That's just designer nods to earlier work/aesthetics, and happen all the time in industrial (and graphic) design.

Especially since we're talking about 20 and 50 year old designs at the time -- it's not like copying this year's hot product to sell a cheap imitation. Totally different era, totally different functionality, totally different devices -- but borrowing the old visual style.

The magic of Apple is the functionality and thinking behind their devices. There are tons of same looking competitor devices that get it wrong.

E.g. the whole idea behind the unibody design is not the seam-less look, it's the sturdiness and tolerance of the materia. Competitors copy the overall look and color, but leave out both the seam-lessness AND the sturdiness.

Or take touches like the mag safe port, the touch trackpad, the no-button trackpad, the first to come out with the hi-dpi display -- plus the thinking that goes into ensuring good battery life, small weight, and thinness along with said sturdiness. Competitors often leave out one or more of these -- which are all important for a laptop.

Where Apple fails, OTOH, is their occasional cheapness, still selling embarrassing starter configurations (memory, disk-size wise). Of course if they do sell these, and buyers have no problem, kudos to them, but one would expect more, since that's too is part of the whole experience, even if the buyer thinks 128 GB SSD is good for them.

My wife got (on my recommendation) the starter config Air, and it's never occurred to me that there was anything inadequate about it (to be fair, two years in, she ran out of disk space and had to move a stash of photos to an external hard drive, and for me, I can't stand the tiny display, but it works for her, so that's great).

I use a 128GB SSD, have done for nearly two years.

This is my main machine (a laptop) for work and home.

Never had a problem and I don't expect to have a problem before the laptop fails.

As for the entry level MacBook Air, for my work the CPU is a little slow, and I would probably boost the RAM for the occasional "lets open everything", but I see no reason to increase the SSD size unless it is trivially cheap. Each to their own though.

I genuinely can't tell how much of that is supposed to be a joke.