The History Of The MacBook Air

Launched in 2008, the MacBook Air was a fashionable choice, sacrificing performance and capability for a form factor that famously allowed Steve Jobs to reveal the laptop from a manila envelope. Since then, it has evolved away from the computer catwalk, becoming Apple’s ‘standard’ laptop for consumers. It has grown to accommodate two screen sizes and has been seen as Apple’s most popular consumer laptop.

Yet that evolution has seen it grow closer and closer to the MacBook Pro. Each new generation is reducing the potential gap between consumer and professional. There is little to choose between the Air and the Pro for consumers, thanks to Apple Silicon's flexibility and its ability to deliver leading performance even with vanilla chipsets.

Comparing the spec sheet, you can see Apple holding back on airflow: the number of I/O ports is reduced, screen brightness is lowered, and active cooling is removed. These and more compromises feel artificial, a way to build fear of missing out and to upsell the consumer-focused MacBook Pro.

With the MacBook Air, the entry-level MacBook, that all felt fair. Not now.

The MacBook Air’s Neo Challenge

The MacBook Neo is going great guns thanks to its competitive price and performance. Neo’s A18 Pro chipset is derived from the iPhone 16 Pro chipset, and there is enough capability in this chipset that the MacBook Neo is able to meet the day-to-day needs of consumers, consumers who would normally be forced to start with the MacBook Air and its prohibitive $1099 price tag just to get into the ecosystem.

The iPhone 16 Pro runs with 6 GPU cores in the A18 Pro, while the Neo uses just 5. Why the difference? Rather than binning the A18 Pro chip that had a single faulty GPU core, Apple has been stockpiling them for the Neo. By that logic, next year there will be a stock of binned A19 Pro chipsets available for the MacBook Neo 2, boosting performance once more.

The MacBook Neo is the new entry-level macOS laptop. It fits a defined purpose and is beloved by the market. It has enough separation from laptops higher up the portfolio to be part of the family. And it has carved out its own identity in 2026.

The MacBook Air is missing all of that. It now sits in the middle of the portfolio, no longer the entry-level machine that consumers buy when they “just need a Mac.” Those who need more power than the Neo are going to look at the options for the M5 chipset, at which point the specification differences between the Air M5 and the Pro M5 look more compromised than ever.

If you want a macOS laptop at every $100 step on the price ladder, then the MacBook Air has a business case for the portfolio, no matter the disruption the MacBook Neo has delivered. Yet there is another way, a more Apple way, a more ruthless way.

Decision Time For The MacBook Air

In early 2004, Apple launched the iPod Mini, a smaller form factor of the iPod. 18 months later, with no warning, Apple withdrew the iPod Mini from sale overnight. The reason? It had launched the iPod Nano. While many questioned the approach at the time, the move from a small hard-drive-based media player to a solid-state media player saw the market explode, and Apple was the beneficiary.

Perhaps it would have been more risk-averse to do it the other way around, launch the Nano and follow it up with the Mini cancellation later that year.

Should Apple be as ruthless with the MacBook market? You have the MacBook Neo aggressively priced to bring in new users. You have a mid-range MacBook Pro M5 that could easily be rebranded as the standard MacBook for everyone, sitting between the Neo and the M5 Pro and M5 Max-powered MacBook Pro laptops at the top end of the portfolio.

It’s a classic good, better, best approach from Apple, with clean lines between each of the three branches. It reduces the innovator's dilemma around the MacBook Neo, magnifies the disruptive effect of the Neo, and avoids the dilemma the Neo has created. It focuses on new products and reinvention. There’s a lot of benefit for Tim Cook to follow “Hello Neo” with “Goodbye, MacBook Air."