Biography | Steve Jobs — He Slid the World's Thinnest Notebook Out of an Envelope Here

On 15 January 2008 Steve Jobs opened Macworld in Moscone West by saying there was something in the air.

An hour later he pulled a silver laptop out of a manila interoffice envelope.

The machine was the MacBook Air.

Apple called it the world's thinnest notebook.

At its thickest point it measured 0.76 inches; at the thin edge, 0.16 inches.

It weighed three pounds, carried a 13.3-inch LED screen and a full-size keyboard, and shipped with 2 GB of memory and an 80 GB 1.8-inch hard drive.

The base price was $1,799.

A 64 GB solid-state model cost $3,099.

There was no built-in optical drive.

Battery life was given as five hours.

Shipments were due in about two weeks.

The same morning Jobs announced iTunes movie rentals with the major studios and a revised Apple TV.

He also said Apple had sold 4 million iPhones in the first 200 days.

Moscone West, at 800 Howard Street, was the hall where he had introduced the iPhone a year and six days earlier.

It would be the room of his last WWDC, in June 2011.

It was not his last Macworld.

He came back in January 2009.

Apple then told the show that 2009 would be the company's final year there.

The building still stands and still runs conferences that have nothing to do with Apple.

A visitor walking the glass lobby at Fourth and Howard will not find an envelope or a plaque for the Air.

Cover: Steve Jobs with the MacBook Air on this stage on 15 January 2008.

Photo: Matthew Yohe, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.