In those days, Apple designers figured out a number of clever tricks to make things look even thinner than they were, but in the spirit of updated design, a number of these tricks have been abandoned, resulting in products that in some cases look thicker but are actually thinner than their predecessors. The wedge design was brilliant, and still to my eyes looks entirely modern. I’m glad they kept it around as long as they did, and maybe when some of the current designs start to look dated they can bring back some of the things they learned with the wedge and the rounded and beveled edges of the 10.5” iPad Pro, among others.
The 2012 and later Intel iMacs also employed a wedge/tapered design that has always been quite attractive and slimming, at least when viewed from the side. The fact that the back of the tapered edge iMac machines had a noticeable hump in the center did not really detract from their overall appearance. Like you said, clever tricks to deceive the eyes. Despite the pleasing aesthetics of the wedge/tapered products I imagine the hardware designers and engineers were very happy to see the wedge/tapered chassis designs go away. Fewer constraints and more flexibility for cooling requirements.
I still use my 2011 13" MacBook Air and my 2012 iMac 27" computers. They have aged gracefully and their last version of macOS is not bad at all for many office productivity tasks. One common thread for maintaining their relevance (in my eyes) is their use of solid state storage. I have a newer Mac mini that was a total dog because it only had a slow spinning hard drive. Upgrading the 1 TB slo-mo hard disk only mini with a very inexpensive and very easy to install 3rd party adapter ((Sintech M.2 NGFF NVMe SSD Card for Upgrade Mac Mini Late 2014) ) that uses the empty and easily accessible (just pop off the bottom cover) Fusion drive socket on the mini to add a fast but inexpensive 500 GB M.2 NVMe to the mini extended its useful life by more than 5 years. It's still going strong (in 2014 terms). I created a Fusion 1.5 TB drive using the 1 TB HDD and 500 GB NVMe SSD and the performance is imperceptibly different than an SSD-only mini of the same vintage, which makes sense with such a relatively large SSD. Apple only used 128 GB SSDs in early Fusion drives and even downgraded to 32 GB SSDs in later Fusion drives.
Speaking of storage drives, the original MacBook Air had a tiny hard drive (1.8") or SSD that used a ZIF connector. The hard disk version is quite slow, as in very very slow. I have never opened one of those MacBook Airs but I do have a Dell D420 from around the same era that has similar specs as the original MacBook Air. Same processor, same slow storage. I found it at a rummage sale in near perfect condition for $5 USD a few years ago. It would crash while trying to load Windows but replacing the memory with spares I had in a drawer revived it. The 1.8" hard drive was incredibly slow so I ordered a ZIF SSD from Amazon, which I ended up getting for free due to a them sending me the wrong part. The SSD kind of woke it up a little bit, but putting a lightweight 32-bit Linux distro on it really made it actually usable. Dealing with the ZIF connector was a royal PIA and I was kind of surprised it even booted up. The ZIF connector is very delicate and fragile. But it did work and it's still working when I occasionally boot it up for old times sake and update the OS. Definitely worth $5 USD for something built like a tank that I can tinker with no fear of breaking it.
The current MBA models feel too thick and too heavy. As are the iPhone Pro models.
Definitely missing Steve Jobs
And Jony Ive?
No, Apple is not missing Jony Ive. With him in charge of all user interface design at Apple, things got messy and a lot of stereotypical mistakes from "design gurus" were made. A lot of this can be pinpointed to the design group having too much power. Apple's almost recovered from this era, imo. Almost.
The canary in the coal mine was the 2013 Mac Pro. Both Apple's product marketers and the design team seriously misjudged what the Mac Pro market wanted and what hardware was in the pipeline. They then made a stopgap in the 2017 iMac Pro, before finally arriving at the 2019 Mac Pro. That 2019 model should have been delivered in 2017 as they had to know the 2013 Mac Pro was a dead end in 2015 in order to ship an iMac Pro in 2017.
The 2015 Macbook 12" was a failure. They had 3 iterations of this model. A lot of work went into it. It still could not outsell the MBA13, which was stagnant during the same time frame. The Macbook Pros with Touchbar and the butterfly keyboard from the MB12 came out in 2016, and these models ultimately ended in failure. That's probably too strong, but the Touchbar went away and the keyboards were reverted to scissors designs. In the background, Jony Ive wanted to simplify the Macbook lineup to only one product lineup. Like, Apple only would sell MBAs at 13, 15 and 17 inches.
iPhones were arguably a hit with the home button designs reaching their zenith and the Face ID designs working out. So, you win some and lose some. Apple Watch Edition with the gold was definitely an excess from the design guru, but fortunately the strap connectors and other parts of the Watch were great. The AirPods turned out well. The car project was too idealistic and no product came out of it.
I haven't mentioned the UI. Not sure what's going on with the iPadOS UI team. They are not resourced and don't know how to fix UI issues. There aren't any UI buttons anymore, just text or symbols, but maybe like fashion, that will come back.
So Apple finally managed to remove the 'thin' hard to manufacture shape (that kind of was a reason for the higher price) to a cheap to manufacture (but still expensive) box shape in the name of the holy dollar. You've probably all seen what happened to Boeing after they changed their priorities to 'shareholder value' instead of 'making great products' ... that's Apple's future.
The current MBA models feel too thick and too heavy. As are the iPhone Pro models.
Definitely missing Steve Jobs
Too heavy? No, you're imagining that. The Macbook Air that Steve Jobs first pulled from an envelope weighed 3 pounds. The just retired M1 Macbook Air wedge weighed 2.8 pounds. And the current M2/M3 Macbook Airs weigh 2.7 pounds. That's not a whole lot more than even the Macbook Air 11", which was 2.35 pounds. Thickness is more of a draw. Yes, the wedge Air was .11 at its thinnest edge, but it was also .68 inches at its thickest. The redesigned M-series Airs are .44 inches thick all around, so neither as thick nor as thin as the wedge, depending on where you measure.
The real heir to the Air title was the Macbook Retina 12" which weighed just 2 pounds with a wedge shape that went from .14 to .52 inches. It's a damned shame it got saddled with Intel's heavily maligned Core M series processor. The original 2015 Macbook 12" served me happily as my work laptop for six years until I sold it in 2021 and it was far more capable than its tech press reputation would have led you to believe. But the damage was done and one wonders what might have been had it been introduced with Apple Silicon. We'll probably never know and Apple likely views iPad as its entry now into the ultra portable laptop field.
Apple should just start calling this the "MacBook" and drop the Air title
I don’t understand the existence of “MacBook” when it was actually an “Air”. It should’ve been the next “Air”. I found this extra model line “MacBook” is so confusing and unnecessary. Glad Apple got rid off it.
Comments
I still use my 2011 13" MacBook Air and my 2012 iMac 27" computers. They have aged gracefully and their last version of macOS is not bad at all for many office productivity tasks. One common thread for maintaining their relevance (in my eyes) is their use of solid state storage. I have a newer Mac mini that was a total dog because it only had a slow spinning hard drive. Upgrading the 1 TB slo-mo hard disk only mini with a very inexpensive and very easy to install 3rd party adapter ((Sintech M.2 NGFF NVMe SSD Card for Upgrade Mac Mini Late 2014) ) that uses the empty and easily accessible (just pop off the bottom cover) Fusion drive socket on the mini to add a fast but inexpensive 500 GB M.2 NVMe to the mini extended its useful life by more than 5 years. It's still going strong (in 2014 terms). I created a Fusion 1.5 TB drive using the 1 TB HDD and 500 GB NVMe SSD and the performance is imperceptibly different than an SSD-only mini of the same vintage, which makes sense with such a relatively large SSD. Apple only used 128 GB SSDs in early Fusion drives and even downgraded to 32 GB SSDs in later Fusion drives.
Speaking of storage drives, the original MacBook Air had a tiny hard drive (1.8") or SSD that used a ZIF connector. The hard disk version is quite slow, as in very very slow. I have never opened one of those MacBook Airs but I do have a Dell D420 from around the same era that has similar specs as the original MacBook Air. Same processor, same slow storage. I found it at a rummage sale in near perfect condition for $5 USD a few years ago. It would crash while trying to load Windows but replacing the memory with spares I had in a drawer revived it. The 1.8" hard drive was incredibly slow so I ordered a ZIF SSD from Amazon, which I ended up getting for free due to a them sending me the wrong part. The SSD kind of woke it up a little bit, but putting a lightweight 32-bit Linux distro on it really made it actually usable. Dealing with the ZIF connector was a royal PIA and I was kind of surprised it even booted up. The ZIF connector is very delicate and fragile. But it did work and it's still working when I occasionally boot it up for old times sake and update the OS. Definitely worth $5 USD for something built like a tank that I can tinker with no fear of breaking it.
The canary in the coal mine was the 2013 Mac Pro. Both Apple's product marketers and the design team seriously misjudged what the Mac Pro market wanted and what hardware was in the pipeline. They then made a stopgap in the 2017 iMac Pro, before finally arriving at the 2019 Mac Pro. That 2019 model should have been delivered in 2017 as they had to know the 2013 Mac Pro was a dead end in 2015 in order to ship an iMac Pro in 2017.
The 2015 Macbook 12" was a failure. They had 3 iterations of this model. A lot of work went into it. It still could not outsell the MBA13, which was stagnant during the same time frame. The Macbook Pros with Touchbar and the butterfly keyboard from the MB12 came out in 2016, and these models ultimately ended in failure. That's probably too strong, but the Touchbar went away and the keyboards were reverted to scissors designs. In the background, Jony Ive wanted to simplify the Macbook lineup to only one product lineup. Like, Apple only would sell MBAs at 13, 15 and 17 inches.
iPhones were arguably a hit with the home button designs reaching their zenith and the Face ID designs working out. So, you win some and lose some. Apple Watch Edition with the gold was definitely an excess from the design guru, but fortunately the strap connectors and other parts of the Watch were great. The AirPods turned out well. The car project was too idealistic and no product came out of it.
I haven't mentioned the UI. Not sure what's going on with the iPadOS UI team. They are not resourced and don't know how to fix UI issues. There aren't any UI buttons anymore, just text or symbols, but maybe like fashion, that will come back.
You've probably all seen what happened to Boeing after they changed their priorities to 'shareholder value' instead of 'making great products' ... that's Apple's future.
The real heir to the Air title was the Macbook Retina 12" which weighed just 2 pounds with a wedge shape that went from .14 to .52 inches. It's a damned shame it got saddled with Intel's heavily maligned Core M series processor. The original 2015 Macbook 12" served me happily as my work laptop for six years until I sold it in 2021 and it was far more capable than its tech press reputation would have led you to believe. But the damage was done and one wonders what might have been had it been introduced with Apple Silicon. We'll probably never know and Apple likely views iPad as its entry now into the ultra portable laptop field.