152 DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE
When Jobs slipped the computer out of the envelope, you
could hear the gasps in the room. You knew most people in
the audience that day were thinking, “Holy shit. That’s thin!”
ABC News declared, “The MacBook Air has the potential to
reshape the laptop industry. The laptop fits inside a standard
office manila envelope, which is how Jobs presented it as the
showstopper of this year’s conference of all things Apple.”^2 The
“showstopper” had been planned all along. Well before Jobs
enacted the stunt in front of an audience, press releases had
been written, images created for the website, and ads developed
showing a hand pulling the notebook from a manila envelope.
The “holy shit” moment had been scripted to elicit an emotional
response; the presentation as theater.Raising a Product Launch
to an Art Form
On January 24, 2009, Macintosh celebrated its twenty-fifth
anniversary. Apple’s Macintosh had reinvented the personalFigure 13.1 Jobs holding up the MacBook Air after dramatically removing
it from an office-sized manila envelope.
TONY AVELAR/AFP/Getty Images