbook and that thing could barely even run Windows XP with its Intel atom n270 the MacBook Air also introduced features that were revolutionary not only for an ultra portable device but were standard for MacBooks going forward it introduced multi-touch gestures the black chiclet keyboard that was a pillar of mac notebooks until 2016 perhaps the best notebook keyboard we've ever shipped it's a phenomenal keyboard and the concept of a unibody design that is still the standard for not just Mac's but most notebooks however despite its revolutionary design and features the MacBook Air made so many compromises to fit into its tiny frame that we really have to question whether it was worth it so coming up now is the part where I list the extremely long laundry list of major major flaws with the original generation MacBook Air and if you're a Steve Jobs fan boy who thinks that nothing ever went wrong during his tenure at Apple you might want to cover your ears because this one's a doozy but also Before we jump into that let's not forget about all of these scandals it wasn't all sunshine and roses okay here we go the first problem is that this machine was too small to fit certain components that most laptops relied on namely ports and hard drives the port problem was dealt with thanks to the funky little hatch but the hard drive problem was solved really rather poorly the MacBook Air used the 1.8 inch hard drives that were used in the iPod at the time they were small enough to fit in the frame but they were damn slow spinning at just 4200 rpm that is absolutely painful my machine has the very expensive at the time SSD upgrade but even that is no screamer it's a screamer and because of the irregular sizes you can't use any third-party drives furthermore this MacBook Airs started the wonderful trend of soldered ram it came with 2 gigabytes of ddr3 that couldn't be upgraded before or after buying and it severely limits the machine then we get to the cooling this thing uses an absolutely miniscule heat sink if you could even call it a heat sink it's a little more than a thick foil and the tiny noisy fan doesn't directly cool the processor it pretty much just cools near the processor so it gets way too hot way too fast and it can't cool itself down so it's thermal throttles immediately this 2009 revision was a little bit better but the original mid-2008 model was so bad that it disabled one of its cores when under load completely defeating the point of having a dual-core processor in the first place I mean think of it this way as soon as you needed a dual-core processor it shut down and became a single core processor so why even bother then we get to the construction of this machine and why it's so hard to work on when I got my machine the display was very very loose so I decided to pull off the display and tighten the hinge screws as you would on pretty much any MacBook it turns out to get to the display you have to completely disassemble the entire computer once I was in I encountered another problem in most Mac books you just slide off the plastic clutch cover and then tighten the screws but this has two huge obstacles one the clutch cover is blocked on both ends by the metal hinges and to the hinges themselves aren't actually mounted with screws in fact they wear out and cause the display to become loose in the first place you have to pull off the clutch cover almost definitely shattering it and then pry off the hinges and force new ones on this is what it looks like get it to fit over this metal that's sticking out I filed down this edge here like this just putting this part with a screwdriver I wiggle it like that this loose display issue was actually a known defect at the time and Apple started a replacement program to replace the displays what could have easily been prevented by using a normal hinge mechanism ended up causing extremely expensive and unnecessary repairs wait a minute that sounds familiar so should you buy the cheapest MacBook Air on eBay sweet baby J no please for the love of RAM no stay as far away from this absolute dog as you possibly can as revolutionary as this thing was it is not a machine for 2019 this device needed to exist it practically created the modern Ultrabook and so many of the features that I mentioned earlier became standard fare across the board furthermore the subsequent 2010 redesigned was not only a long-lived MacBook but an extremely reliable and outrageously popular machine this original model however was essentially a public beta albeit one that cost two thousand dollars so thank you guys so much for watching this video let me know down in the comments below what you think about this original MacBook Air was it an innovation or was it a complete disaster let me know down in the comments below and as usual make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe don't forget to follow me on twitter at luke me on e and i'll see you all in the next videowhat I have here is a mid 2009 MacBook Air and as it turns out it is the cheapest MacBook Air on ebay that I bought by accident before we get started I'd like to thank inti go Mac antivirus for sponsoring today's video ante goes Mac premium bundle includes everything that you need to keep your device safe clean and free from internet threats it includes world class Mac antivirus two-way firewall bootable backups disk cleanup and for the parents out there parental controls to keep your family safe online to learn more and also receive 40% off the entire bundle head down to the link in the description and protect your Mac from hackers and malware today what I decided to make this video I wanted to make a retrospective on the first generation MacBook Air why it was simultaneously a huge innovation and a total design failure so I picked up this 2009 model for 130 dollars with free shipping and because I bought it sort of on a whim just with an inkling of the video I wanted to make I decided to double check the pricing to make sure I didn't overpay or anything and as it turned out there was not a single fully functioning MacBook Air that was less expensive than this one it's kind of crazy to think about that this was a hundred and thirty dollars yikes this is the second revision of the first generation MacBook Air and it comes with a Core 2 Duo SL 9400 at 1.8 3 gigahertz 2 gigabytes of ddr3 RAM and an NVIDIA 9400 M graphics processor with a quarter gig of VRAM my unit has the upgraded 128 gigabytes solid-state drive considering how little I paid the unit I bought is honestly not in bad shape it has a few scratches and dents but it's really not too bad soon after I unbox the laptop itself I used the dusted won Mac OS moment all Mac OS Mojave which runs pretty poorly I must admit the performance is passable but it just feels old although I won't lie it is impressive that you can even run the latest operating system on this 10 year old machine also impressive given the age of this device is the design it definitely looks dated make no mistake but you can see how this design was revolutionary when it first came out this is the new MacBook Air if we compare it to the MacBook Pro that was current when this design was introduced in 2008 you can see the drastic difference even compared to unibody MacBook Pros that came out later in 2008 this device is felt and sleek the whole thing is tapered including the sides this is an interesting design choice as everything had to be fit into that ultra-thin tapered design this MacBook actually necessitated a new MagSafe charger because the port is weirdly placed at an angle on the bottom the ports are also tucked into this funky little hatch on the side you can tell Jony ive had his way with this design before anyone told him it needed to have ports and be able to charge speaking of the iconic design remember those manila envelope ads that were everywhere when this MacBook Air came out and then remember the parity ads that came out shortly after that this was the appeal of the MacBook Air it was incredible in 2008 to see a machine that was so light and so portable but was classy and well designed the whole point of the MacBook Air was to have a thin light device that didn't have any compromises if you remember 2008 was the height of the netbook craze it was clear that people wanted portable laptops the whole first like 20 minutes of the MacBook Air announcement was comparing to a standard netbook that had a cramped keyboard tiny trackpad low resolution 11 or 12 inch display and realistically wasn't all that thin they compromised though on things like the display they have an 11 or 12 inch display most of them at 11 they also compromise on the keyboard the MacBook Air purported to solve all of these problems by including a full size 13-inch display full-size trackpad and a full sized keyboard as well as five-hour battery life it also promised better performance by cramming a Core 2 Duo into it whereas most netbooks at the time we're using Intel Adams I'll tell you when this thing came out in 2008 I was so jealous at the time in my family we had an MSI wind netbook and that thing could barely even run Windows XP with its Intel atom n270 the MacBook Air also introduced features that were revolutionary not only for an ultra portable device but were standard for MacBooks going forward it introduced multi-touch gestures the black chiclet keyboard that was a pillar of mac notebooks until 2016 perhaps the best notebook keyboard we've ever shipped it's a phenomenal keyboard and the concept of a unibody design that is still the standard for not just Mac's but most notebooks however despite its revolutionary design and features the MacBook Air made so many compromises to fit into its tiny frame that we really have to question whether it was worth it so coming up now is the part where I list the extremely long laundry list of major major flaws with the original generation MacBook Air and if you're a Steve Jobs fan boy who thinks that nothing ever went wrong during his tenure at Apple you might want to cover your ears because this one's a doozy but also Before we jump into that let's not forget about all of these scandals it wasn't all sunshine and roses okay here we go the first problem is that this machine was too small to fit certain components that most laptops relied on namely ports and hard drives the port problem was dealt with thanks to the funky little hatch but the hard drive problem was solved really rather poorly the MacBook Air used the 1.8 inch hard drives that were used in the iPod at the time they were small enough to fit in the frame but they were damn slow spinning at just 4200 rpm that is absolutely painful my machine has the very expensive at the time SSD upgrade but even that is no screamer it's a screamer and because of the irregular sizes you can't use any third-party drives furthermore this MacBook Airs started the wonderful trend of soldered ram it came with 2 gigabytes of ddr3 that couldn't be upgraded before or after buying and it severely limits the machine then we get to the cooling this thing uses an absolutely miniscule heat sink if you could even call it a heat sink it's a little more than a thick foil and the tiny noisy fan doesn't directly cool the processor it pretty much just cools near the processor so it gets way too hot way too fast and it can't cool itself down so it's thermal throttles immediately this 2009 revision was a little bit better but the original mid-2008 model was so bad that it disabled one of its cores when under load completely defeating the point of having a dual-core processor in the first place I mean think of it this way as soon as you needed a dual-core processor it shut down and became a single core processor so why even bother then we get to the construction of this machine and why it's so hard to work on when I got my machine the display was very very loose so I decided to pull off the display and tighten the hinge screws as you would on pretty much any MacBook it turns out to get to the display you have to completely disassemble the entire computer once I was in I encountered another problem in most Mac books you just slide off the plastic clutch cover and then tighten the screws but this has two huge obstacles one the clutch cover is blocked on both ends by the metal hinges and to the hinges themselves aren't actually mounted with screws in fact they wear out and cause the display to become loose in the first place you have to pull off the clutch cover almost definitely shattering it and then pry off the hinges and force new ones on this is what it looks like get it to fit over this metal that's sticking out I filed down this edge here like this just putting this part with a screwdriver I wiggle it like that this loose display issue was actually a known defect at the time and Apple started a replacement program to replace the displays what could have easily been prevented by using a normal hinge mechanism ended up causing extremely expensive and unnecessary repairs wait a minute that sounds familiar so should you buy the cheapest MacBook Air on eBay sweet baby J no please for the love of RAM no stay as far away from this absolute dog as you possibly can as revolutionary as this thing was it is not a machine for 2019 this device needed to exist it practically created the modern Ultrabook and so many of the features that I mentioned earlier became standard fare across the board furthermore the subsequent 2010 redesigned was not only a long-lived MacBook but an extremely reliable and outrageously popular machine this original model however was essentially a public beta albeit one that cost two thousand dollars so thank you guys so much for watching this video let me know down in the comments below what you think about this original MacBook Air was it an innovation or was it a complete disaster let me know down in the comments below and as usual make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe don't forget to follow me on twitter at luke me on e and i'll see you all in the next video\n"