What you need to know
- New internal emails from Apple have been filed in the Epic Games trial.
- They reveal Steve Jobs and Apple discussed a 15-inch MacBook Air in 2007.
- Apple announced its new 13-inch MacBook Air the following year in January 2008.
Internal emails from Apple have revealed the company considered making a 15-inch MacBook Air back in 2007.
First spotted by @Techemails, one email filed in a recent dump of evidence pertains to the Agenda of an Apple Executive Team Meeting, sent from Steve Jobs on August 5, 2007.
The email looks to be a hard copy, with handwritten annotations alongside the agenda. It confirms that at an Executive Team Meeting on August 6, 2007, Apple discussed its upcoming Mac OS Leopard software, the MacBook Due in October, and a 15-inch MacBook Air that never saw the light of day.
Apple unveiled its first-ever MacBook Air on January 15, 2008, at MacWorld San Francisco. From the original press release:
Apple today unveiled MacBook Air, the world's thinnest notebook. MacBook Air measures an unprecedented 0.16-inches at its thinnest point, while its maximum height of 0.76-inches is less than the thinnest point on competing notebooks. MacBook Air has a stunning 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display, a full-size and backlit keyboard, a built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing, and a spacious trackpad with multi-touch gesture support so users can pinch, rotate and swipe. MacBook Air is powered by a 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache, and includes as standard features 2GB of memory, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive, and the latest 802.11n Wi-Fi technology and Bluetooth 2.1. "We've built the world's thinnest notebook — without sacrificing a full-size keyboard or a full-size 13-inch display", said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "When you first see MacBook Air, it's hard to believe it's a high-performance notebook with a full-size keyboard and display. But it is".
In an interesting tidbit, one annotation refers to "fakestevejobs", a big story from 2007 which saw Forbes editor Daniel Lyons take on the online mantle of 'Steven P. Jobs' and use it to slate Apple's founder and CEO. From 2007 and the NYT:
For the last 14 months, high-tech insiders have been eating up the work of an anonymous blogger who assumed the persona of Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive and one of the world's most famous businessmen.
The mysterious writer has used his blog, the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, to lampoon Mr. Jobs and his reputation as a difficult and egotistical leader, as well as to skewer other high-tech companies, tech journalists, venture capitalists, open-source software fanatics and Silicon Valley's overall aura of excess.The acerbic postings of "Fake Steve," as he is known, have attracted a plugged-in readership — both the real Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates have acknowledged reading the blog (fakesteve.blogspot.com). At the same time, Fake Steve has evaded the best efforts of Silicon Valley's gossips to discover his real identity.Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine who lives near Boston, has been quietly enjoying the attention.
Lyons was outed on the day the email was sent, but its unclear if this Apple discussed the matter in advance, or more likely, if it was discussing the revelation following Lyons being exposed.
