The MacBook Air is the world’s thinnest notebook. Photos: Courtesy of Apple.

On 15 January, Apple announced the latest arrival to its product range – the MacBook Air – a notebook that measures just 0.16 inches at its thinnest point.

With a maximum height of 0.76 inches, MacBook Air has a 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display, a full-size and backlit keyboard, a built-in iSight® video camera for video conferencing, and a spacious trackpad with multi-touch gesture support so users can pinch, rotate and swipe.

Powered by a 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache, it offers 2GB of memory, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive, the latest 802.11n Wi-Fi technology and Bluetooth 2.1, and up to five hours of battery life.

During his keynote presentation at the annual Macworld Exposition, Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, said: “We’ve built the world’s thinnest notebook – without sacrificing a full-size keyboard or a full-size 13-inch display. When you first see MacBook Air, it’s hard to believe it’s a high-performance notebook with a full-size keyboard and display. But it is.”

Designed to be used as a wireless machine, it does not have a CD or DVD drive in order to save space – but users can buy the companion MacBook Air SuperDrive, a compact external drive or use the wireless back-up system called Time Capsule, offering a combined wi-fi router and hard drive. Jobs also announced the introduction of iTunes® Movie Rentals – offering US users over 1,000 titles from all the major movie studios by the end of February.

The new MacBook Air will be shipping globally in two weeks through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $1,799 (£1,199).