The best laptop Apple ever made

TL;DR

Jeff Geerling argues the 11-inch MacBook Air is Apple's best laptop due to its unmatched portability, despite its flawed display and poor battery life.

Key Points

• 1.The 11-inch MacBook Air wins on portability above all else. Jeff's 2014 model traveled more miles than any computer he owned, fitting perfectly on airplane tray tables, and its wedge form factor slides into bags better than modern boxy MacBooks.
• 2.Two major flaws held the 11-inch Air back: battery life and screen height. It only achieved 9 hours vs. the 13-inch model's 12, and its 768-pixel display height caused dialog boxes and buttons to be cut off as developers used more vertical space.
• 3.Guest YouTubers name rival contenders across Apple's laptop history. The Titanium PowerBook G4 (2001), clamshell iBook G3 (1999), PowerBook 1400c (1996), and Macintosh Portable (1989, $7,300/$19,000 in 2026 dollars) all get nominations from Bruce, Colin, Steve, Mr. Macintosh, and Krazy Ken.
• 4.The iBook G3 is credited as Apple's most influential laptop, not its best. It was the first laptop with built-in Wi-Fi, made computing accessible and affordable to the general public, and the 'i' literally stood for internet.
• 5.A dead SSD required repair using a standard NVMe adapter from Micro Center. The internal drive failed but was replaced using a proprietary-connector NVMe adapter, with macOS reinstalled via Internet Recovery and the result used to type the video's script.
• 6.The 12-inch MacBook and MacBook Neo are spiritual successors to the 11-inch Air. The 12-inch solved the display problem with a Retina screen but had a bad keyboard and single USB-C port; the Neo improves on that with two ports and Apple Silicon, which could have saved the Air's form factor.