Plastic used to be the sexy material of the future. Now, it’s the cheap, ugly material of the past. Just look at the effort Apple put into getting rid of plastic when designing its new $1,300 MacBook laptops, which went on sale this month. Apple now is machining the upper part of the chassis from a single block of aluminum, shaving it down to perhaps one-tenth of its original mass. The result is a laptop with the stark elegance of a Modernist skyscraper, all glass and metal.
