Seven and a Half Millimeters of Showing Off

The first iPad Air arrived in October 2013 and immediately made every previous iPad look like a tray. Seven and a half millimeters thin, under five hundred grams—Apple had essentially starved the thing without touching the battery life. The A7 chip brought 64-bit architecture to a device light enough to hold with one hand through a two-hour film, and the narrowed bezels meant the screen felt larger while the device got smaller. On paper it read like a spec sheet assembled specifically to make rival manufacturers feel bad.

What the numbers didn’t capture was the feel of it. Earlier iPads always had this slight awkwardness—that dead weight in your hands after forty minutes of reading, the adjustment you’d make without noticing. The Air addressed all of it without compromise. It was the first iPad that felt designed around the act of holding it rather than around the act of displaying its specifications.

Whether it changed how anyone used a tablet is a different question. The ecosystem was the ecosystem. But as an object—as a thing to pick up, carry, stare at on a Sunday—the Air was the version that finally got it right.