Apple’s “unibody” design is now ubiquitous across its products—the casings of every MacBook, iPad, and now the latest iPhone 17 Pro are carved from solid blocks of aluminum. But after describing Issey Miyake’s “A Piece of Cloth” as “‘spiritually related’ to Apple’s unibody design,” I wondered: When did Apple release its first unibody product?

The answer tumbled me down a nostalgia rabbit hole.

Apple first used the term “unibody” during an October 14, 2008 Town Hall event introducing a new family of MacBook laptops. From the press release:

The new MacBook and 15-inch MacBook Pro both have a precision unibody enclosure crafted from a single block of aluminum, resulting in thinner, more durable and incredibly beautiful designs. […]

“Apple has invented a whole new way of building notebooks from a single block of aluminum. And, just as important, they are the industry’s greenest notebooks,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The new MacBooks offer incredible features our users will love —like their stunning all-metal design, great 3D graphics and LED backlit displays—at prices up to $700 less than before.”

“Traditionally notebooks are made from multiple parts. With the new MacBook, we’ve replaced all of those parts with just one part—the unibody,” said Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of Industrial Design. “The MacBook’s unibody enclosure is made from a single block of aluminum, making the new MacBook fundamentally thinner, stronger and more robust with a fit and finish that we’ve never even dreamed of before.”

But the MacBook products announced that day weren’t Apple’s first “unibody” hardware. That honor goes to the first MacBook Air, introduced on January 15, 2008, at MacWorld San Francisco. Even though that product wasn’t marketed as “unibody,” it was the first to use the manufacturing process we’ve come to know by that name. Here’s how Ive described its genesis during the October 14 Town Hall event:

We discovered that if we started with a thick piece of aluminum and actually removed material to create mechanical features in the structure, we discovered we could make a much lighter, but importantly, a much stronger part. And that’s exactly how we made the palm rest for the MacBook Air. […]

It really is this highly precise, aluminum unibody enclosure that made this product possible. So this new way of building a notebook that we pioneered here, obviously has a relevance beyond the MacBook Air.

Apple extended the concept to that year’s MacBook and MacBook Pro, then to the Mac mini, thence to the iPhone 6 family and iPad Air 2, and, by this progression, into virtually every product Apple makes, and all we pine for.

Watching that October event seventeen years on is quite the trip. It’s far removed from the glitzy, tightly produced videos we’ve come to expect from Apple in the post-Covid-lockdown era.

It was held in Apple’s Town Hall on the Infinite Loop campus and was surprisingly low-key. It was mostly press, and almost reverentially quiet—no raucous applause here. The whole event ran less than an hour, with the first ten minutes spent on the “State of the Mac” (presented by then-COO Tim Cook—complete with his now-trademark, if more subdued, “good morning”), followed by eight minutes of Ive explaining the unibody design process (and another two minutes of near-silence as one of those enclosures was passed around the audience—you can see Jobs’ growing impatience with their lack of alacrity). The event closed with a nearly eight-minute white-room video of various Apple talking heads extolling the virtues of the unibody manufacturing process.

It’s quite the time capsule. Steve’s graphs are made of 3D wood and stone. “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” ads are a thing. The movie playing on the MacBook is the first Iron Man. Ive is responsible only for industrial design, while Dan Riccio and Bob Mansfield remain hardware fixtures. Oh, and Apple touts the inclusion of graphics chips from a tiny company called Nvidia.