Back in 2007, some weird stuff happened and I ended up with a VIP badge for WWDC so I got to see Steve do a keynote up close!

I was thinking [about netbooks recently]() as well as a [portable device for developers]() and I was fondly recalling my beloved 11” MacBook Air I had about 10 years ago. That thing was fantastic. The display was short but wide, so it was excellent for meetings since you could easily look over the top of the screen. Battery life was good (for the time) and I never felt like I needed more ports. In my rose colored recollection, the 11” was tiny, but I wondered how that actually compared to Apple’s smallest notebook today.

Here’s the overlay with the 13” M series MBA in green and the vaunted 11” in red. There’s not that much difference! The 13” is ~0.8 inches deeper and only about 0.2 inches wider. The 11” had the classic Air wedge shape and was actually about 50% thicker than the 13” at the butt end.

Looking at the 11”, you can see how much space it had to cede to bezels, which have all but disappeared in today’s MBA. The display has gone high res too. The screen resolution has essentially doubled in both directions going from just over one megapixel of screen real estate to well over four megapixels.

So Apple’s smallest laptop is still pretty small! The 13” moniker fooled me into thinking it was bigger, but those disappearing bezels have let the physical dimensions of the machine shrink down to just a tad bigger than the display. I bet I can even still see over the screen in a meeting.

Whatever happened to subnotebooks? Those were the tiny laptops you could find in the 90s and early 2000s. The form factor was general a ‘just big enough to be usable’ keyboard and a whatever sized screen matched the footprint. I had a Toshiba Libretto which was about the size of a VHS tape that I carried around in a DiscMan case. There were others like the Sony PictureBook and the Gateway Handbook. I guess the market was eaten netbooks that turned into ChromeBooks which are now basically just the cheapest thing you can build with a 12” screen and a keyboard. Ah, the adventure of booting linux from an external floppy drive. Those were the days!