Today I posted a video titled The best laptop Apple ever made, and tl;dw1 it's the 11" MacBook Air.
I acknowledge in the video my pick is slightly subjective, and I also asked a number of other YouTubers which Mac laptop they consider the best (or at least most influential). If you don't want to watch the video, I'll summarize their choices here:
- Jeff Geerling (me): MacBook Air 11" - a laptop slightly ahead of its time, the shape is better than the modern 'boxy' MacBook Airs, it would've benefitted from a 12" display with thinner bezels, and A-series Apple Silicon chip.
- Branchus Creations: Titanium PowerBook G4 - an upgrade-friendly laptop that was impossibly thin, bridging the gap between two eras of Mac OS.
- Action Retro: PowerBook 1400c - one of the best keyboards on any laptop, ever, with easy upgrades, a multitude of expansion options, and a beautiful (for the time) Active Matrix display.
- This Does Not Compute: iBook G3 Clamshell - not the best laptop even for its time, but it was key to bringing the Internet (the 'i' in iBook) to the truly portable market, for the masses.
- Mac84: iBook G3 Clamshell - he has quite a collection of portable Macs (even including a 'wireless' eMate 300), but one of his memories was using the iBook as his first DVD player, with a direct connection to his TV.
- Mr. Macintosh: Macintosh Portable - the 1989 original that started it all, it cost $19,000 in today's money, and weighed a massive 15.8 lbs (7.17 kg). But it was a truly desktop-class Mac you could carry with you.
- Computer Clan: M-series MacBooks - While giving the clamshell iBook an honorable mention, he's pragmatic in saying the modern Apple Silicon MacBooks are the best laptops Apple's ever made. (And he's not wrong, if we're speaking of modern practicality!)
I thought it would be fun to pull some of my old laptops out of storage and get them running for this video—and I found different eras of Macs were wildly different in repairability.
Some people just buy the newest laptop, trade in their old one, and never worry about things like replacing a battery or storage.
But I found the 11" Air was surprisingly repairable—modern battery replacements can be had for $35 (shipped!), and replacing the battery took all of 10 minutes following iFixit's guide.
The original Apple SSD in the Air was also broken, and I found I could replace it with a modern NVMe SSD using this $10 adapter!
The iBook G3 and PowerBook G3 Wallstreet that I have took a lot more work to tear down, but assuming you don't break off any plastic tabs, they're surprisingly repairable as well! Some of the older Macs even had processor upgrade cards, and some of the YouTubers mentioned above have gotten an old Mac to jump 2-3 generations in performance through 3rd party upgrades!
I don't think we'll see that depth of upgradability again, Apple's laptops are too thin and power-efficiency is too important to them for processor slots and replaceable RAM sticks.
But it is good to see the Neo being at least mostly user-serviceable.
I just wish Apple took the Neo's guts and stuffed them in a modified 11" Air, with the tapered front edge. It may not look like much, but that front edge and the curves made the older Airs feel a lot more 'Air' like than modern boxy Airs.