How Apple Shaped The Laptops We Use Today

The dream of a truly portable Mac is almost as old as the Macintosh itself. Five years after the debut of the original Macintosh desktop in 1984, Apple launched the disastrously expensive, 16-pound Macintosh Portable. It failed quickly. But out of the ashes came the PowerBook 100 in 1991, followed by the more refined PowerBook 500 and PowerBook G3 in 1994. Apple finally struck mainstream consumer gold with the colorful iBook G3 in 1999. With a small handle and an adorably rounded case, what more could you want? It wasn’t exactly fast, but it was a clear sign that Apple was aiming to make computers that appeal to the masses.

I can remember the exact moment I first fell in love with an Apple laptop. It was right as I was entering college in 2001: I came in with a desktop I built myself, but I couldn’t help but notice the gorgeous PowerBook G4 several classmates had. I adored its sleek titanium case and the way Mac OS X seemed lightyears beyond Windows XP. Then Apple announced the first MacBook Pro in 2006, improving on the PowerBook G4 in every way, and the computing world hasn’t been the same since. 

No matter what you think of Apple or its hardware, there’s no doubt that MacBooks have been the defining laptops of the last two decades. PC makers rushed to ape the MacBook Pro’s sleek unibody design, and the introduction of the MacBook Air spurred on the creation of ultraportable laptops. 

Sure, Apple has had its missteps — the first MacBook Air was way too slow, and it later made the boneheaded decision to remove crucial ports from the MacBook Pro — but even those served as learning lessons for the PC industry.

One of the first major stories Engadget covered back in 2005 was Apple’s switch to Intel CPUs, moving away from the PowerPC chips it relied on for years. That made the first MacBook Pro and MacBook, as well as the revamped iMac, pretty intriguing systems when they arrived in 2006. They weren’t just spiffy new Macs, they were a sign that Apple was now directly competing with PCs using the exact same Intel Core Duo chips.

For the most part, the MacBook Pro and MacBook were yet another sign of Apple’s design prowess, and a warning to the entire PC industry. The MacBook Pro was a slimmer and more refined version of the PowerBook G4’s aluminum case, while the PowerBook carried over a similar aesthetic to a plastic frame. At the time, most PC makers focused on less exciting and more utilitarian designs. Sony was the rare PC company actually leaning into a premium aesthetic with its VAIO systems, but they were also notoriously slow and expensive.

In 2008, Apple debuted the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air which both featured “unibody” cases carved out from a single block of aluminum. And really, the PC industry has never been the same since. Apple’s unibody cases were stronger, lighter and more attractive than anything we’d seen on mainstream laptops at that point, and the company has continued to evolve that concept over the last two decades. 

PC makers struggled to replicate unibody cases for years — mainly, because Apple had a stranglehold on the global metal chassis supply chain. But eventually, Razer was able to get close with its 2011 Blade gaming laptop. Intel’s push for ultraportable “Ultrabooks” in the early 2010s also led to other PC makers following suit. Dell’s first XPS 13 combined an aluminum case and carbon fiber palm rests, while HP covered its Envy 14 laptop in Gorilla Glass to stand out.

Apple’s first redesign of the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air, which debuted in late 2010, also set a new standard for laptop shapes. Instead of simply being thin, they were slightly wedge-shaped, which gave them more room for larger batteries and faster SSD storage drives. Both ASUS and Acer took clear inspiration from the MacBook Air for all of their ultraportables throughout the 2010s.

With the 2012 MacBook Pro, Apple brought over the “Retina Display” concept it originally debuted on the iPhone 4. It features a resolution that’s so sharp you can’t discern individual pixels. The Retina Display MacBook Pro started a new trend towards high-resolution laptops. It wasn’t long before every PC maker started racing to shove in better screen technology and more pixels into their systems. Ironically, Dell pioneered the razor-thin screen bezel design in the PC world, and it took Apple nearly a decade to seriously shave down its screen bezels.

The 2016 MacBook Pro was a significant change for several reasons: It was the introduction of the Touch Bar, and Apple also removed all legacy ports, leaving it with only four USB-C ports and a headphone connection. Apple basically double-downed on the design of the 12-inch MacBook, which was notorious for having just a single USB-C port. (The company also released the MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar in 2016, which only had two USB-C ports and a headphone jack.) This redesign made the MacBook Pro lighter and thinner than ever before, but it also left many professionals out in the cold, since it didn’t have a built-in SD card reader, Type-A USB ports or an HDMI connection. There wasn’t even a dedicated MagSafe power port. The 2016 MacBook Pro was the peak of Apple designer Jony Ive’s minimalist style, which often came at the cost of practicality. 

The MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar was divisive from the beginning, and aside from ASUS — which experimented with trackpad screens and is still exploring dual screens with the ZenBook Duo — few PC companies tried to compete. But Apple’s decision to strip down ports gave PC makers permission to do the same, as we saw in premium systems like the XPS 13, HP Spectre and Microsoft Surface laptops after 2016. ASUS, Acer and others eventually started squeezing more legacy ports into their laptops, both as a response to consumer criticisms and a way to differentiate from Apple’s limitations.

In 2020, Apple completely reshaped its computers around its own M1 chip, an Arm-based system-on-a-chip that proved to be both more powerful and more efficient than Intel’s x86 CPUs. Crucially, Apple Silicon brought together CPU cores, GPU cores, RAM, AI NPUs and I/O connections onto a single chip. The M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro were a revelation: They were incredibly fast, offered a huge battery boost and you couldn’t even tell they were running emulated apps. While we’d seen Windows PCs dabble with Arm support over the years prior to 2020, they were always slow and offered terrible legacy support. Apple Silicon, and the company’s reworked OS, demonstrated a far better way to build an Arm-based laptop. 

Apple followed up with the redesigned M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro models in 2021, which finally brought back an SD card reader and HDMI port, as well as the M2 MacBook Air in 2022 (which I called a “near perfect” computer at the time). As a response, Microsoft rallied its partner Qualcomm to help build Copilot+ laptops, Arm-powered systems that could offer comparable battery life and performance to Apple’s hardware. While the Copilot+ branding wasn’t hugely successful, it at least helped to spur on better hardware in Windows laptops.

NVIDIA’s RTX Spark system-on-a-chip, which powers new high-end AI-focused systems like the Surface Laptop Ultra and ASUS ProArt P16, is an attempt at delivering the high-end of Apple Silicon performance. RTX Spark systems are incredibly expensive, starting at $2,600 and scaling upwards of $7,000, but the platform’s combination of a powerful GPU and up to 128GB of unified RAM makes it a compelling option for AI researchers.