Apple VP of design Evans Hankey on remaking the iconic MacBook Air

Fourteen years after its iconic unveiling by Steve Jobs the MacBook Air has an all-new look. GQ speaks with Apple VP of Industrial Design Evans Hankey and members of the team behind the Air’s dramatic, delightful, and all-new design.
Measuring just 11.3 mm thin, the new MacBook Air is available in four beautiful finishes — silver, starlight, space gray, and midnight.
Robert Leedham for GQ:

There are some product designs that it’s a cardinal sin to mess with… Of course, Apple doesn’t tend to go in for this kind of pearl-clutching. Most of its products came to exist because they killed off their predecessor in utterly unflinching fashion…
Since its introduction by Steve Jobs in 2008, the MacBook Air has proved an emphatic exception to this ethos. It’s thin, it’s grey, it’s lightweight, it’s shaped like a wedge and – to borrow a phrase from Britain’s most famous rule-abiding citizen – them’s the breaks. Such was the industry-shaking impact this ultra-portable computer made when it was first pulled out of a brown paper envelope onstage. “It has always been a product where it’s a bit provocative,” says Evans Hankey, Apple’s vice president of industrial design.

Apple’s all-new M2 MacBook Air

Since ditching Intel’s chips for the dramatically improved power and efficiency of its own M series equivalents in late 2020, every major Apple-made laptop and desktop has been redesigned from the ground up. The most surprising part of all? From those poppy new iMacs to an oh-so-suave slate of MacBook Pros and this year’s beast of a Mac Studio, the results have been widely acclaimed as near-on flawless. “The new MacBook Pros are incredible,” said famously meticulous tech bible The Verge, while Wired called the iMac “pure, colourful bliss”.
Even though the Air was designed in tandem with last year’s new MacBook Pros, there’s a reason why this sacred cow was slain last – it’s Apple’s best-selling laptop. Given the company sold an estimated 28.96 million Macs in 2021, up 28 per cent year-on-year, that is no mean feat at all. As such, this is a re-do that had to be done right at the first time of asking, and that meant really dialling back into the Air’s core ethos. “I think the Air requires a lot of courage, because it’s like, ‘What are you going to keep?’” says Hankey.

MacDailyNews Take: The new MacBook Air is simply gorgeous!
Read more about its creation in the full article here.
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