Brief history of the MacBook

What is a MacBook?

The iMac may have been the machine that brought Apple back into the market, and the current incarnations are still darn popular, but the sales leader is the Apple MacBook family.
The firstborn son of this family was the MacBook Pro, and it was first announced at the 2006 MacWorld Expo.

How have they changed?

The first models lacked Firewire 800 and S-Video and ran on the Intel Core Duo processor, by late 2006 the CPU was upgraded to the Core 2 Duo and mag safe power leads were added.
Now available in 13, 15 and 17-inch screens they are the high end models of the Mac family, with minimum specs of 2.53GHz Intel® Core™ 2 Duo  processor, 5400RPM 250Gb hard drive and a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor.

The MacBook Air is the most lusted after member of the family; unveiled in 2008 at the MacWorld Expo, featuring the same unibody aluminium design as the Pro, the Air is 1.94cm at thickest and weighs only 1.36kg. It has no optical drive and has a solid state hard drive to save on space and to give you an amazing battery life of 5 hours.

The little sibling of the family is the cheaper MacBook. It was released in 2006, and the plastic bodied, 13.3 inch notebook has proved Apple’s most popular computer. With 2.26GHz Intel® Core™ 2 Duo, 250Gb 5400-rpm hard drive and 2Gb RAM as standard it’s still a powerful little computer.

Why do they matter?

The appearance of the Air started the current rush of high-end ultra portable gorgeous laptops that are on the market today.