Originally released on January 29, 2008, the Apple MacBook Air is the thinnest and lightest laptop in the MacBook line, measuring less than an inch thick and weighing in at three pounds. The MacBook Air makes a few sacrifices to achieve its light weight and thin design, lacking an integrated optical drive and only having 3 ports besides the power connection: a single USB connection, an audio out port, and a display output.

In October 2008, Apple refreshed the line, adding NVIDIA GeForce 9400 M 16-core GPUs, changing the display output from Micro-DVI to a Mini DisplayPort connector, and offering a larger 128GB solid state drive. The updated MacBook Air comes in two standard versions: a $1799 MSRP model featuring a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a 120GB SATA hard drive and a $2499 MSRP model featuring a faster 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a 128GB flash-based solid-state drive for faster disk access speeds.

All Air models feature a 13.3-inch wide-angle screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, a multi-touch trackpad, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, 802.11n WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1.