The Macbook Air M2 (2022) Is Thinner Than The Original iPhone (2007)

With new updates coming out all the time, it’s easy to forget how far tech has really come.

The M2 Macbook Air laptop is thinner than the original iPhone. The first iPhone released in 2007, the iPhone 2G, had a thickness of 11.6 mm. In 2022, Apple released the Macbook M2 Air, and this laptop had a thickness of just 11.3 mm, a whole 0.3 mm narrower than the original iPhone.

This is pretty incredible, given how the iPhone was a phone that one carried around in their pockets, while the Macbook is a fully functioning laptop. Apple has been steadily making its iPhones thinner over the years. While the original iPhone was 11.6 mm thick, it wasn’t the thickest-ever iPhone. The thickest iPhones were released in 2008 and 2009, with the iPhone 3G phones being 12.3 mm thick. But since then, Apple has been reducing the thickness of its iPhones. The iPhone 4 was the first phone under 10 mm, and the iPhone 5 became the first phone under 9 mm. Apple latest iPhones, while now being much more powerful than the original iPhone, are at least 40% thinner than the original iPhone.

The thickness of Macbooks has decreased even more substantially. The Macbook Pro released in 2006 had a thickness of 25.4 mm, more than twice that of the iPhone which was released just a year later. But like iPhones, the Macbooks also kept getting thinner. The Macbook Air 2008 was the first Macbook under 20 mm, and MacBook Retina 12-inch in 2012 was the first Macbook under 15 mm. The Macbook Air 2022 was just 11.3 mm, thinner the the very first iPhone, and more than 60% thinner than the original Macbook.

Now thickness is only one aspect of the performance of an electronic device, but it’s crucial. It is one of the factors that determines how mobile and lightweight the device feels, and how easy is is to use. And while Apple announces gradual improvements to its devices every year, it can be easy to miss the big picture and see how far we’ve really come — Apple’s laptops are now thinner than the first phone it had released.