If you'll indulge me for a moment, here's some ancient history.

In 2008, when Apple took the very first MacBook Air out of a manila envelope, it was not positioned as Apple's new entry-level Mac laptop. The innovative but flawed system started at $1,799, far above the $999 price of the entry-level plastic MacBook and well into MacBook Pro territory.

In those early, formative years, the "Air" branding denoted not a midrange or entry-level model but an alternate branching path from the baseline MacBook. Paying Apple more money could get you more computer—the Pro model, with more processor, more screen, more storage, more everything—or it could get you a different kind of computer, with fundamentally different benefits and tradeoffs.

I bring up this ancient blip in Apple's history beca

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